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Comment by elondaits | Hacker News Reader

It’s very hard for me to interpret the idea that the www was “given away from free” from anywhere but a very contemporary mindset. Back in the early days of the Internet all popular protocols were free/open (ftp, irc, smtp, usenet, gopher, dns, etc.) (sorry if any of these examples was actually under a patent… I remember multiple free clients for all of these)… there was no chance for anything else, since there was no infrastructure for online payments yet, and platforms were very fragmented.

The WWW wasn’t a closed online dial up service, a BBS, or HyperCard. So to ever be the WWW, it needed to be free and open.

What would be the first propietary/closed popular internet service? ICQ?

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There was the WELL, CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, all of which predated the web, and which were all commercial and proprietary services

I was on prodigy and AOL, and then the web

This thread actually shows the curse of inventing things and giving them away: some of the people who benefit from the idea think it is obvious, and some also think that you obviously should have given it away

It’s odd that if you create user-hostile products like Microsoft and Apple, you’re somehow more respected by (some) users

yes and back then remember there were a battle about how to keep the web open, so the Internet doesn't become an AOL walled garden. Now who really knows AOL.

Now days is about META/GOOGLE apps vs web standard. Just seems like the empire always wants to strike back. We techs better be on watch.

For sure! Web attestation is the gateway through which we will close off the web, and Google's already proposed it.

Yeah exactly, there WAS a battle back then, and it WAS won for a while

But that doesn't mean it's won forever -- the people of the NEXT generation still have to put in effort

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This thread shows the ingratitude: You didn't fix our problems for all time, in a rapidly changing world! The thing you invented and gave away only fixed it for a decade or so

Comment below:

> The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything

Memories are short; history is written and framed by interested parties

You forgot Apple which cripples the web by forcing iPhones to only use WebKit.

yeah dame you IndexDB was quite a hold back. But stuff like fakeIndexedDB is what something HN crowd can do to help.

> It’s odd that if you create user-hostile products like Microsoft and Apple, you’re somehow more respected by (some) users

The respect is for the bits they get right more than anything.

Also, if you hold onto control, you maintain control. People respect control. Even when it is pervasively used against them. Perhaps more so.

If you give away control, people quickly forget and lose respect for you, for what you did. After wall, what have you done for them lately?

It isn't fair, but it is how people are wired.

People respond to today's marginal forces. Not much else.

I think the fact that these services existed is actually the point.

If you charged for the world wide web, you would never have beaten compuserve and aol, both of which I used before the internet.

For me it is funny to remember it differently from you because I used the www much before AOL. When I tried AOL I felt it was so closed and limited. I understood the idea but the WWW was at the same time less professional but also free. I was maybe around 12y or 13y when I tried AOL and by them I was using the www for maybe 3y already.

My family had zero technology knowledge and I only came to know about BBS and other stuff after was an adult and those things were not relevant or dead by then

Minitel comes to mind as a genuinely popular predecessor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

I’ve heard it blamed for stunting France’s later adoption of the internet, because people were able to do many useful things on it and didn’t have as compelling a reason to get online to the internet as they did in other countries with no similar system.

Before the WWW, the leading large-scale hypertext project was Xanadu:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

It was decidedly non-free. The code was owned by Autodesk, and the protocol was supposed to include micro-transactions applied to all content access so that authors would always get paid.

There were quite a few, I think. It depends who you ask as to which was the leading one.

There was also Microcosm, HyperG and others. The Web was notable amongst them in avoiding money and licensing sort of stuff altogether (e.g. Xanadu made a point about micropayments for lots of content, and I think many of the others fell to the temptation of catering to cash in some way or other).

Anything with micro transactions is dead on arrival without massive disintermediation, or a revolution in the way we handle the incestuous relationship between finance, crime, and law enforcement.

You can have a world where all people are capable of trivially transacting, without having anyone else say no, and consequently, financial crime is trivial, and a nigh-intractable problem to handle. Or you have the ability to enforce sanctions, anti-money laundering, and taxation laws, financial crime is at least tractable with sufficient will, and you have the perfect abusable engine of tyranny through which people can be completed ousted from society through financial lockout or micromanagement. Almost inevitably, you will not be the one with your hand on that button.

Choose wisely.

Interresting point of view.

But don't you think that today's internet already provides lockout and micromanagement without ever needing the microtransaction part?

This is actually all the talks around censorship on various platforms and random ejection from various marketplace/social system without much recourse for some (can go from being censored on any given social network, to being prevented to publish on app stores, to having your google account fully taken away).

Sure, you might still be able to access the internet, but is that relevant? What people come to do on the internet is more in relation with other people than anything else. Tech doesn't matter that much; everything ends up being built around social networks/issues.

And in the end, the internet is just a layer built on top of a physical system that is very much dependent on a given social structure/hierarchy. If that social structure wants you out, it won't make much of a difference how your internet software works.

I kind of get what you are saying, but I fail to see how a microtransaction internet would be any more tyrannical than the "real world".

Interesting post!

> Sure, you might still be able to access the internet, but is that relevant?

I think that's the core point being made: if transaction are built into the infrastructure, then all the financial controls inevitably get built into the infrastructure such that you can't access the network any more.

I feel like your response rests on the assumption that Facebook/Google/<Provider that can choose to lock you out> _are_ the internet. But the defining point of the Web that succeeded for many was the long tail part of it, people and provider who aren't motivated to reject people for monetary related reasons.

As long as we're on the Web without transactions, there'll always be somewhere/someone you can go and interact with.

If transactions and subsequent monetary policy were implemented in the low level protocol, then you could be locked out in a way which meant you can't reach/find the people who would still want to interact with you.

One allows subcultures and counter-cultures to grow if they want, the other doesn't.

In a way it was more mature in the sense of what makes the world go round.

Without money data centers and infrastructure don’t happen.

So now instead of microtransactions we get plastered with ads ad nauseam.

I think microtransaction methods still exist using cryptocurrencies. They were going to be difficult without crypto anyway, because of the hurdles that the stubborn national authorities put up in the way of an international payment system.

Microstransactions are a massive on iOS and android using “non-crypto” currency and have been for many years.

Micro transactions work fine. If there was any real demand on the web, browsers would incorporate them seamlessly.

But people don’t want to pay even a single cent for a 10 minute article.

Brave tries. Maybe one day this will be the solution along with Kagi.

Payment Request API is a thing and it looks kinda nice, except apparently nobody cares about it.

I don't think that is true.

A seamless ubiquitous interface and accounting system for penny sized transactions hasn't been introduced anywhere I am aware of.

It would need to be incredibly convenient, easy, reliable, secure, private. With flexible permissioning (subscription list, ok to pay list, etc.) so people were not hammered by "Do you want to pay?" popups all the live long day.

I definitely would, if payments in 10s of cents was possible.

But we only get full on subscription that are at least few euros per month and those are annoying to manage and it's quite complicated to evaluate the value beforehand (unlike say a traditional magazine that you can buy as a single issue to test before subbing).

And when you find one-time payments, they are usually high price (around 3€ minimum seems to be the usual) and worse than that, you rarely can own the stuff. You purchase "access" with a license and no way to really save the thing as your own, making the whole thing a bit of a joke, and piracy the only truly sane solution.

We the consumers are the ones who paid the infra with our monthly teleco bill.

It really doesn’t pay for the billions in infra, maintenance and personnel. You’d have to pay quite a bit more.

In my country 45.6 million homes pay each month around +30€ to have fiber to the home.

That is around 162 billion a year in cash flow.

The biggest provider operational costs are aroud 37B. For everything, not only fiber. And controls 50% of the FTTH market.

I mean is quick maths but looks like it does pay for it.

Gopher was the early front-runner for a hypertext system. However it was proprietary (UMN owned if, IIRC) which meant you needed a license to write a client or server that used the protocol. HTTP came along and ate its lunch.

According to Wikipedia, UMN only announced that they would charge for their implementation of Gopher. They said nothing about the protocol and its competing implementations. But this ambiguity made people a bit apprehensive and this proved costly for Gopher at a time when WWW was actively competing with them. TBL and CERN capitalized on this by unamiguously opening the standard, while the Mosaic browser became competitive with Gopher implementations.

Great article about that: https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...

I think it's not meant in contrast with proprietary standards, but (if you look at the book blurb) in contrast with people like Gates and Jobs. Bill Gates invented some things but is mostly known for taking his inventions, and those of others, to great commercial success. Steve Jobs never invented anything but was extremely successful at packaging existing tech into usable products people would buy.

Tim Berners-Lee on the other hand never attempted to turn the WWW into a product to sell, or make a browser company, or anything of the sort.

He didn’t invent anything either, though. www is just a less-than-half implementation of Xanadu.

EDIT: To be clear, I don’t intend that as a knock against Sir Berners-Lee. But the post I’m responding to invokes a false dichotomy.

There were more systems out there, not just Xanadu.

All of which were similarly fractional implementations of Xanadu.

Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext in the 60s.

Turbo Pascal help was using hypertext. Many people were exposed to it by the 80s

Again, all of this comes from Ted Nelson. He also had philosophical antecedents, but in terms of software it was his dream of Xanadu that was the first hypertext system.

However, it’s worth pointing out that every attempt at Xanadu (under the name Xanadu) thus far has also turned out to be a fractional implementation of Nelson’s dream.

> Sir Berners-Lee

Nit: The Brits say "Sir Tim." </pedantry>

I also thought of it through the lens of comparing him to Marc Andreessen, who played a huge role in the open internet with Mosaic and Netscape and now sits at the far, far other end of the spectrum with his VC investments and government involvement. It's plausible that Berners-Lee could have followed a similar trajectory and notable that he has not.

Ward Christensen always said that Xmodem was popular specifically because he didn't charge for it. (He worked at IBM, and didn't want to risk his job, so it had to be non-commercial)

I think the trend is likely to repeat on any system you care to examine.

Compuserve, Prodigy and original AOL come to mind, as places we used to hang out before WWW.

Many magazines used to have an editor note with the ID on them for online forums, regarding the articles.

CompuServe was closed/proprietary/non-"free". AOL too.

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