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?
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 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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
He laments youtube comments and health-gadget data in silos and walled gardens, but this is entirely congruent with the original http client/server concept.
The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything and arguably succeeded because it could be adapted for so many different purposes.
In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.
I would argue that financial incentives explain the Web's walling-off, and the inverse for email. There's just not that much money to be made, comparatively, from email.
But after some thought I'm coming around to your suggestion that the protocols were compatible with this outcome from the beginning. With email protocols, the messages themselves are sent from one system to another. With the web's protocols, the body of an HTTP request could be anything, or crucially it could be nothing. Walled gardens choose nothing. If email providers did the same, it wouldn't be email anymore.
> In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.
The point of e-mail was electronic mail: instantly sending text multimedia digitally. It's not necessarily been "walled off", but I think the wide spread adoption of things like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, MSN, ICQ and even SMS all happened because e-mail wasn't really convenient enough for instantly sending multimedia digitally at the time.
Now though, it would be an interesting experiment to force all chat/messaging apps to become fancy e-mail clients for e2e encrypted e-mails that they can't access.
The Web has fared better than e-mail IMO: it's far easier to find a website than it is to find an e-mail address, and people are far likely to go to something other than e-mail for the things e-mail can do.
It's worth noting that the initial proposal for WWW (https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html) was actually for a distributed/decentralized network, requiring no central authority/control:
> CERN Requirements - Non-Centralisation - Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination.
As the web grew, this obviously became less and less true. But I don't think there is anything in particular in the initial ideas for WWW that locks it into a client/server model, although that's what naturally happened.
I imagine this term was used because it was before everything got centralized, so there was no need to "de-"centralize yet.
> client/server model
The original design of the WorldWideWeb application was a web browser and editor, which I think implies that anyone using it could run a server as easily as browsing other people's servers.
Edit: Not totally sure, but it does seem there was an HTTP server bundled with the browser/editor.
Email is sort-of a walled garden: I've heard running your own email server is very difficult and many providers will consider your mail as spam.
Technically it's impossible to make a service that can't be a walled garden, specifically because the walls can be legal. Today, there are laws preventing you from sharing data you have access to (e.g. DMCA, clickwrap). Without those laws, no publicly-accessible data would be walled off, because people could just scrape and redistribute it, and distribute hacks (though without those laws, less services would exist in the first place, since they would be much harder to monetize).
> I've heard running your own email server is very difficult and many providers will consider your mail as spam.
This is just another case of monopoly abuse though. Both Google and Microsoft (the two largest email providers) make it notoriously hard to deliver regular mail to their customers. Meanwhile, you still get tons of spam that makes it through their filters so they are both blocking legit mail and allowing spam to filter through at the same time.
I guess I must count myself lucky having lived through that optimism of the 1990ies. But perhaps those too young to really remember anything pre 9/11 have it easier to adapt to the state of the world today and I should therefore be envious?
PS: Yes, this appears a terribly unrelated to the article, but that's basically what I read: "There was this trajectory to a better world, I eagerly contributed (and this turned out huge but that's beside the point), but at some point we lost direction and now I'm just trying to find small steps in that old direction, even if the impact certainly won't repeat."
It's nice if the 90s can be mythologized as a time of optimism and reaching for a better world. That was when Jamiroquai released "Virtual Insanity", and everybody was very worried about the ozone layer and homelessness. "The world's insane, while you drink champagne, and I'm livin' in black rain," to quote I think from Body Count by Body Count. But everything's relative.
Dee Lite - I Had a Dream I Was Falling Through a Hole in the Ozone Layer
The one example of impeding ecological doom that humanity actually tackled by getting their shit together. Why did we succeed? Many ways to romanticize, but at the bottom of it is that it just wasn't that hard of a problem compared to the real toughies.
(I do believe that climate change worries are also the root of the resurgence of authoritarianism, but that's a story for another time. Just in short the key hypothesis: adopting a hate ideology is just another type of looking away from the problem that has no simple convenient answers)
the cases given for it not to be free anymore could be arguments for it actually being free, humans just dont live up to what we hoped. if there's freedoms then there are people who enjoy taking liberties. the problem is likely more the unpreparedness and unawareness of impact of new technology more than it being free to use. free to use means for anyone, including shit governments, corporations and others who dont necessarily want to get out of the thing the same as what it was intended for.
what you hope a technology will become when given away for free, and what it really becomes, thats 2 totally different things.
technology innovators should always be aware of this, and try to align the capabilities of their software to more specific and perhaps restrictive models to protect its users. rather than to give it for free and hope humans will be good with it. especially if there is an angle that will allow a single party to heavily impact its use by investments not available to others..
It is still fundamentally free, giving your data to google or facebook is a choice, a very convenient choice but there are competing platforms for everything they provide.
Governments have made every attempt to control or limit the web, but we have technologies that allow us to evade this, we have encryption, and cryptocurrency, and open source software.
Online communities of hackers still exist and thrive, way more than they did in 90s, the only difference is that the total population of the web has increased substantially, and most people choose convenience over freedom.
The internet is like a world of a few huge Megalopolises with branches out to smaller cities followed by rural communities and then thousands of miles of natural beauty and cottages dotted about.
Parent reminds me of the city slicker in his 1 bedroom closet of a condo in one of the many sterile towers shouting how the world has been destroyed and will never be nice again.
But for most people without the large platforms and tooling of those megacorps the internet is mostly useless.
Where would they even start without Google search?
And people come to the internet to communicate and form groups, having a gazillion website fundamentally does nothing for this goal.
Even today we can see the attempt at a decentralized network with things like Mastodon but it is never going to take in any meaningful manner, because the centralisation aspect is exactly what people are looking for. It's kind of the forums of old roman cities. You need one big one to be able to accept everyone, having a bunch of small ones spread out in the city is not only useless but also completely counterproductive.
The only real problem with the megacorps is that they figured out better and faster than the hopeless idealists what people would actually want/need. So instead of having things that could be interoperable public utilities with a focus on standards, we have the wild west of commercial competition and monetary exploitation with ads.
All of this happened/exist because the internet is a naive and lackluster protocol. Without the massive commercial investment of those companies, it would largely be useless. The reason it took off is basically only because it was free, not for real technical merit (the same thing for Linux).
This speaks to what should be the biggest concerns with AI. The world wide web is free as in speech and free as in beer. Because of this, it grew into the incredible tool it is today, equally beneficial for Apple computers, Apple records, and even a random apple orchard in Washington.
If monopolized like social media networks, not only will relatively few get the benefits of AI, but we might also see AI output bend to the whim of their owners. We've already seen this a few times with grok.
On the other hand you have bad faith actors like Sam Altman who pretends he really wants governments to regulate ai to protect people from it's potential risks. Maybe he also wants that but mainly he was trying to preserve openai advantage via regulatory capture.
The idea that people can expect to know the data stored about them unfortunately is a pipe dream. governments certainly have no interest in that. As a rule i assume that anything i do and write online is being recorded under my name and i act accordingly. I'm not paranoid but i am prudent. I bear in mind the possibility that one day there will be a massive leak and anyone will be able to type my name and see everything i've ever done.
Without the commercial investment and money advertising brought, the internet would still be mostly a concept and mostly useless for the vast majority of people. It would be like a convenient way to browse material, like a library connected client.
It truly took off because Google figured out the hard part of making sense of the whole.
36 years later, making the internet more widely available is still important to the rest of the world. While the U.S. is building and refurbishing nuclear power plants for AI datacenters, semiconductor process nodes have shrunk to the point where solar panels the size of a credit card can power an entire mobile device.
A 3D printer is symbolically considered the part of 4th industrial revolution- owning the "means of production" (though maybe not the supply chain). But just as the internet decentralized telecommunications and broadcast media, renewable energy has the ability to minimize coverage gaps, much like how 5G cell towers increase range.
The next step is owning the means of energy production. People are willing to pay $1100 for an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone and yet unwilling to integrate a $5 solar panel, because it is thought to be useless compared to the amount of power needed to run iOS or Android. Yet, there are other, lower power ways to send data, and an article about TCP/IP should be a reminder of that. https://indico.cern.ch/event/1331906/contributions/5606846/a...
I'm not saying he's resting on his laurels or that we shouldn't look back towards the success stories. I'm just encouraging people to wonder what a 34 year old Tim Berners-Lee would be developing today if he were adding another component to the internet.
Readit News
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?
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
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.
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
If you charged for the world wide web, you would never have beaten compuserve and aol, both of which I used before the internet.
The respect is for the bits they get right more than anything.
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.
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 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).
Without money data centers and infrastructure don’t happen.
So now instead of microtransactions we get plastered with ads ad nauseam.
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.
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.
I think the trend is likely to repeat on any system you care to examine.
Many magazines used to have an editor note with the ID on them for online forums, regarding the articles.
The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything and arguably succeeded because it could be adapted for so many different purposes.
In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.
But after some thought I'm coming around to your suggestion that the protocols were compatible with this outcome from the beginning. With email protocols, the messages themselves are sent from one system to another. With the web's protocols, the body of an HTTP request could be anything, or crucially it could be nothing. Walled gardens choose nothing. If email providers did the same, it wouldn't be email anymore.
The point of e-mail was electronic mail: instantly sending text multimedia digitally. It's not necessarily been "walled off", but I think the wide spread adoption of things like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, MSN, ICQ and even SMS all happened because e-mail wasn't really convenient enough for instantly sending multimedia digitally at the time.
Now though, it would be an interesting experiment to force all chat/messaging apps to become fancy e-mail clients for e2e encrypted e-mails that they can't access.
The Web has fared better than e-mail IMO: it's far easier to find a website than it is to find an e-mail address, and people are far likely to go to something other than e-mail for the things e-mail can do.
> CERN Requirements - Non-Centralisation - Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination.
As the web grew, this obviously became less and less true. But I don't think there is anything in particular in the initial ideas for WWW that locks it into a client/server model, although that's what naturally happened.
I imagine this term was used because it was before everything got centralized, so there was no need to "de-"centralize yet.
> client/server model
The original design of the WorldWideWeb application was a web browser and editor, which I think implies that anyone using it could run a server as easily as browsing other people's servers.
Edit: Not totally sure, but it does seem there was an HTTP server bundled with the browser/editor.
How to make a WWW server (1992) - https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/...
WWW Daemon user guide - https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/...
Technically it's impossible to make a service that can't be a walled garden, specifically because the walls can be legal. Today, there are laws preventing you from sharing data you have access to (e.g. DMCA, clickwrap). Without those laws, no publicly-accessible data would be walled off, because people could just scrape and redistribute it, and distribute hacks (though without those laws, less services would exist in the first place, since they would be much harder to monetize).
This is just another case of monopoly abuse though. Both Google and Microsoft (the two largest email providers) make it notoriously hard to deliver regular mail to their customers. Meanwhile, you still get tons of spam that makes it through their filters so they are both blocking legit mail and allowing spam to filter through at the same time.
PS: Yes, this appears a terribly unrelated to the article, but that's basically what I read: "There was this trajectory to a better world, I eagerly contributed (and this turned out huge but that's beside the point), but at some point we lost direction and now I'm just trying to find small steps in that old direction, even if the impact certainly won't repeat."
https://youtu.be/ZTcWojwUrfk?feature=shared
Dee Lite - I Had a Dream I Was Falling Through a Hole in the Ozone Layer
The one example of impeding ecological doom that humanity actually tackled by getting their shit together. Why did we succeed? Many ways to romanticize, but at the bottom of it is that it just wasn't that hard of a problem compared to the real toughies.
(I do believe that climate change worries are also the root of the resurgence of authoritarianism, but that's a story for another time. Just in short the key hypothesis: adopting a hate ideology is just another type of looking away from the problem that has no simple convenient answers)
Dead Comment
The hardest for me is to grasp is that world wide free and largely uncensored communication was a singular anomaly that is never going to come back.
what you hope a technology will become when given away for free, and what it really becomes, thats 2 totally different things.
technology innovators should always be aware of this, and try to align the capabilities of their software to more specific and perhaps restrictive models to protect its users. rather than to give it for free and hope humans will be good with it. especially if there is an angle that will allow a single party to heavily impact its use by investments not available to others..
Governments have made every attempt to control or limit the web, but we have technologies that allow us to evade this, we have encryption, and cryptocurrency, and open source software.
Online communities of hackers still exist and thrive, way more than they did in 90s, the only difference is that the total population of the web has increased substantially, and most people choose convenience over freedom.
Parent reminds me of the city slicker in his 1 bedroom closet of a condo in one of the many sterile towers shouting how the world has been destroyed and will never be nice again.
And people come to the internet to communicate and form groups, having a gazillion website fundamentally does nothing for this goal.
Even today we can see the attempt at a decentralized network with things like Mastodon but it is never going to take in any meaningful manner, because the centralisation aspect is exactly what people are looking for. It's kind of the forums of old roman cities. You need one big one to be able to accept everyone, having a bunch of small ones spread out in the city is not only useless but also completely counterproductive.
The only real problem with the megacorps is that they figured out better and faster than the hopeless idealists what people would actually want/need. So instead of having things that could be interoperable public utilities with a focus on standards, we have the wild west of commercial competition and monetary exploitation with ads.
All of this happened/exist because the internet is a naive and lackluster protocol. Without the massive commercial investment of those companies, it would largely be useless. The reason it took off is basically only because it was free, not for real technical merit (the same thing for Linux).
If monopolized like social media networks, not only will relatively few get the benefits of AI, but we might also see AI output bend to the whim of their owners. We've already seen this a few times with grok.
The idea that people can expect to know the data stored about them unfortunately is a pipe dream. governments certainly have no interest in that. As a rule i assume that anything i do and write online is being recorded under my name and i act accordingly. I'm not paranoid but i am prudent. I bear in mind the possibility that one day there will be a massive leak and anyone will be able to type my name and see everything i've ever done.
Deleted Comment
Without the commercial investment and money advertising brought, the internet would still be mostly a concept and mostly useless for the vast majority of people. It would be like a convenient way to browse material, like a library connected client.
It truly took off because Google figured out the hard part of making sense of the whole.
A 3D printer is symbolically considered the part of 4th industrial revolution- owning the "means of production" (though maybe not the supply chain). But just as the internet decentralized telecommunications and broadcast media, renewable energy has the ability to minimize coverage gaps, much like how 5G cell towers increase range.
The next step is owning the means of energy production. People are willing to pay $1100 for an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone and yet unwilling to integrate a $5 solar panel, because it is thought to be useless compared to the amount of power needed to run iOS or Android. Yet, there are other, lower power ways to send data, and an article about TCP/IP should be a reminder of that. https://indico.cern.ch/event/1331906/contributions/5606846/a...
The internet in 1988 was state of the art, and yet the protocols to develop even more autarkic computing systems have still not been optimized. https://newsteve.substack.com/p/from-telegrams-to-datagrams
I'm not saying he's resting on his laurels or that we shouldn't look back towards the success stories. I'm just encouraging people to wonder what a 34 year old Tim Berners-Lee would be developing today if he were adding another component to the internet.
I think the answer is hardware, not software.