[ih] Internet History - from Community to Big Tech?

[Miles Fidelman]

I think that the change started the day the Internet opened to the 
public (1992) and folks looked to the Internet as a commercial 
opportunity, and secondarily as a service delivery opportunity (e.g., 
for Government agencies).

By and large, my sense is that three things have happened in parallel:

1. A lot of the traditional Internet remains, and continues to be used 
as built - business email (including academic, non-profit, government), 
academic uses (epublishing, web sites, library access, etc.), lots and 
lots of email lists, a vehicle for collaboration (e.g., open source 
projects).  About the only thing that's gone out of style is USENET - 
which has largely been supplanted by things like Facebook.  IRC seems to 
remain, but lots of traffic has moved to other things like Slack.

2. Spam, and mass media!  Not unlike our postal mail, and telephones, 
lots and lots of crap has been added to the mix - raising the noise 
level, and requiring our attention just to sort it out and throw it away.

3. New services introduced commercially.  This is the area I worry about 
the most - all these new services that have proprietary interfaces, 
recreating a world of walled gardens. That kind of gets in the way of 
the Internet as a common vehicle for "the community."  We're all getting 
sliced and diced.  Not a good thing for large scale collaboration.

Miles Fidelman



On 3/27/19 3:47 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
> An interesting perspective on Internet History landed on my screen today:
>
> https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/03/15/society-desperately-needs-an-alternative-web
>
> One premise of the article (and the underlying ones it references,
> especially Chris Dixon's article) is that the technical evolution of the
> Internet has gone through stages.  The early stage was one in which the
> "Internet Community" drove the development of the open protocols used
> pervasively.   The second stage saw the "Big Tech" companies take over,
> building on top of, and sometimes replacing, the earlier open
> protocols.  The next stage, now emerging, sees governments and
> regulations appear to (try to) exert some level of control on how the
> technology affects society.
>
> This view struck a chord with my personal experience over those first
> two stages.  For example, back in the 70s/80s we had electronic mail of
> several kinds, mostly interconnected.  People on SMTP-mail, UUCP,
> Compuserve, MCIMail, etc. could communicate, if perhaps awkwardly.
> Today, I know people who have their mailboxes on SMTP-mail, and
> Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and even game platforms, and there are
> many more.  But mostly they can't inter-communicate, and I need an
> account on each one, and need to log in to each to read and send
> electronic mail in each walled garden.
>
> All of these now constitute what people call "The Internet."
>
> In the discussions on this list, I've mostly seen a historical view of
> the Internet from the "Internet Community" perspective - i.e., the
> genealogy of protocols documented in RFCs, IENs et al and driven by
> organizations such as IETF, etc.
>
> But in the actual "Internet" I'm wired into, I see a very different
> world.  Mysterious protocols are in use to do something unknowable
> because they're secret.   Protocols I see in the RFCs as "Internet
> Standards" aren't always the ones that are actually used in the real
> world (e.g., email).
>
> This experience seems to match the notion of the two "stages" of the
> Internet, where the technical development of the running hardware and
> software moved from the "Internet Community" of IETF et al into the
> Engineering departments of the Big Tech companies.  I spent a good bit
> of my time both in "Stage One" and "Stage Two", but haven't seen much
> written about Stage Two events and experiences, or about how
> organizations such as IETF have changed.
>
> It seems like that transition was an important part of Internet History,
> but when it happened, how, who, why, etc., aren't discussed much.
>
> What do you think.....?
>
> /Jack Haverty
>
>
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