[ih] How TCP and the Internet "won" outside of the US?

[Brian E Carpenter]

Jack,

As far as Western Europe is concerned, I suggest the following reading list:

1. The official version: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9783527629336

2. The unofficial version: http://ictconsulting.ch/reports/European-Research-Internet-History.pdf

3. My version: https://sites.google.com/site/bcabrc/network-geeks-book

The short answer is that "the political and commercial interests" in W. Europe sneered at the Internet until about 1995, after which they either embraced it or went bust. Technically OSI networking was out for the count by 1990, but it took 5 years before the management and political layers noticed.

An unwritten story, I think, is that there was an enormous flowering in East Europe and Russia after the fall of Communism, i.e. from ~1990. See the awful news about Soldatov.

Regards
    Brian Carpenter

On 25-Jul-24 08:23, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> On 7/23/24 10:16, Gergely Buday via Internet-history wrote:
>> Russia does not like the open Internet as they did not like Radio Free
>> Europe.
>>
>> - Gergely
> 
> I've always been curious about the adoption of the TCP-based Internet as
> it spread outside the US.
> 
> Inside the US, the Internet, and TCP, was characterized as "an
> Experiment".   It might provide research insights, but the "real" next
> generation system was being aggressively developed by big corporations,
> perhaps to evolve into some kind of OSI standards-based data
> communications infrastructure for the world - much as the telephone,
> telegraph, postal, and other such older global communications
> infrastructures had evolved.
> 
> The perception of the Internet as just "an experiment" made it of little
> relevance to the competitors, both corporations and standards bodies,
> that were battling to define the actual next generation. Thus, as just
> an Experiment,  the Internet got little attention from corporate or
> political interests.   It grew on its own and likely surprised a lot of
> people when it exploded and dominated, especially through the 1990s
> after the Web appeared and provided content and services interesting to
> the general public.
> 
> I've always assumed that the Internet grew outside the US much as it had
> grown inside.   But is that true?
> 
> So my question is --- How was the Internet received by the political and
> commercial interests in other countries?   Was it viewed as a threat, or
> ignored as irrelevant?  In the US, IIRC a lot of big companies were
> blindsided by the sudden (to them) emergence of the Internet and TCP.
> 
> But elsewhere?  For a country that "does not like the open Internet",
> when did they realize that, and what did they do about it?
> 
> Any recollections, pointers to literature, etc.?
> 
> Jack Haverty
> 
>