[ih] The web as wind and whirlwind? (was Re: History from 1960s to 2025)

[Brian E Carpenter]

The conflation of "the Web" with "the Internet" was fully in place when Fred Baker (as IETF Chair) and I (as IAB Chair) were invited to a meeting with Magaziner in the Old Executive Office building in December 1997. Certainly the belief that DNS domain names had magical properties was thoroughly established by then, and Magaziner desparately wanted to privatize IANA. He wasn't interested in arguments about the public good.

A subsidiary question is when, and why, the Internet became the internet.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 21-Dec-25 16:57, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 04:25:22PM -0500, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote:
>> If my memory is to be trusted, I did not hear much at gatherings of IP
>> lawyers about the evolving internet or domain names until the world
>> wide web came along.  After that the floodgates of client cash to "do
>> something to protect us" began to open.)
> 
> That was my impression from the outside, too, but there is the obvious problem that the end of the AUP and so the practical era of early consumer-grade commercialization is approximately contemporaneous with the rise of the web.  So, it's hard to be sure which way the causal arrow goes.  I nevertheless (obviously) think it was the web's doing.
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> A
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