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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 22-Dec-25 07:18, Greg Skinner wrote:
> On Dec 18, 2025, at 12:16 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>> Yes. Up-levelling a bit, unregulated markets always lead to monopolies or
>> cartels unless there is effective anti-trust regulation. The Internet has
>> always been an unregulated market -- originally because no politicians
>> or regulators even knew it existed, and later because they had no idea
>> how it worked and in particular how it simply ignored international
>> boundaries. So we ended up with near-monopolies both in the plumbing
>> (the "Tier 1" carriers, CDNs, the namespace, cloud hosting, etc.) and
>> in the fluff (search engines, on-line markets, social media, etc.).
>>
>> Here's a counterfactual question: what would have happened if the
>> whole Clinton/Gore/Magaziner commercialization project had never
>> taken place?
>>
>> Regards/Ngā mihi
>>    Brian Carpenter
> 
> Hmmm …
> 
> At least as far as the US is concerned, politicians knew that it existed.  For example, there were US Congress hearings about NSFNET. [1] Also, when concerns about anticompetitive behavior arose, politicians got involved again. [2]

Well, Al Gore knew, yes. Networking featured heavily in the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Another good source is [3].

But there wasn't widespread political interest in the network as such until at least 1995, by which time the unregulated Internet was already running wild. All this was equally true in the EU and pretty much everywhere else in the world.

I don't mean that was a bad thing; quite the opposite. I believe that the lack of political interference was a boon for the network's development.

Happy solstice,
     Brian Carpenter

[3] Brian Kahin (Ed.), Building Information Infrastructure: Issues in the Dvelopment of the National Research and Education Network, McGraw-Hill, 1992, ISBN 0-390-03083-X

> 
> --gregbo
> 
> [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=yLLuZ61d9xAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=nsfnet&f=false
> [2] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED350986.pdf
> 
>