[ih] deterioration of email (was Re: clever usc creation)

[Jack Haverty]

I agree that complexity made it more difficult, and expensive, for 
companies to use the Internet's innovations.

But I think there was another related change that mattered as well.  In 
the early Internet era, circa late 1970s, ARPA funded a wide range of 
implementations of TCP/IP on a bunch of different types of computers.  
(I implemented the first TCP on Unix in 1977)   Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn 
also decided to make the code and specs free and available to anyone who 
wanted them.

As a result, courses in schools used TCP/IP as a vehicle for teaching 
networking concepts, leading to a stream of graduates that already had 
experience with the technology.    Entrepreneurs could create startups, 
building stuff around the base that ARPA provided for free.   End-users 
could buy things that worked, and hire people who already knew how to 
use them.   All the other networking technologies disappeared rather 
rapidly.

A similar process happened with the Web.  Open-source or free web 
servers and browsers established a similar environment.   It was simpler 
than other schemes.  First implementations were proprietary, but 
eventually software became freely available, both in code and 
specifications.   There were competitors.  Lotus Notes comes to mind.  
Notes was pretty simple, but not free or open.

Simplicity and low-cost availability went hand-in-hand.

/Jack

On 7/29/26 10:27, John Labovitz wrote:
> I disagree that those protocols haven’t evolved — though they may have done so more conceptually or by inspiration than direct improvement. I’m sure that Mbone influenced later media protocols; FTP’s verbs, plus email’s header/body model, plus Gopher’s browsing mode seem to be a direct model for HTTP and the web; IRC begat many, many later chat protocols (and cultural usage); NetNews/NNTP certainly inspired forums, Reddit, and Facebook’s groups; TELNET led to SSH and others.
>
> But I think protocols/standards fragmented because the standards process failed to produce things that were practical to implement. I was in the industry in the late 90s and early 00s, and it was striking how complex so many standards became — IPSec, or SIP/VoIP, or the email standards (IMAPv4, DMARC/DKIM/SPF). That complexity may have been technically justified, but it made interoperability expensive — and made it more likely that companies like Facebook would just build their own silos.
>
> In my experience, HTTP caused a sea-change of the structure of the internet in the early 90s, flushing away earlier work that was no longer fit for purpose. Like IP before it, HTTP ‘won’ in part because it was deliberately simpler, and it led to a whole new flowering of services: HTML/JavaScript, REST/JSON, Atom/RSS. Those succeeded because they were lightweight enough that people actually implemented them.
>
> —John
>
> PS: I don’t often post here, so a short bio: first online in 1982 as a teenager dialing up to a DOD TAC to MIT-AI; produced the ‘e-zine-list,’ a pre-search engine directory of electronic publications; technical director for GNN, the first commercial website; wrote the application proxies for WatchGuard’s firewalls.
>
>
>> On Jul 29, 2026, at 01:16, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>> It's not just email that has deteriorated.  Lots of other pioneering services introduced on the Internet have similarly grown to involve large populations of users today.  But like email, that growth has occurred by a fragmentation of the initial "universal" connectivity introduced to the Internet into a plethora of separate and non-interoperable but functionally similar services.
>>
>> Mbone is one example.   Also IRC (Internet Relay Chat).  Network news (NNTP).  rec.whatever forums.  Perhaps Gopher?  Even FTP, from ARPANET days.  There are probably others.   All of those may still be used, but none of them have evolved into a common standard that many implementations can deploy and interoperate with all the others.
>>
>> Why did IP succeed as the substrate of The Internet, but so much else failed to do so?
>>
>> /Jack Haverty
>>
>> On 7/25/26 15:39, Ofer Inbar via Internet-history wrote:
>>> On Sat, Jul 18, 2026 at 12:51:04PM -0700,
>>> Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>> Over the last decade or two, I've suggested, several times, to
>>>> several ISOC administrations, that ISOC "walk the walk" with email
>>>> by serving as a prominent example of "how to do email right".   That
>>>> of course might require policies to possibly be changed, technical
>>>> flaws to be addressed, educational efforts, and even perhaps
>>>> governments' actions.
>>>>
>>>> Most Internet users today likely experience things like phishing
>>>> attacks, emails with forged sources, and other such effects that
>>>> make email untrustworthy in their views.   Most of the Internet
>>>> users have no idea how to protect themselves from such attacks.
>>>>   Most regulatory and government authorities seem to have no idea
>>>> what, if anything, they can do about it.
>>> A majority of younger Internet users (at least in the English speaking
>>> world I'm familiar with) - perhaps not an overwhelming majority, but
>>> quite certainly a majority - simply do not use email to communicate.
>>> They use it to verify their address for accounts, they use it to check
>>> for a specific thing that they know is going to be sent to them by
>>> email and that they know they want to see, and most of the rest of the
>>> time, they let their email pile up and they ignore nearly all of it.
>>>
>>> To actually stay in touch with friends, family, coworkers, groups
>>> they're part of, etc. - all the things email used to be for - they
>>> use messaging apps.  Discord, Facebook, Slack Instagram, and more
>>> like that.  Or SMS/RCS phone texts.
>>>
>>> All of the various problems with email today, including the ones you
>>> listed, are I think dwarfed by one big one that has caused this:
>>> spam.  This includes both scattershot scam-oriented spam, but also
>>> lots of lists that sign you up without asking permission.  You donate
>>> to a political candidate, and some sleazy "grassroots" database starts
>>> selling your address to loads of other campaigns of the same party.
>>> You pay for a meal at a restaurant with your phone, enter the email
>>> address for your receipt, and now not only are you on the email list
>>> for that restaurant, but also the next cafe or ice cream place or
>>> whatever where the payment system recognizes your card and offers
>>> to email your receipt and you didn't notice the small checkbox to
>>> opt out of signing up.  You RSVP to an event on some sleazy site like
>>> eventbrite, and now you're on several mailing lists for similar events.
>>>
>>> The majority of email is assumed to be spam or otherwise irrelevant,
>>> by people whose experience of email started after the explosion of
>>> spam that I described above.  They never knew what it was like for
>>> email to be relevant and worth checking, so they don't think of it
>>> as relevant or worth checking.  Knowing this, they also don't think
>>> it's a useful way to communicate with anyone they know.
>>>    -- Cos
>> -- 
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> -
>> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 665 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/attachments/20260729/b69b8d4b/attachment.asc>