[ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[Greg Skinner]

On May 10, 2026, at 2:02 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s.  That was the era of the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State.  Lots of pushback especially from young folks.  Even the resignation of a POTUS, under threat of removal from office.  Lots of distrust of government.  Lots of anger.
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> Is it so different now?
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> But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s.  The USG did not "give away" the Internet.  The Internet (and previously the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment.  That followed the charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency.  Research produces ideas.  Experiments build prototypes to test theories.  Research produces knowledge.  Freely sharing that knowledge would be beneficial to the "real systems" that followed.  Artifacts, such as protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future.
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> The "real system" was expected to be OSI.  Of course that didn't happen.   But it was The Plan.  Even the USG had a program called GOSIP (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG.  As long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant objections.  It might even help OSI development.  OSI was the target.
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> Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to both The Internet and the OSI promises.  In the "multiprotocol router" stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and all the others would just fade away.  Most of them had some ambition of global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN".  But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which was available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP.   Its adoption by the USG established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper.
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> It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for electronic mail service.   So lots of corporations did just that.  The IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product architecture.   A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux, becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet.
> 

I’m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by “give away.” IMO, the USG had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards cryptographic technology at that time.  The history of PGP <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example of this.  If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become what they are today.  (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to comment.)

--gregbo