Imagine A World with Multiple Internets

https://medium.com/@shehzand/imagine-a-world-with-multiple-internets-70990abd4f69

by sdevani • 12 years ago

3 1 12 years ago

This was roughly the situation circa 1990. There was a TCP/IP based NSFNet, VMS-based HEPNet/Spacenet and whatever DEC ran internally, a UUCP-based Usenet, Telenet, FIDO and probably some others I'm not remembering, not to mention various proprietary "walled gardens" like Compu$erve, Delphi, GEnie...

It was actually kind of interesting, for someone who wasn't stuck in a "my subculture is BEST!" viewpoint. Innovations arose in a small population, and spread based on merit. Really niche populations (OS-9 on a Color Computer III, anyone?) could live in peace, and not be swamped by advertising and a mass market that demanded everyone be part of that mass market. You could laugh at the hicks stuck in DELPHI, or worse yet, GEnie.

The reasons the author of this article gives for favoring a single market (because that's what he really means) is "it's good for business, especially Big Business". Should I, as a consumer, just nod my head and say "Yes, Yes!"? A lot of generally accepted "good things" don't work from my point of view. Internationalization? I'm a native English speaker, exclusive ASCII works fine for me, why do I have to pay the performance penalty so that MSFT can sell bi-directional capability half a world away?

Imagine A World with Multiple Internets

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