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I've thought for a while now that the design of the internet may have been fundamentally sabotaged by that fact that it was primarily created by government fund

I've thought for a while now that the design of the internet may have been fundamentally sabotaged by that fact that it was primarily created by government funded academics. In that scenario, there wasn't any need to attach a price to any part of the resources used by this new creation, since it's creators paid few if any costs for it themselves. So eventually the internet grew up to be fundamentally free, where to charge a price to download a webpage goes against every instinct baked into the system and the user. What other method of information transfer has no default method of requiring payment before transferring information? If the internet had had to pay for itself at any point during it's beginning, you can bet that HTTP status code "402 Payment Required" wouldn't of sat abandoned for 20 years with no implementation.

BoiledCabbage 9y ago
> ? If the internet had had to pay for itself at any point during it's beginning, you can bet that HTTP status code "402 Payment Required" wouldn't of sat abandoned However, it's also fairly likely that the internet would've collapsed before ever reaching event the state of the Compuserve/AOL walled gardens. Free software unfortunately is the same thing. It won't kick in for another 30-40+ years (or maybe more) because of the insane growth in the industry still supports enormous numbers of well-paying positions. And I view it as a huge plus because of the incredible rewards it provides and multiplicative effect. It has increased the speed of innovation many times over. But long term we should remember there is a reason why there are no industries in the world mainly backed by volunteerism. Software development at zero monetary cost right now is the equivalent of the early days of the internet. But then again, by the time is actually becomes a problem we might have AI's doing all the coding for us.
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BoiledCabbage 9y ago

> ? If the internet had had to pay for itself at any point during it's beginning, you can bet that HTTP status code "402 Payment Required" wouldn't of sat abandoned However, it's also fairly likely that the internet would've collapsed before ever reaching event the state of the Compuserve/AOL walled gardens. Free software unfortunately is the same thing. It won't kick in for another 30-40+ years (or maybe more) because of the insane growth in the industry still supports enormous numbers of well-paying positions. And I view it as a huge plus because of the incredible rewards it provides and multiplicative effect. It has increased the speed of innovation many times over. But long term we should remember there is a reason why there are no industries in the world mainly backed by volunteerism. Software development at zero monetary cost right now is the equivalent of the early days of the internet. But then again, by the time is actually becomes a problem we might have AI's doing all the coding for us.

deleted 9y ago

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