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Central planning never works. But the Internet was the spin-off of a centrally planned government network. I am not sure it's accurate to say the failure of "c
by Klinky 15y ago
Central planning never works.
But the Internet was the spin-off of a centrally planned government network. I am not sure it's accurate to say the failure of "competing" services was due to the failures of central planning, but more related to the onward march of technology(cheaper & faster). Even now the Internet is far from decentralized & some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary.
- mikecane 15y ago>>>some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary. Which all tend to eventually fail. The Source, CompuServe, Delphi, AOL, all failed.
- Klinky 15y agoFirstly, suggesting dial-up ISPs failed because they had a centralized business structure makes no sense. That's like saying horse & buggy manufacturers went out of business due to their centralized business structure rather than the introduction of the car. Also for the record AOL is still around & those companies were successful for their time. Second, I was speaking about things like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server architecture as being non-decentralized. Additionally some of the biggest services on the Internet are indeed centralized. Google, Facebook, iTunes. ISP options have also been drastically reduced over the last two decades.
- mikecane 15y agoI think we are talking at cross-purposes here, in different perspectives, so let's stop.
- Klinky 15y agoWell perhaps your point was that those services were walled gardens & incompatible with each other before the Internet took off. The Internet opening up with it's low cost ISPs & flexibility was the end of those walled garden services & many BBSs, true. That doesn't really have anything to do with the Internet being centrally planned or not. It was just planned to be more open than those other services.
- mikecane 15y agoYes, that's closer to my perspective: The strangling walled garden.
- nodata 15y agoThe Internet became the success it is now once it escaped from being a centrally planned government network.
- Klinky 15y agoI know! Agencies like ARPANET, NSFNet & CERN were real drains on the Internet. All they provided was huge initial monetary outlays for building the initial backbones & tech like TCP/IP & HTTP. It also appears that the government made the choice to open the network up for commerce. So I guess these centralized agencies setting up the initial infrastructure & later opening it up when personal computers were becoming affordable was a failure? Concepts like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server... Yes all very decentralized concepts..mmm hmmm.
- nodata 15y agoWhat? Just because a lot of the stuff started off as government research projects doesn't mean they centrally planned the migration from what it was to what it is now.
- Klinky 15y agoDid Apple plan to build the iPod back in the 80s? Did Google plan that they'd build Android back in the 90s? Just because the government didn't initially plan for the Internet to envelop our lives 30 years later, doesn't mean that it wasn't a successful centrally planned project that benefited society. Most things are centrally planned. Much of private industry relies on centralized chains of command. I am not sure what the OPs point was, but seemed more like a veiled jab that suggested centralized government programs are always failures. When the facts are that Minitel shouldn't be classified as a failure & the Internet shouldn't be classified as a poster child for decentralized initiatives.