7 ms·

> Great people, but too many were of the "everything should be a market" persuasion. Hell, even our world's free digital encyclopedia was started by a guy who

> Great people, but too many were of the "everything should be a market" persuasion. Hell, even our world's free digital encyclopedia was started by a guy who named his daughter after a fucking Ayn Rand character. So the question should be: how did our world's burgeoning form of the web ever escape that persuasion in the first place?

kragen 5y ago
Maybe the things you like about the web happened because of liberalism, not in spite of liberalism, as you seem to think. As you point out, that's true of Wikipedia, but it's also true of the commercialization and privatization of the internet, it's true of the EFF, it's true of the DMCA's safe-harbor provisions, and it's true of the Open Source Initiative. It was ultimately liberalism — Dan Bernstein's years-long court battle for due process — that struck down the US's prohibitions on open-source cryptography, too. More generally, the internet itself ended up being built in the US, even though adequate industrial capacity for it existed in many countries: the USSR, the UK, France, Japan, and so on. There are a number of possible reasons for that, and the UK and France did in fact build nationwide teletext systems with some degree of interactivity, and the UK also built JANET; but very plausibly the US was the one who built the internet because such a liberal network design was too threatening to the other countries, and it happened to work better than designs like Tymnet (which was also built in the US) and Minitel. Of course the internet was famously non-market-oriented before the com-priv era, not at all like the Digital Silk Road proposed by the Agorics guys (unrelated to the darknet market, of course).
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  But the WWW - that is, the "Internet" as most people know it and as relevant in this context - was build by a Brit in Switzerland, wasn't it? By basically adding the URL concept, anchors/links, and HTTP to an SGML vocabulary readily described in ISO 8879 (SGML) to implement visual paradigms already known from early-90s multimedia apps.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Yes, except for the visual paradigms thing, and the "as relevant in this context" bit; the WWW was text only for years, except in the sense that you could use it to download files of any type. And he wasn't doing it for profit. But he was doing it on a network that allowed that kind of decentralized extensibility, unlike CompuServe, Minitel, Tymnet, AOL, Facebook, or AT&T. An interesting feature of capitalism that Marx liked to talk about a lot is that they can be unstable, like democracies: participants in a free market are free to pursue their own profits, but by far the most profitable situation for them is to become a monopoly or monopsony, which destroys the freedom of the market and ends capitalism. So we have this interesting situation where the internet, arising from government planning and with commercial use prohibited for decades, ended up being freer even for commercial use than the alternatives established by for-profit companies like CompuServe, Tymnet, and AT&T. (In the same way, a politician in a democracy is free to pursue power by getting elected, but if they are sufficiently successful at pursuing power, they end democracy.)
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      > the WWW was text only for years actually it wasn't since the beginning relevant quote from Wikipedia [1] > WorldWideWeb is capable of displaying basic style sheets, downloading and opening any file type with a MIME type that is also supported by the NeXT system (PostScript, movies, and sounds), browsing newsgroups, and spellchecking. In earlier versions, images are displayed in separate windows, until NeXTSTEP's Text class gained support for Image objects. WorldWideWeb is able to use different protocols: FTP, HTTP, NNTP, and local files. Later versions are able to display inline images. In 1990 the "Hypermedia Browser/Editor" by Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee already supported images [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb [2] https://www.artribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Il-Web-nel-1990.-Image-courtesy-CERN.jpg https://www.artribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Il-Web-...
      - kragen 5y ago
        I said, "the WWW was text only for years, except in the sense that you could use it to download files of any type." You seem to have responded that actually it wasn't because you could use it to download files of any type, including images (which you could display), and that years later it was able to display inline images (after pmarca added them to Mosaic in 01993). Well, that is true, but your implication that it contradicts what I said is false.
- vidarh 5y ago
  This has the feel of a "history by the victors" view. There were contemporaneous research networks in a range of different countries, some - like the UK NPL network - which influenced ARPANET in various ways (the term "packet switching" comes from Donald Davies work on NPLs network; though Paul Baran at RAND beat Davies to inventing, Davies was not made aware of Baran's work until a year after he'd independently invented it and was told by the UK MoD), and most of them became part of the internet rather than being replaced by it. Pouzin, designing the French CYCLADES, beat ARPANET to a layered architecture with the connection endpoints responsible for reliability in the vein of TCP. Both Davies and Pouzin provided feedback to Kahn and Cerf on TCP and are acknowledged in their papers. The internet looks most like ARPANET looking backwards because of a combination of the military interests in the early international connections which made ARPANET the first to see significant push in international expansion before other standardisation efforts got traction, coupled with the simplicity of TCP/IP. To the international push, Norway got the first international link to ARPANET because of NORSAR[1] - a seismic array used to monitor Soviet nuclear tests. The NORSAR link led to work on connecting UCL in the UK, and led to work on gatewaying the UK network to ARPANET, and also led to e.g. Kirstein's [2] involvement with the spread of TCP/IP. See [3] for example. Or this article on his Marconi prize [4] which talks about how Kirstein was instrumental in helping TCP/IP win out over OSI in Europe. Had ARPANET simply never happened, history would certainly have looked different, but we most likely would still have had an internet. Whether it'd have the characteristics we like about the current internet is an open question, but it's worth noting that people like Kirstein pushed an open interconnection model that ultimately contributed to the "win" of TCP/IP because a lot of the European networks were already getting connected by the time ARPANET opened up, and so Kirstein's work on promoting TCP/IP and interconnection to ARPANET gave TCP/IP a leg up in the race to define the internetworking protocol set. E.g. by 1976 at least 6 European countries had national networks interconnected via EIN; by 1979 Euronet connected at least 9. Euronet was operated by private providers. By that point a number of public and private providers in Europe were also offering packet-switched services to private companies. By 1978, X.25 was internationally available via IPSS, linking a number of different national providers. The irony of mentioning Minitel is that if anything, Minitel was in many ways a demonstration of what the internet could have ended up as had the "everything should be a market" crowd won out - it nickel and dimed almost everything. But Minitel was not the only French network. But "everything should be a market" in the sense implied above (the nickel and diming approach of Xanadu etc.) is entirely orthogonal to liberalism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORSAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORSAR [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._Kirstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._Kirstein [3] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1455416 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1455416 [4] http://www.marconisociety.org/index.php/newsroom/379-peter-kirstein-to-receive-marconi-prize http://www.marconisociety.org/index.php/newsroom/379-peter-k...

kragen 5y ago

Maybe the things you like about the web happened because of liberalism, not in spite of liberalism, as you seem to think. As you point out, that's true of Wikipedia, but it's also true of the commercialization and privatization of the internet, it's true of the EFF, it's true of the DMCA's safe-harbor provisions, and it's true of the Open Source Initiative. It was ultimately liberalism — Dan Bernstein's years-long court battle for due process — that struck down the US's prohibitions on open-source cryptography, too. More generally, the internet itself ended up being built in the US, even though adequate industrial capacity for it existed in many countries: the USSR, the UK, France, Japan, and so on. There are a number of possible reasons for that, and the UK and France did in fact build nationwide teletext systems with some degree of interactivity, and the UK also built JANET; but very plausibly the US was the one who built the internet because such a liberal network design was too threatening to the other countries, and it happened to work better than designs like Tymnet (which was also built in the US) and Minitel. Of course the internet was famously non-market-oriented before the com-priv era, not at all like the Digital Silk Road proposed by the Agorics guys (unrelated to the darknet market, of course).

tannhaeuser 5y ago
But the WWW - that is, the "Internet" as most people know it and as relevant in this context - was build by a Brit in Switzerland, wasn't it? By basically adding the URL concept, anchors/links, and HTTP to an SGML vocabulary readily described in ISO 8879 (SGML) to implement visual paradigms already known from early-90s multimedia apps.
- kragen 5y ago
  Yes, except for the visual paradigms thing, and the "as relevant in this context" bit; the WWW was text only for years, except in the sense that you could use it to download files of any type. And he wasn't doing it for profit. But he was doing it on a network that allowed that kind of decentralized extensibility, unlike CompuServe, Minitel, Tymnet, AOL, Facebook, or AT&T. An interesting feature of capitalism that Marx liked to talk about a lot is that they can be unstable, like democracies: participants in a free market are free to pursue their own profits, but by far the most profitable situation for them is to become a monopoly or monopsony, which destroys the freedom of the market and ends capitalism. So we have this interesting situation where the internet, arising from government planning and with commercial use prohibited for decades, ended up being freer even for commercial use than the alternatives established by for-profit companies like CompuServe, Tymnet, and AT&T. (In the same way, a politician in a democracy is free to pursue power by getting elected, but if they are sufficiently successful at pursuing power, they end democracy.)
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > the WWW was text only for years actually it wasn't since the beginning relevant quote from Wikipedia [1] > WorldWideWeb is capable of displaying basic style sheets, downloading and opening any file type with a MIME type that is also supported by the NeXT system (PostScript, movies, and sounds), browsing newsgroups, and spellchecking. In earlier versions, images are displayed in separate windows, until NeXTSTEP's Text class gained support for Image objects. WorldWideWeb is able to use different protocols: FTP, HTTP, NNTP, and local files. Later versions are able to display inline images. In 1990 the "Hypermedia Browser/Editor" by Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee already supported images [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb [2] https://www.artribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Il-Web-nel-1990.-Image-courtesy-CERN.jpg https://www.artribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Il-Web-...
    - kragen 5y ago
      I said, "the WWW was text only for years, except in the sense that you could use it to download files of any type." You seem to have responded that actually it wasn't because you could use it to download files of any type, including images (which you could display), and that years later it was able to display inline images (after pmarca added them to Mosaic in 01993). Well, that is true, but your implication that it contradicts what I said is false.
vidarh 5y ago
This has the feel of a "history by the victors" view. There were contemporaneous research networks in a range of different countries, some - like the UK NPL network - which influenced ARPANET in various ways (the term "packet switching" comes from Donald Davies work on NPLs network; though Paul Baran at RAND beat Davies to inventing, Davies was not made aware of Baran's work until a year after he'd independently invented it and was told by the UK MoD), and most of them became part of the internet rather than being replaced by it. Pouzin, designing the French CYCLADES, beat ARPANET to a layered architecture with the connection endpoints responsible for reliability in the vein of TCP. Both Davies and Pouzin provided feedback to Kahn and Cerf on TCP and are acknowledged in their papers. The internet looks most like ARPANET looking backwards because of a combination of the military interests in the early international connections which made ARPANET the first to see significant push in international expansion before other standardisation efforts got traction, coupled with the simplicity of TCP/IP. To the international push, Norway got the first international link to ARPANET because of NORSAR[1] - a seismic array used to monitor Soviet nuclear tests. The NORSAR link led to work on connecting UCL in the UK, and led to work on gatewaying the UK network to ARPANET, and also led to e.g. Kirstein's [2] involvement with the spread of TCP/IP. See [3] for example. Or this article on his Marconi prize [4] which talks about how Kirstein was instrumental in helping TCP/IP win out over OSI in Europe. Had ARPANET simply never happened, history would certainly have looked different, but we most likely would still have had an internet. Whether it'd have the characteristics we like about the current internet is an open question, but it's worth noting that people like Kirstein pushed an open interconnection model that ultimately contributed to the "win" of TCP/IP because a lot of the European networks were already getting connected by the time ARPANET opened up, and so Kirstein's work on promoting TCP/IP and interconnection to ARPANET gave TCP/IP a leg up in the race to define the internetworking protocol set. E.g. by 1976 at least 6 European countries had national networks interconnected via EIN; by 1979 Euronet connected at least 9. Euronet was operated by private providers. By that point a number of public and private providers in Europe were also offering packet-switched services to private companies. By 1978, X.25 was internationally available via IPSS, linking a number of different national providers. The irony of mentioning Minitel is that if anything, Minitel was in many ways a demonstration of what the internet could have ended up as had the "everything should be a market" crowd won out - it nickel and dimed almost everything. But Minitel was not the only French network. But "everything should be a market" in the sense implied above (the nickel and diming approach of Xanadu etc.) is entirely orthogonal to liberalism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORSAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORSAR [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._Kirstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._Kirstein [3] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1455416 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1455416 [4] http://www.marconisociety.org/index.php/newsroom/379-peter-kirstein-to-receive-marconi-prize http://www.marconisociety.org/index.php/newsroom/379-peter-k...