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).
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.
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.)
> 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]
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.
> You seem to have responded that actually it wasn't because you could use it to download files of any type
I'm not English native speaker, but I'm quite sure this sentence doesn't mean what you think it means.
I'll quote it again
> In earlier versions, images are displayed in separate windows, until NeXTSTEP's Text class gained support for Image objects
BTW, yes, everything you see in a browser's webview is "downloaded", even today
Inline or not, the web wasn't text only from inception (it was designed to support different media types according to the mime type mappings of the system, it's not a coincidence).
Lee called it hypermedia browser, not hypertext.
> years later it was able to display inline images
by years later I think you mean by 1990
This [1] is from the NEXTSTEP Reference Volume 2 (published in 1990)
Even though the browser would guess MIME types based on filename, HTTP didn't have MIME types until HTTP 1.0; HTTP/0.9 as of 01992 still didn't have them: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Response.html
I didn't use the NeXT WorldWideWeb browser, so I don't have firsthand knowledge, but in http://web.archive.org/web/20110131164401/http://diveintomar... you can read TimBL commenting in 01993 about possible alternative ways of adding inline image support in ways that make it clear that he hadn't yet implemented any kind of inline image support. So I guess either the Wikipedia page is wrong or the page you posted is wrong about what NeXtStEp could support in 01990.
> Even though the browser would guess MIME types based on filename, HTTP didn't have MIME types until HTTP 1.0
correct
but guessing the mime type is what many tools still do today
MIME types were one of the (many) emergent features added to HTTP out of necessity
like, for example, HEADERS
HTTP/0.9 had no headers, no status code it was basically nothing more than
- GET THAT
- HERE IT IS ITS RAW CONTENT
But Lee HyperMedia browser had support for different file types because he already envisioned it as a mean to browse a "web" of hosts in search of "resources of different kind"
WWW was text only the same way Excel was text only, meaning they could not show text and images side by side, not in the sense "VT100 text only"
Ask you this: was there another software that let you click on a link representing a file on another computer possibly on the other side of the planet, download it and show it to you in (almost) real time?
This [1][2] is the best Microsoft could do using all its resources in 1990, on a platform that was already very advanced for graphics (Word 1.1 for Windows looks like sh*t), T.B.Lee was basically himself writing the code for the server, the client on a platform that was still in its infancy while also having to learn the framework (NeXTSTEP)
Oh, agreed. And when I started using the WWW in 01992 it was obvious that it was going to be a huge thing. But "visual paradigms already known from early-90s multimedia apps" is mutually exclusive with "they could not show text and images side by side". HyperCard, PowerPoint, and other "early-90s [or late-80s] multimedia apps" showed text and images side by side incessantly. Or sometimes on top of each other.
There was "another software that let you click on a link representing a file on another computer possibly on the other side of the planet, download it and show it to you in (almost) real time"; specifically, Gopher, which came out at the same time as WWW.
Can you elaborate on what you're saying about Word 4.0 for Macintosh?
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.
You seem to be arguing against a view that USans invented everything about internetworking, but that's not a view I hold. I know lots of people from lots of places did pioneering internetworking research! What I was saying is that the US is where the internet got deployed. Surely you are correct that without ARPANET someone still would have built an internet, and eventually it would have become worldwide. But what I'm pointing out is the contingent political facts that resulted in it happening in our timeline in the US rather than, for example, the USSR, where access to photocopiers was still tightly controlled.
I don't think "everything should be a market" is orthogonal to liberalism. At a large enough social scale, liberalism always produces markets unless warfare erupts; strong restrictions on commerce are necessary to prevent markets from arising among groups much larger than Dunbar's number.
I agree with you about Minitel; in fact, monopoly for-profit providers like CompuServe and Tymnet imposed the same kinds of restrictions on innovation that prevented the WWW from arising on their networks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30916796
"1987"? The first ARPANET link was active in 01969, and the ARPANET switched from NCP to TCP/IP on January 1, 01983, though the TCP/IP RFCs start in 01976 or 01977. Do you mean it was still deployed as a research network in 01987, as it was in, for example, 01992?
Perhaps you meant that 01987 was the last year it was US-only? But vidarh pointed out above that the ARPANET was connected to NORSAR, a research center in Norway, in June 01973, and Norway is in Europe, so in fact our current internet has had some international connections for almost 49 years now.
> 1987"? The first ARPANET link was active in 01969,
ARPANET is not INTERNET
there were many network similar to ARPANET for scope (maybe not size, but Europe was politically much different back then and the wall in Berlin was still there) at the same time ARPANET was alive
Russians had their network too since the late 70s, and at one point they connected to the US directly even during the cold war years! (mid 80s).
> Perhaps you meant that 01987 was the last year it was US-only?
no, it was the year it became "a public accessible network", after NSFNET was established. The year later research centers in Europe were connected to it and were contributing to it.
> You seem to be arguing against a view that USans invented everything about internetworking
No, I was arguing that there is sufficient evidence that the basic internetworking would have been independently invented even if ARPANET had never happened, and that as such, this is also not supported by history:
> What I was saying is that the US is where the internet got deployed
This is why I said it read like a "history by the victors" view.
"The internet" got only got deployed in the US if you take the view that the dozens of other contemporaneous networks at the time did not combine with ARPANET to form the internet, but that ARPANET alone became the internet and replaced the others, or in the strict technical sense that "the Internet" was first used about what sprung out of ARPANET. So, sure, "the" Internet arguably got deployed in the US.
But many internets were built in the 1970's. And while ARPANET was early in some respect (e.g. packet switching was first invented at RAND), many of the aspects were also invented or reinvented independently elsewhere, and both academic and commercial deployment of internationally internetworked networks was well developed long before ARPANET connectivity became widely available internationally.
As such, an internet would have still existed had ARPANET never happened. It'd have looked different, but not that different.
We're left with something ARPANET flavoured because TCP/IP won and existing networks were gradually switched to TCP/IP, not because there weren't alternatives, because there were multiple commercial and public alternatives by the late 70's, predating both TCP/IP and the opening up of access to ARPANET. If you wanted global networking at that time, you'd likely buy access from an X.25 provider, so had ARPANET and/or TCP/IP failed entirely, at worst we'd still have services built on an X.25 descendant (that truly is the worst timeline.... shudder). [Compuserve and Tymnet both used X.25 for at least parts of their networks]
Even by the time I started an ISP in '95, not everyone were still convinced TCP/IP was the way forward, and people were still doing things like tunnelling TCP/IP over X.25 because X.25 was still more easily available some places.
> I don't think "everything should be a market" is orthogonal to liberalism. At a large enough social scale, liberalism always produces markets unless warfare erupts; strong restrictions on commerce are necessary to prevent markets from arising among groups much larger than Dunbar's number.
The point is that the commenter above was not arguing against the existence of markets, but the kind of nickel and diming proposed by Xanadu on expectation of markets for everything. But in terms of writing and knowledge, one of the things the Xanadu people failed to grasp is that the supply far outstrips the demand. For most writing there is no commercial market. In fact, for a whole lot of writing, the commercial value of the writing as a product is negative: people want to pay to push it on others more than people want to pay to read it. Trying to build markets for ideological reasons even where a whole lot of people are desperate for distribution rather than payment is a folly.
So I agree with you that liberalism will always produce markets, but I don't think that is relevant to the point. The ideological bent to try to find ways to extract money out of everything is a particular right-libertarian/objectivist subset of liberalist ideologies that most liberalist ideologies do not share.
I see! Thank you! I agree, especially about the nightmarish X.25 shadow universe.
An interesting thing about Wikipedia is that it's not very compatible with charging for access, but not because Wikipedia editors are desperate for distribution (we do our best to discourage the ones who try to use Wikipedia to get distribution for their point of view). It's more that charging for access discourages people from contributing in a variety of interestingly different ways.
I don't know if it's true that Jimmy Wales named one of his daughters after an Ayn Rand heroine (none of them seem to be named Dominique or Dagny, but maybe I just haven't read enough Ayn Rand) but he is definitely pretty bullish on liberalism and specifically capitalism.
Interesting, was there a ceiling? I'm thinking of those 1-900 premium-rate phone scams in the 01990s where you'd find out after calling that you had just spent US$27 when you thought you were going to spend 50¢.
I think it really is plausible that transaction costs of various kinds would have confined Xanadu to a niche, which would have been particularly catastrophic for the two-sided market they were trying to build. But CompuServe and AOL seemed to do okay, and that wasn't in fact what killed Xanadu.
I presume anyone could've written a client for the frontend protocol -- I don't think I ever read that protocol draft. There was a general vibe that good frontends were an important problem and people would want a variety.
Yeah, it's questionable whether their business strategy could've evolved into a winning one even if they'd made it to launch.
I was just questioning the parent's perspective on "right libertarian ideology" -- my impression of Xanadu's vision was not so much "people love markets for information!" as "it's vital for the health of the info ecosystem that basic costs be paid directly", so e.g. the problem of UIs that people can rely on against scams should be faced and not avoided in favor of structurally leaning hard on advertising. (Yes, some kind of ads are inescapable.)
(It sounds like you've gotten to quiz MarkM on Xanadu directly; I'm going by largely-forgotten reading mostly in the last millennium.)
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).