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0 pointsNetisneverfree3y ago0 comments

Actually, it's not ignorant of history. "The Internet" as most people know it today, and for easily multiple decades now, has always had ads. It's only back when the BBS boards were the big thing that perhaps you would be correct, but even then you had people trying to make money somehow; usually to pay for the gear they were using to run their own websites, etc and so forth.

Now to be fair to you, by comparison to today, the 'original' internet was by far much "free'er" than it is now since subscription fees and such didn't really exist; but it was never completely free. (*for anyone not just hijacking someone elses connection somehow via wardriving for open wifi and such like that.)

Ultimately you still had to pay a ISP of some sort, or going back far enough your telephone provider for dial up. Though that might be somewhat redundant to split them up since most telecoms tend to provide internet, and ISP's tend to provide some form of telephony now too. I say tend to, since it's not 100% across the board with all of them.

Now to be fair to you, you are technically correct that the internet that was made available to us all back in 1993 was technically 'free', but this is not the kind of technically correct that is the best kind of correct, because ultimately people still immediately started trying to use things like affiliate links and advertisements to pay for their hardware or lifestyles.

That said, there is one caveat I must make clear. In 1993, I would have just been 4 years old, and not using the internet yet. I didn't get on the net until I was roughly 10 years old in 1999, though there was some exposure to it prior due to school and extended family.

But my experience of it back then was that there were ads, and affiliate links. Especially in forums.

But again as I was saying before; a connection to the net required that you pay a middle man such as an ISP or telecom company. So even if 'the net' itself was free in some fashion without all the ways to pay for things and etc; the 'net' itself was not free to access. You still needed that middleman to provide some form of connection for you, provided you weren't joining a local lan or something like that (if I understand correctly) and even that isn't 'the internet'. It's just a personal network between friends.

So for all intents and purposes, my argument is basically correct. The internet has never really been 'free'. CERN may have given it to the world for zero cost to the world, but even that doesn't qualify as 'the net' being free.

For the internet to be truly free, ever, would require that there be zero money being paid to absolutely anyone to be able to access it. This may seem pedantic, but it's important that we use the right words for the right things. To portray the idea that it was ever completely free to access for anyone, anywhere; is to mislead those people.

My older family members certainly did not have access to the internet for free when they got their first computers. Neither did our schools which would gripe about how much it cost them to get decent connections capable of handling the computer labs they had built.

So I digress, but the net was never really free. IT may have been really cheap at one point, and not hounding you for money constantly; but not free. Just like how aerial based NTSC tv in North America also was never really free; but paid for via advertising companies. Sure, you could find ways to watch it for free and never watch a commercial; but it was still paid for somehow by someone.

A few final notes:

1. Anything prior to 1993 would constitute the internet as still being a project and not giving any credence to the idea of the internet being free; since it was still in its developmental stages at that point. It's most early ones at that.

2. The first web purchas through the net, was pizza, in 1994. The first banner ad was also used in 1994; which means the internet had maybe 1 year in total of being 'free' by some arbitrary standard which I do not agree with. Banner ads are a tool for getting attention for something or the other, usually to do with affiliates, or some form of purchase.

3. The same year that the 'internet' was donated by CERN, is also the same year that commercialization of the 'internet' began. So your argument really only applies to the years 1991 and 1992 really; which doesn't matter because ultimately the net was still in its developmental stages still at that point. It was only used mostly for academic purposes; and commercial purposes were not allowable. But because 'the internet' itself should not be seen as the same thing as the project that was the network that Tim Berners Lee was working on; that means that since it's donation in 1993, the internet has never really truly been free. https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...

> But in 1993, enlightened regulators and policy makers decided two things at the same time. They decided to amend the AUP to make commercial use legal, and in parallel they decided to hand off the internet backbone to the telecom companies, at the time AT&T, Sprint, and MCI. That solved the economic problem since the government no longer had to pay for it.

And there is pal. Even if you or I were not paying for it out of pocket, the government was. And the government pays for things via the taxes it takes from our pocket. So ... it was never free.

I rest my case.

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lmm3y ago

> But again as I was saying before; a connection to the net required that you pay a middle man such as an ISP or telecom company. So even if 'the net' itself was free in some fashion without all the ways to pay for things and etc; the 'net' itself was not free to access. You still needed that middleman to provide some form of connection for you, provided you weren't joining a local lan or something like that (if I understand correctly) and even that isn't 'the internet'. It's just a personal network between friends.

The early net worked much the same way as a personal network between friends. If you wanted to join, you could run your own cable to someone who was connected; charging for connections and data transfer came much later. Of course someone had to rig and maintain a cable (or make regular phone connections, or what have you), and wires don't grow on trees, but this wasn't on a commercial basis in the early days; it was a research project for some but mostly just a thing cool people did; those who could contributed and those who couldn't didn't, like a potluck.

> 1. Anything prior to 1993 would constitute the internet as still being a project and not giving any credence to the idea of the internet being free; since it was still in its developmental stages at that point. It's most early ones at that.

Nonsense; 1993 is decades into the development of the net.

> Even if you or I were not paying for it out of pocket, the government was.

The government was one entity among many that ran parts of the net in some countries. They may have ran the biggest and most important connections, but they weren't the whole thing; the whole point of the net is that it's a network, with no single point of failure.

> And the government pays for things via the taxes it takes from our pocket.

Nah, the government takes what it can and sometimes pays for things, but there's no real connection between those two actions. Government-provided stuff is free.

NetisneverfreeOP3y ago

> The early net worked much the same way as a personal network between friends. If you wanted to join, you could run your own cable to someone who was connected; charging for connections and data transfer came much later. Of course someone had to rig and maintain a cable (or make regular phone connections, or what have you), and wires don't grow on trees, but this wasn't on a commercial basis in the early days; it was a research project for some but mostly just a thing cool people did; those who could contributed and those who couldn't didn't, like a potluck.

That's called a Local Area Network, or LAN. Not internet.

> Nonsense; 1993 is decades into the development of the net.

That was not the 'Internet' either. That was ARPAnet, which is also not the same as 'the internet'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

To be fair though, this is much closer to the internet we ended up with than the prior mentioned LAN (Local Area Network).

And to be fair again, you could technically make your own internet or maybe more accurately 'intranet' via LAN, but it still would not be the world wide internet as we knew it back then, or today.

> The government was one entity among many that ran parts of the net in some countries. They may have ran the biggest and most important connections, but they weren't the whole thing; the whole point of the net is that it's a network, with no single point of failure.

Let me tell you about backbone connections then. If those go down, basically everyone's internet is down. Depends on which ones, which goes hand in hand with your comment here; but ultimately if the right backbones connections go down, it may as well be a shut down of the entire internet since many areas won't be able to access other areas networks; and due to the massive influx of people trying to figure out what's going on, a sort of DDoS of sorts will ensue from all those attempts to connect to whatever else remains online. If it can be connected to at all. For example, Google. Google has world wide servers, and thus can be connected to from almost anywhere. But if the backbones are down, then only local connections might be able to ping google. Pinging google is a typical way for people to test if they have a working connection. That or cloudflare with 1.1.1.1 for a quick ping test when google isn't the quick resort. The point?

Well, if everyone starts trying to ping the only connections available to their area, then those servers better be able to take that sudden congestion, which will result in the internet essentially going down for everyone. There are caveats I admit, but the point here is that the internet is not quite as failure redundant as you seem to think it is. If it was, we would have cellular backhaul being used to ensure that at least basic connections can be made for information purposes and emergencies. But that would require world wide 5G and 6G cellular to be used. Which I guarantee you would not be free.

> Nah, the government takes what it can and sometimes pays for things, but there's no real connection between those two actions. Government-provided stuff is free.

Truth be told, I understand your reticence to agree with this, since the way governments do things in different countries can make this difficult to talk about. But the basic premise is this. The government's coffers are filled via 2 main sources. Taxes, and Investments of some sort. A 3rd form exists in the case of lobbying and bribes, but that's a different beast all together.

In general, public services tend to be paid for via the taxes the government takes from our pocket, and so regardless of what name is attached to that money given, like in the case of America with its department of defense; that money did ultimately contain some portion or majority made up of tax payer money.

But to say there is no real connection between these two actions just shows me that you may need to expand your thinking on this subject matter, because it's more nuanced than you seem to think, if you think government provided stuff is free.

It's not. That money paying for it comes from us all in some form or another.

That said, there is a caveat here as well. America providing internet to North America did mean that Canadians getting to use the connections at the earliest points would have been getting something of a free service to some degree; since Canadians like me didn't really put money into that via our taxes. But through trade agreements and other such things, our government probably did contribute to it in some way; and so our taxes did contribute in some manner. It's hard to say without going through all the fine point details. But suffice to say; nothing government provides is truly free. It's paid for somehow. Even if they just print off more dollars, we pay for that printing via inflation and higher costs due to it.

Nothing, is free.

lmm3y ago

> That's called a Local Area Network, or LAN. Not internet.

Technically it's an internet when the cable runs between two distinct networks. But the point is that it all ran on the same principle in the early days.

> That was not the 'Internet' either. That was ARPAnet, which is also not the same as 'the internet'.

You originally said "the net". Which in the early days would generally have meant UUCPNET (itself an informal concept) or even just the vaguer notion of "all the computers that are connected one way or another to each other". Either way, it remains something that was well developed long before 1993.

> Let me tell you about backbone connections then. If those go down, basically everyone's internet is down. Depends on which ones, which goes hand in hand with your comment here; but ultimately if the right backbones connections go down, it may as well be a shut down of the entire internet since many areas won't be able to access other areas networks

If you cut enough connections then you can disconnect the net, cutting it into two or more pieces (and on a small enough scale that happens all the time, as computers on the edge with only one connection do that). But no single connection is an essential part of the net; the concept of a "backbone" is something we use to try to understand the network, not an actual distinction between different types of connection. The US government ran major high-bandwidth connections; without them the net would have been a lot slower and more congested. But it would still have worked; messages still got through eventually when the "backbones" were down.

> There are caveats I admit, but the point here is that the internet is not quite as failure redundant as you seem to think it is. If it was, we would have cellular backhaul being used to ensure that at least basic connections can be made for information purposes and emergencies. But that would require world wide 5G and 6G cellular to be used. Which I guarantee you would not be free.

You can make your connection to the internet more reliable by connecting to more different nodes - whether by traditional wires, radio, or something else. (Although these days they'll probably charge you for it). That's how the core of the network works - lots of "peers" connected to each other - and always has, and that's why any single network (even the US government) can go down and not take the whole internet with it.

> Nothing, is free.

Do you believe it's impossible to have a free potluck picnic? Ultimately it has always taken labour and material to run the net, but in the early days that happened noncommercially and without charging people. Unless you define "free" so narrowly that nothing is free by definition, which would make it a rather useless concept, the net was free.

matai_kolila3y ago

Do you know what a Gish gallop is?

With a new account you lack the credibility for me to trust that's not what you're doing here with these very long comments.

Ironic, coming from me, but I make new accounts for privacy reasons, not each time I want to make a comment.

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0 pointsNetisneverfree3y ago0 comments

But my experience of it back then was that there were ads, and affiliate links. Especially in forums.

A few final notes:

And there is pal. Even if you or I were not paying for it out of pocket, the government was. And the government pays for things via the taxes it takes from our pocket. So ... it was never free.

I rest my case.

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lmm3y ago

Nonsense; 1993 is decades into the development of the net.

> Even if you or I were not paying for it out of pocket, the government was.

> And the government pays for things via the taxes it takes from our pocket.

Nah, the government takes what it can and sometimes pays for things, but there's no real connection between those two actions. Government-provided stuff is free.

NetisneverfreeOP3y ago

That's called a Local Area Network, or LAN. Not internet.

> Nonsense; 1993 is decades into the development of the net.

That was not the 'Internet' either. That was ARPAnet, which is also not the same as 'the internet'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

To be fair though, this is much closer to the internet we ended up with than the prior mentioned LAN (Local Area Network).

And to be fair again, you could technically make your own internet or maybe more accurately 'intranet' via LAN, but it still would not be the world wide internet as we knew it back then, or today.

> Nah, the government takes what it can and sometimes pays for things, but there's no real connection between those two actions. Government-provided stuff is free.

It's not. That money paying for it comes from us all in some form or another.

Nothing, is free.

lmm3y ago

> That's called a Local Area Network, or LAN. Not internet.

Technically it's an internet when the cable runs between two distinct networks. But the point is that it all ran on the same principle in the early days.

> That was not the 'Internet' either. That was ARPAnet, which is also not the same as 'the internet'.

> Nothing, is free.

matai_kolila3y ago

Do you know what a Gish gallop is?

With a new account you lack the credibility for me to trust that's not what you're doing here with these very long comments.

Ironic, coming from me, but I make new accounts for privacy reasons, not each time I want to make a comment.

2 more replies

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse