Slashdot Mirror
Could the Web Not be Invented Today?
An anonymous reader writes " Corante's
Copyfight has a
piece up about this new column
in the Financial Times by James Boyle celebrating (a few days on the
early side) the 15th
anniversary of
Berners-Lee's first
draft of a web page .
The hook is this question: What would happen if the Web were
invented today? From the article: 'What would a web designed by the World
Intellectual Property Organisation or the Disney Corporation have
looked like? It would have looked more like pay-television, or
Minitel, the French computer network. Beforehand, the logic of
control always makes sense. Allow anyone to connect to the network?
Anyone to decide what content to put up? That is a recipe for piracy
and pornography. And of course it is. But it is also much, much
more...The lawyers have learnt their lesson now...When the next
disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web -
is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more
evident. That is not a happy thought.'"
...we must kill ALL the lawyers.
Dog is my co-pilot.
of a great new way to share stuff on the net anonimously ! Wait a sec there's someone knocking on my front door. Be right back... "And in related news, inventor found lynched by a mob of record executives. Now sports."
Learn to separate truth from illusion. Because in this world, it's the hardest thing to do.
It's completely down to Tim Berners Lee that the internet is a free and open as it currently is. Preceding the Linux or the GNU, he was a real hacker creating something that he couldn't have known would change the world. He did it without profit in mind and as such it's been allowed to flourish.
:P
Sure, the military may have created the fundamentals, but Tim was the first to put them to good use
I, for one, welcome our new Internet2 overlords.
Just remember that networking was not a new phenomenom before the web.
We had Compuserve, Prodigy, Bix, eWorld, and probably a dozen other big ones that I can't recall. All of them got steam rolled by the internet because it was so 'disruptive'. One of the properties of being disruptive means upheaval and loss of a certain amount of control.
Perhaps google will introduce the next phase of communications through wireless gateways that are free, and put cell phone providers in the category of technological has beens...who really knows what will work and what will fail until it is done?
Without the invention of the "Web" the world of today wouldn't be as it is. Thinking about the question at hand can lead nowhere since noone knows what a world without the Web would look like today.
Look, I'm not saying an armed anarchist revolution right friggin' now is the *best* solution, I'm just saying it's *a* solution.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
USA would have taken better control of it.
Oh wait...
Not always, but people invent new modes of communicating and sharing data regularly, and thinking that other interests would drive the evolution of a new medium ignores that ... we still are inventing things (P2P) and generally no, they aren't.
First, if there were no internet and someone were to "invent" it today, it would be very similar to the Internet that was created years ago. It wouldn't have much content aside from a few indexes and maybe some scientific or technical content.
If the internet were created today, none of us would be online. We'd still be doing all the tedious tasks like making phone calls to clients and friends, and using hardbound encyclopedias and journals to find information. Newspapers would be making a ton of money selling ad space and subscriptions. Television would probably have a lot more content related to the writers' and producers' interests rather than based on viewer feedback.
In short, if the Internet were invented today, it would not have reached us mere mortals yet. And there is no reason to think that an Internet created in 2005 would be significantly different or more advanced than the Internet created in 1974.
The Internet itself has changed the rules of intellectual property. Without it, the media conglomerates would not be in the tizzy that they currently are in. It is precisely because of the ease of broadcast that the Internet gives us that we have media content creators trying to find ways to use the law to restrict users. In very real terms, the Internet that we are talking about here is the one created 1999 by Shawn Fanning. Until the arrival of Napster, Internet piracy was a drop in the bucket. Now it is one of the most often used features of the Internet, and it is because of that initial software that media companies sat up and took notice of all the copyrighted bits being transmitted right under their noses.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
The Web was actually invented by someone(s)??? Damn, I thought it was always just... you know... there. I'm gonnna have to tell my friends about this.
A disruptive technology thwarts all attempts to stop it.
The web, both its Light and its Darkness, is an unavoidable result of the transistor.
Trying to control disruptive technology puts you squarely on the wrong side of history. The only thing to do is to spot the inexorable trend and adapt to it.
Free software is next.
Or else, global Bird Flu. Hard to tell.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Secondly, the FT commentary is the most lame counterfactual history of the Net I've layed eyes on. No need for anyone to read it. The meat of the article is the rhetorical questions that were qouted in /. submission. There is no attempt to actually compare nor flesh out scenarios of suppression of future technology by the dastardly lawyers. I can foresee the rest of this /. comments to be FUD and political soap box rants.
Thirdly asking negative sentences like "could x not be done?" is idiotic, confusing and rarely illuminating. How about asking a better question next time by submitters?
If the Internet was invented now, that means I would still be buying pRon in magazine form.
I think that, while it may be an interesting intellectual exercise to demonstrate the problems with laws today, a fundamental problem with imagining what the web would be like if it were created in the current social, economic and political climate is that many of the things we look at think might change the way the Internet was rolled out have come about because of the mass use of the Internet. In other words, if the Internet were invented today I think that it would happen in much the same way because we would not have had a chance to see the effects of the Internet and react to it.
To go further with this however, I think that this can be extended to future communcation technologies as well. The laywers and businesses that hold a stake in keeping control of media, and the law makers who have a stake in limiting communication among the masses have a tendancy to be reactionary. Because of this I think that as technologies are developed they are nutured by a community which I think overall strives to keep the technology unencombered by corporate or political interests. By the time any technology has gained enough momentum to become the target of the governments and lawyers it will have, in general, reached a critical mass such that it becomes very difficult to stop.
I think that can be seen in things like Voice over IP. By the time Governments got around to trying to figgure out how to regulate it and the traditional TelCos began to try to stop it in favor of their own intererests it had developed to the point where it would no longer have been realistically possible for those organizations to step in and bastardize the technology into something that fit in with their previous ideas.
While many complain of the slowness of buisnesses to adopt new technologies as they are developed (for example, the movie industry's reluctance to accept movie download services) I think that in the end it is a benefit in that it allows the technology to be developed outside of the interests of those groups.
Of course that is not to say that these organizations have no hand in shaping the technology as it matures. The Web for example has, in it's maturity, grown from a largely cooperative network of webpages hosted by individuals to a more passive link to corporate advertising and shopping. However, as existing technologies become mainstream and grow to fit the agendas of large organizations the developers of new technologies are new, more "pure" sources of information and communication- and with each iteration of technology and corporate and government attempts to shape it to their will these groups also begin to bend to the possibilities and design of the technologies that have been developed. Even as the Web becomes more like Television, Television becomes more like the Web with Movies on Demand, live TV schedules, targetted ads, and things like Myth TV.
Corporations and Governments are not static and immortal beings unto themselves, their policies are created by people and as the newer generations grow into a culture based around these new and developing technologies the next generation of policies will be built to adhere to this generations technological ideals- even as the next generation of technology is built to subvert or assist the agendas of these groups.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Isn't google thinking of doing this soon?
Won't somebody please think of the children?
.. if even so much as one babbling lawyer was told about the possibilities when it was being made. Assuming said lawyer's head didn't implode.
It's never just a game when you're winning. - George Carlin
Interesting take. I would bet that something very much like the WWW would have come about. Sir Berners-Lee may not have thought of it, but someone would have. In 1992 we were PRIMED for 'a better way'. Unmoderated 'News' already sucked. The moderated groups would have been threatened if the content of the 'alt' groups tried to move there. R.A.D. was already a concept. The foundations (or stepping stones) of 'hypertext' were already there. Sir Berners-Lee did not invent (like Copernicus), so much as brilliantly put together (like Einstein) the WWW. It would have taken a little longer, and would probably be noticeably different, but the end result would have been very close. And you can forget about the Big Boys coming up with this concept. the Internet, such as it was, was not attractive to most companies. The concept of 'sharing' was not really in the minds of 'the common folk'. It would take a CERN, NCSA, PARC, Bell Labs, or IBM research to even think in that directon. And they all were, more or less, at that time.
So I don't really agree with him on this.
====
When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident. That is not a happy thought.
...were nothing!! Every single disruption, the media industry says OH MY FREAKING G-D WE ARE DOOMED!!!
What are you joking? The lessons learned from the transition from radio to television, movie theaters to Betamax, CDs to MP3s...
And then a few years later, they are making three times more money than they were before.
...well, at least this week.
The web couldn't be invented today because the lawyers learned their lesson... from the web? I've heard the "hindsight is 20/20" saying, but this is ridiculous. Further, why the hell are they talking about WIPO and the Disney corp? It took the brightest minds on the planet, found at places like CERN -- and research budgets of an astronomical scale that could only have been bankrolled by government agencies like the US Army -- to get where we got with the internet and the web. I have never even heard a suggestion that something like this could ever have come from a pile of douchebags like WIPO.
After reading this article, I wish I had found it in a magazine, so I could have the pleasure of throwing it in the trash. This is garbage.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
1*You might have to get the Onion in ya know.. actual magazine form..
2*Instead of downloading illegal music people would just steal from the stores and run..
3*Ipods? heck no, we would go to the underground illegal music collection from #2 where there would be a copy for each customer willing to buy.
4*You would not be reading this headline
That kinda thing is going to give someone an idea to try to sue the internet and have the entire thing shut down because it causes violent behavior.
- Everything is free, yet nothing is free. (Compensation paradox)
- We don't know who you are, yet there is no privacy. (Identity paradox)
- Write multiple times, yet it still doesn't run everywhere. (Compatibility paradox)
- Code goes over the network, yet it's not mobile. (Boundary paradox)
- The Web is not decentralized enough, yet it is not centralized enough. (Responsibility paradox)
If you are interested, read Abandon the Web! Your attention and feedback is greatly appreciated.Think of open source and free software - in a sense it spreads the same ways.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Disruptive technology means that all bets are off and nobody could have predicted in advance what is about to happen now.
Technological Singularity is the ultimate, ne plus ultra disruptive technology so currently unimagineable that even science fiction fails to describe what will happen beyond the few clues that we we see awakening around us.
Seed AI is the first harbinger of Open Source Artificial Intelligence metastasizing and propagating itself all over the 'Net.
Recursive self-improvement of the AI Minds leads to a hard takeoff of super-intelligent artificial intelligence.
PC-based, AI-ready robots are already being manufactured and pre-ordered by the early adopters of the disruptive AI technology.
The Mind.Forth AI Engine leads the pack of Robot AI Minds germinating and speciating from Seed AI into Singularity AI.
Artificial General Intelligence is already unpreventable and unstoppable.
When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident.
... and that's something that's very hard to do. Commercial interests may have taken over large swathes of the Web, but there's still plenty of room for 'subversives' to play, for example.
By definition, a disruptive technology has to be something that is radically unlike anything that's come before. It's something that will be blindingly obvious in hindsight, and it will have a clear path from basic technologies -- probably something that's a quaint curiosity at the moment -- to the ultimate, disruptive form that it takes; but the jump from quaint curiosity to disruptive technology will not be an obvious one, until after the event.
This means that any form of control will have to be tacked on after the event
Anything with a large degree of control up front will not be able to get the momentum necessary to be disruptive. Again, this is virtually by definition. That's progress: you can slow it down, or try to distort it to your own ends, but in the end, it keeps on, somehow slipping through the cracks in the net. And this is a good thing.
The lovely thing about truly disruptive technologies is that, at least initially, they are seen as not-very-good solutions to second-tier problems (here's Wikipedia on Chistensen's definition of a disruptive technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology ). This feature (not a bug!) can give good ideas the time to get a few steps out of the cradle before incumbent industries, their lawyers, and the political powers-that-be in their employ try to strangle them. It isn't much, but sometimes a little bit of a head start is all you can hope for.
"It's not a bear, it's a hamster. A really, really large hamster."
Name one problem an armed anarchist revolution would actually solve.
No, not a problem that anarchy would obfuscate behind an even bigger problem. Something anarchy would actually solve.
See, I don't think anarchy even qualifies as "a" solution--just another even worse problem.
Example: there are armed anarchist revolutions going on in Iraq and France right now today. What problems are they solving? In what way are they "a" solution?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Al Gore's still around, sort of . . . so I don't see why not.
It woudn't! The thing about the internet and the www is that it grew out of research and academic use first. The corporations didn't even pay attention to the existence of a new media until years after it had been invented. I remember having discussions about the commericalization of the web in the 95/96 time frame. And this was what 5 or so years after the html had been devoloped and 20 or 30 years after the internet had been started.
The question that should have been proposed is what would have happened if media companies had an idea of the potentional of something like the Internet and web site, how would they have influced early desgings?
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
In the U.S., my experience is that lawyers are, in general, the most immoral, amoral people.
I had a friend who graduated in the top 5 of his class at an important law school. His entire approach was that he was learning how to break the law safely.
Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too.
Pay for content. The revolution with the Web is that there is no limitations or anyone controlling the contents there. It used to be, with television, radio, and books, that only the select few producers were able to reach a large audience. Now this has changed to be determined by what you, YOU the reader and potential producer, have to say, and whether, or rather to what extent anyone's interested in it. Now anyone can read, and thanks to Google, anyone can find something they're looking for (as in it may not be what they want, but it will be what they need).
Had the web been created today by any media corporation or association of these, it would have been just another variation on the pay-for-content and "We produce, you consume" theme that is the bread and butter of the media companies today. They do not want to have any competition. And they do not want to surrender their control of the distribution channels.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
The internet was already there and it was ok the way it was. Then came more sites, search engines, Netscape, Windows 95, cheaper and faster private internet access. And with it all the vultures who came to sell things over the internet and all the lawyers who came to get their piece of the cake.
Then came kiddy porn, trojans, 9/11, and politicians trying to regulate the Net. There is no way it could have developed with these clueless powermongers aware of it. The IP protocol would do a secure handshaking between every hop and every packet would come with its hop history in a secure format.
The net would still exist, but bandwidth would be an expensive good and content providers would charge you for every crappy page the put online.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
Considering that most of the world property rights letigation is the direct results of trade on the internet, I would say it would have all been the saem. The technology would be a lot different, and Microsoft would most likely have an even worse operating system. Linux obviously wouldn't exist.
Yes, I said it.
Maybe the internet could be invented these days. Is Al Gore still in politics?
If the Internet did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
Apologies to Voltaire.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
so, no! Neither the Web nor the Internet could be invented today.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If electricity were discovered today, it would be deemed too dangerous for the public.
In the beginning there was the PLATO network which had a working prototype designed for mass-market which would have amortized itself within 5 years easily at $40/month service, including the rental of a bit-mapped graphics, touch screen, plasma displays. It had realtime multiuser games, even some multiuser 3D first person shooter games, as well as email, discussion fora (the origin of Ozzie's "Notes") and the ability for anyone to write programs for anyone else to run via the network. A single Cyber 760 benchmarked out at several thousand simultaneous users with 1/4 second response time. "Management" decided to focus on the higher profit margin corporate education market.
So I left PLATO and took up position as architect for the authoring system for the mass-market videotex experiment conducted by AT&T and Knight-Ridder News called "Viewtron" -- a service of the joint-venture company, Viewdata Corporation of America. They had done market research which showed that the thing people most wanted was discussion. Having been from PLATO this was no surprise and indeed it was obvious to me people wanted to be able to provide publications and software services to the public. But when I presented an architecture whose primary discipline was to treat the desktop computer as the host system nearest the user (ie: P2P in 1982) I was told by a decision-maker that "we see videotex as 'we the institutions providing you the consumer with information and services'" Yes that was what he said. He may have been trying to get my goat but that is in fact the direction they took things. In any event I was about to be told by the corporate authorities that my P2P telecomputing architecture, which would have provided a dynamically downloaded Forth graphics protocol in 1983 evolving into a distributed Smalltalk-like environment beginning around 1985, would be abandoned due to a corporate commitment to stick with Tandem Computers as the mainframe vendor -- a choice which I had asserted would not be adequate. (At least Postscript survived.) I was subsequently offered the head telecomputing software position at Prodigy by IBM and turned it down when they indicated they would not support my architecture either, due to a committment to limit merchant access to their network to only those who had a special status with the service provider (IBM/CBS/Sears). The distributed Smalltalk system was specifically designed to allow the sort of grassroots commerce now emerging in the world wide web. (Now that via AJAX people recognize JavaScript is similar to the Self programming language and the Common Lisp Object System there is some resurrection of the original vision.) But this wasn't in keeping with IBM's philosophy at that time since they had yet to be humbled by Bill Gates coup but already Gates had locked in his position as the bottleneck between Moore's Law and software by retaining ownership of MS DOS while it was being distributed on IBM's hardware.
Lest people think the government is the ultimate savior in all this -- I did make a run at developing this sort of service on my own nickle using PC hardware but was squashed by the U.S. government when it provided UUCP/Usenet service, via MILnet, to a XENIX-based competitor in San Diego and would not offer me the same subsidy. MILnet was, by law, not for public access. Rather it was exclusively for military use. My complaints to DoD investigators resulted in continual "We're looking into it." replies. By that time Usenet was taking off and I couldn't get a seed market to finance any further work.
What Berners-Lee did was admirable in that he aimed lower -- for the low hanging fruit of simple document presentation. The sacrifice of P2P was, however a bit much to sacrifice. I still think that should have remained the "primary discipline". Things are slowly recovering though.
Seastead this.
Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN in Switzerland when he invented the web. There would be absolutely no problem inventing it there today.
Perhaps it would have been much slower to penetrate the US market, but that would not mean it couldn't exist basically as it does now.
There have been recent articles here about how the US is slipping into a technical dark age. This is just one more example of how that's true.
It took the brightest minds on the planet, found at places like CERN -- and research budgets of an astronomical scale that could only have been bankrolled by government agencies like the US Army -- to get where we got with the internet and the web
.. it's a very smart idea, but it's not a particular complex idea as soon as the idea is formed. The web isn't very complicated... and I would think that most research is financed by corporations.
.. it's where the true goodies is. :)
One should differenciate when talking about the Internet and the Web in this case. The 'web' is just http+html
If we start talking about networks, then we're in a whole other league. IP is simple enough, but the routing protocols, bgp, ospf and so forth. The underlying physical layer with all it's protocols... This is where the true research has been done. This isn't just a simple presentation layer
I know libraries started in ancient times. I'm not an expert on the subject, but I don't think the idea of public lending libraries has been around all that long. I doubt they would come about if civilization had to create them now.
just a few word about that :
1) Minitel was never even close to a computer. It was an "advanced" terminal (advanced meaning more advanced than a simple phone : B&W 25x40 screen is nowhere close to "advanced" right now)
2) The Minitel network is now close to death in france, thanks to the web. No one keep on putting money in it, there are just a few historical service than crawl along for the ones that are not blessed by the ADSL fairy's magic wand)
print.google has it, but you have to login (your gmail login works). I guess that's kinda cool, it sucks when ppl link to amazon.
The internet is an extension of ideas that we already had. Bulletin boards allowed small groups of people to interact, particularly with things like MOOs/MUDs. Then CompuServe was alot like the internet before the internet really took off, despite being a commercially owned entity, and yes it was a bit like pay tv.
A disruptive Technology is one that "disrupts" the currently technology. Amazon.com was "disruptive technology" to strip malls. Strip malls were "disruptive technology" to department stores. And department stores were "disruptive technologies" to the old corner stores. In this sense, a WWW could be invented today. The majority of the population (including lawyers) can't predict disruptive technologies - so their creation can't be prevented.
Before the web we had gopher, which was pretty much text based.
On another note, it is interesting that this document does not validate. There's an extra tag in there. No wonder it's hard to get web developer to write valid HTML.
nevermind. I didn't find it after all, or this other 'bout 50 year old book. I guess copyrights are for longer than I thought or the other author was a UK guy, I dunno about Orwell - what country he's from.
Why you gotta drive to a library to read?
Considering that the web is a 'recipe for pornography' while the minitel isn't is a mistake: in truth FT the company operating the minitel was making a big part of the money with 'sex sites'.
Maybe this was possible only in France where sex is not too much a problem..
It probably helped that at the time, the sex was very abstract on the minitel: only crude drawings and text interaction, no photograph.
Apart from this inacurracy, I agree with the article.
After killing all lawyers, you're going to need a hell of a legal team...
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
And you people are looking forward to it, like the sheep that you are!
We are exactly where we would have been otherwise. The web became a view-port in which we arrange the content, but not ultimately how we see it. At the time, the Internet at large was begging to come out, and had things gone different, maybe we would have been viewing the content in a manner which ultimately didn't rely on how "perty" it looks, but rather what it does. Mr. Lee had a fantastic idea, but it was the short term goal that built the end-system. IMHO the web is broken, but the result, is now the reason
That is actually one of the most heartening things I have heard in a long time. The only thing that will make people sit up and do something about the increasingly troubling grip of corporate intellectual property on our society.
A future where IP eventually stops progress and would ultimately then be reformed sounds far better than one where we are insidiously subject to more and more control with corporations deciding not to give us internet porn and other disruptive and disliked social changes.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Ahhhhh my eyes! - The goggles, they do nothing!
I can think of one prominent example of a case where established stakeholders recognized the potential of a new communications/data technology and acted to mold the development of the new technology according to the interests of those established stakeholders.
The example is the case of DAT -Digital Audio Tape. DAT might possibly have served need, that years later, has been fulfilled by recordable CDs and Ipods. Unfortunately established stakeholders realized that relatively inexpensive lossless recording that DAT systemds made possible was contrary to their own interests. These stakeholders saw to it that DAT technology was relegated high-end "professional" niche markets, unavailable in any practical sense to the average consumer. I would venture to guess that if the recordable CD had originally been marketed as an audio backup technology (rather than a data storage technology) that the CDR as we know it today might not be available ( or the Canadian model of "pay in advance for the music we ASSUME you will record" might be the world-wide standard).
Think of what the Industrial Revolution was like, how Britian tried to keep factory technology out of the hands of other countries. It is all about control and money.
If it should by done by corporations then it wouldn't be a totally new solution... it would have been an addon to ftp or gopher...
If some "mad" scientist have invented it, the corporations would try to stop it in all possible ways...
...and if it was invented by the military it would have been secret for the next 30 years...
I didn't truely appreciate the magic that was FidoNet back then... actually, I'm still not exactly sure how it managed to route messages from BBS to BBS until it reached the other side of the planet.
In some ways, BBS's were better than the 'net today, it was a real community since people tended to call BBS's that were in their own city. Nowadays, I don't have any idea where Slashdotter's live... plus there are sooo many more users per site...
The classical anarchist social model---small communities that govern themselves by consensus---might put an end to many of the evils that abide within today's state-centered societies.
(Not that I suppose they could or should be imposed by force.)
At the time it was released (begining of the 80's), minitel was probably one of the most advanced and low cost electronic net in the world, it greatly helped many people to get acquainted with technology. And it had porn too.
Lack of evolution and internet competition killed it, but for 15 years I can't think of anything more or less competing with it anywhere in the world in terms of accessibility and richness of content. And it delivered for (almost) free ! The terminal was lended by France Telecom to anybody at no cost. You paid for the service, at the price of a (sometimes premium) communication. Not really cheap, but a strong incentive for sure.
For certain services, I still use it today, because minitel warrants the user he's talking to the right person (no MIM hack), and the price has no hidden traps.
When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers...
will be as clueless as they were before. Will think that the new technology is some geek playground with no real world use. And then it'll be too late.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I am happy Al Gore invented the Internet. I just cant imagine Dick Cheney being able to do it today, so that means we would have to keep going to the cinama to watch movies and go to the store for buying records and I would not have wasted one minute on writing thi....
ROTFWL, this is the funniest thing I ever read on /.!
Here I am, in France, sitting next to the window enjoying a cool november sun, next to one of the *worst* places in my french town. No cars burning, no burnt cars, no mobs looting the local stores...
I was in Paris several days this week and mainly nothing unusual is happening there.
Remember the riots in L.A. in the US some time ago? Did it really qualify as a revolution? I did not say so then, and given that nothing has changed I will not say so now.
Just because there are a few riots in a few suburbs, does not mean a revolution is even starting.
You have to remember to downsize the information news companies give you, they're only out to sell content.
Besides, I would add that an armed anarchist revolution has never been an immediate solution.
May I use your sig please?
I see many people on here making comments starting with "if the internet were created today..."
Please stop. The article references the web. The web is not the internet. It is merely one of the services available on the internet. The internet was invented in the late 60's by the US Defense Dept (DARPA). The web was invented in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee as a way of sharing documents that was better than Gopher and FTP.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
Your comparaison with the french minitel is not fair, IMHO. If the internet would look like the minitel, it would be:
1) Cheaper
At that time, connections were charger per minute. The range for the minitel was between $0.05 and $2.00, the range for the internet started at $0.35. Addtionaly, the terminal was FREE.
2) More used
There was millions of minitel users in France, and only tens of thousands of internet ones.
3) Faster
Well, the minitel modem was only 1200-bps, while you could get a 9600-bps one for the internet. However, the route was direct and the pages much lighter. So the time-per-page was lower.
4) Styled
The minitel was a character terminal, black and white. Colors and graphics were introduced later. Same for the web. But you could get some effects.
5) More organised
The minitel had a single namespace (mainly 3615). Not a really good thing but definitively more organised and controled.
Finaly, the minitel could be connected to a PC (via serial). You could use it confortably from your PC or you could connect BBS. You could even host your own server. At that time, it was almost impossible on the internet.
----
http://www.milliondollarscreenshot.com/
Million Dollar Screenshot
You'll notice that they make more money BECAUSE the keep saying the sky is falling. It's a ritual which makes the legislators hand them the control and exclusive access they need to turn information into something scarce, IOW produce value.
Perhaps as The Microsoft Network was originally supposed to be? Before everyone decided that they didn't care for it, that is.
For those who don't remember back to 1995, Microsoft had originally intended to make The Internet obsolete by leveraging its OS monopoly to steer everyone to the alternative network controlled and administered by Microsoft. In such a scenario, anyone who wanted to serve up content would have to deal with (and probably pay) Microsoft.
No internet until today = no digital music explosion. No digital music explosion = no Apple iPods. No iPods = Apple might have gone bankrupt. Imagine a world without iPods right now.
Ironic that you mention Disney. Thanks to Mike Davidson in 2002, ESPN.com, a Disney-owned and operated site, was one of the first large web sites after Douglas Bowman's Wired redesign to move to a CSS-based layout.
Too often it's the legal department, marketing directors, and management that hold back a corporation's technical development. I know first hand that the Walt Disney Internet Group is full of smart people who beg management to more fully support open standards in their work. And sometimes they get their way, but too often it's muffled by management. It's the same in any corporation.
If the Walt Disney Internet Group were to invent the internet (the very act of which would make their name a temporal paradox), I think they'd make something very cool. Then all the businessmen would come along and take away the interesting bits.
I find it really awesome that a medium created by technologists and geeks has been so universally accepted and used that corporations have no choice but to rely on it.
Does this idea ever matter? If you create standards that enable a similar institution eventually you will get an AOL. AOL is 90 percent there for the internet. Also researchers would make the web not be so mickey mouse.
My UID is prime is yours?
Does anyone think that if it weren't for unix/linux, then the internet would have come much later?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
you'll never see 3D rapid prototyping printers become common. The technology would be too disruptive if you can simply begin printing out parts for things in your house.
Can you imagine all the sorts of property holders that would be affected by 3D rapid prototyping and would be getting involved in intellectual property issues if that technology debuted?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
of Tim Berners-Lee's web page, I think somebody should really get that n00blet a copy of Dreamweaver.
Remember the Fidonet? The Net that ruled all of the Pack (Minitel, Compuserve, whatever)?
A net entirely built and controlled by citizens!
Now imagine a Fidonet protokoll that supports web-like features such as easy cross-referencing and images.
The quality of a network like that would be much higher than what we have as the web today.
I'd pick an entirely cititzen controlled modern asynchronous net over the web any day.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The lawyers have learnt their lesson now...When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident. That is not a happy thought.'"
James Boyle might write in a formalised and superficially eloquent style, but this last sentence proves that he is still what is referred to on Usenet (and here) as a troll.
A question for Boyle and all the other such fearmongers:- If Disney and the other robber baron conglomerates have such omniscient power, how come eDonkey and all the other p2p networks are still in operation? How come things like this are able to be circulated online without their authors being murdered by Big Oil?
In case you can't figure it out, I'll give you a hint. It's because the rest of us outnumber the management of such corporations by a factor of at least a few hundred million to one. Thus, although in some ways they are able to make our lives difficult and win some minor battles, ultimately they are entirely assured of losing the war.
Get it through your heads, everyone; The Evil People (the heads of most multinational corporations and the senior staff of the current US government are the primary groups I'm talking about here) are NOT going to accomplish their goal of enslaving the lot of us. By believing for even a moment that they are going to, you actually give them what they need to continue to cause problems...in the sense that they can only be a threat to anyone if we allow them to be. Continue to actively oppose them, yes, but don't give ANY mental, verbal, or literary airtime whatsoever to the idea that they have even a chance of succeeding...because a) that isn't what any of us want, and b) because of a, it ain't going to happen anywayz.
We need to spend more time creating the kind of world that we *do* want to live in, and give a lot less focus to the tiny minority of individuals who don't want to allow anyone to move forward. Not only will they fail, as I have said, but we need to start consistently knowing and realising, as an entire race, that they will. Once they have failed once and for all, we will be able to use p2p and other such technologies as much as we want or need, without interference. We will also be able to continue to research and implement things in various areas which can be of enormous benefit to all of us, but which have currently been forced underground by the aforementioned corporations.
The thing to realise though, is that this new society...without the corporate greed addicts and corrupt politicians...is coming, and there's nothing that they or anyone else can do about it. They know that, and they're terrified and desperate...because they know their time is almost permanently up.
Am I a crazed Utopian here, talking about a scenario where nobody will have any problems? No...I'm not implying that we will be free of problems at all. What I am implying however is that we are about to enter a scenario where we will be able to find solutions to said problems much more easily and freely, and where Disney and all of their kind will have evaporated into the past like fog at midday.
When you think about it, libraries are a bit socialist, but I think the benefits far outweigh the harm.
Wait.
What harm?
.
Reality has a liberal bias
...if this story were not posted? Would anyone notice?
Twinstiq, game news
When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident
No they won't. The "next web" will be a disruptive technology therefore the effects cannot clearly be foreseen. Lawyers & "logic of control" type people will not even notice what's happening until it's already too late. These people operate strictly within existing mental frameworks.
To be able to forsee what's to come they would need to be visionaries. Visionaries do not become lawyers, nor do they suffer from an unhealthy desire to impose their own will on everything (as do sufferers of "Logic of control" type personality disorders). Lawyers etc. argue over the rights to own and administer the crumbs left in the wake of visionaries.
Look at Tesla, did he focus on business ? No he'd far rather be inventing stuff. Compare this with Edison who only invented stuff with a view to marketing it.
Who made the money ? (Edison) Who was the true genius ? (Tesla)
For further information Google for "Eris Discordia".
Praise "Bob" !
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
i think we already see this regulation happening. With the ease of setting up and using torrents, don't you think everyone would already have been serving their files this way? Don't you think the legality has burdened its growth?
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
You are the ONLY one to have gotten the reference; Shakespeare's "Henry VI, Part Two"
From act four;
ALL God save your majesty!
CADE I thank you, good people: there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord.
DICK The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. How now! who's there?
Dog is my co-pilot.
but i despise lawyers.
i know it might be a bit strange, but to fight something you have to get to know it really well.
I mean comeon, its the w3 15th anniversery (or comming close too it according to wikipedia) so what are we talking about "what if the net was invented today" really ????? we should have a bit more of a positive slashdot artical for this. Personally i believe any restriction of freedom which is advocated by todays w3 would result in a lacking of support by the general public, we as people of democratic societies (some of us) believe this to be a trait in all aspects of our lives and i dare say it translates in to the internet and is the inherent reason as to why it is as popular as it is.. As for vulturistic behaviour of lawyers, personally i find this is a disgusting part of our society and mearly whats happened over the past 2 centuries to make todays "civilized" society is that we've simply just replaced gun slinging cowboys with guys wearing suits walking around with a briefcases full of torn up newspapers ripping people off blind to get them out of trouble ... i hate lawyers as they take advantage of their position...
The exact same argument can be made regarding the public library. After all, anyone who borrows a book from the library (even without making other fixed copies) deprives bookstores and authors of a potential sale. In some ways, the public library is like a old fashioned P2P program. Their goal is to disseminate knowledge and culture as fast and efficiently as possible. Some libraries participate in interlibrary loan programs, where a book can be retrieved from a peer if the library itself does not a copy of the book to lend.
Of course, nevermind the public benefit and educational value of public libraries. The copyright industry today believes it is entitled to dictate every use of a copyrighted work, including getting paid. We're not talking about giving authors a living and incentive to create more works here. We're talking about making one work and collecting royalties on it for a century or more, while ensuring (by twisting the law) that you (as the consumer) get less value while spending more of your money to get it.
It is only the fact that the public library's value has been demonstrated today is why going after the libraries is political suicide for the copyright industry. Because if Congresscritters had to use foresight instead of hindsight to see the benefits of the public library, then the insane interpretations of copyright by Congress and the copyright industry virtually guarantees that they wouldn't exist. The RIAA tried to kill used CD sales in the past, but failed. Just wait 10 years for the RIAA to make that depriving artists/decreasing potential revenue argument again, to a more receptive Congress.
The only reason that the Internet exists is because we techies managed to sneak it by the @#$%ing lawyers, who had no idea what we were doing until it was too late. That will never happen again. They now watch everything.
Slashdot Moderation Guidelines: Leftist viewpoint (+4), Conservative viewpoint (-4, Troll)
AOL, CompuServe, GEnie all wanted to be a controlled internet. The internet won because of it's lack of control.
I also disagree with the concept that lawyers will hammer down the next disruptive technology because now they're "prepared" for it.
Sorry, but disruptive technologies are the ones that sneak in the back door, it's that thing nobody thought they needed but they really did. Lawyers by nature won't believe such a simple thing noone needs will be disruptive.
They may react a bit faster once it becomes obvious what is going on, but they're still going to miss the inital boat.
Open standards are part of this - they do a better job for customers than closed ones do. Remember, people tried this with various services. How big are MSN, AOL, Compuserve and all that now?
I predict that the current cellphone companies are going to be in big trouble in a few years, when the wireless technology catches up and provides a cheaper service.
Your comment made me imagine the entertaining concept of "readeasies" where once you got past Vinny the bouncer you could drink bathtub gin and swap books with the other patrons. For some reason I also picture everyone wearing zoot suits and flapper dresses...
Freedom: "I won't!"
just remmeber, the net, as it was designed, was meant to be an information sharing research tool. while my opinion may not be widely agreed upon, had the net, even back when it was first conceived, been left up to the commercial entities of the day, it would not differ much from one developed today (ingoring technological advances and only looking from the economic tool vantage point).
i fail to believe that the corporations back in the day were less greedy than the ones we see now. technology has changed, and shares of certain markets has changed, but the knee jerk reactions to loss of profits and helplessness to emerging technologies proabably would not have changed much.
the net as it is now, emerged successfull becuse business underestimated it; they sat back and "let the geeks have their little research toy." for a net to succeed along the lines that the current one has, the implications of its usefullness would have to streach beyond the ablity of coropration leaders comprehension. this is entirely possible since most people who are smart enough to innovate in that way are often marginalized by businessmen becuase of their uniqueness and variance from that of the status-quo business man (which is a major problem with modern american culture, but alas...thats not for this post).
more of a ramble...but whatever...
dude.
[Not speaking for SunSITE, Metalab, ibiblio, or UNC].
1) Before the great Cambrian explosion of 90-92, only a few, simple internet applications existed - primarily telnet, smtp, ftp, and DNS. In a manner that would shock most members of the Dover school board, these applications envolved through a process of trial, error, and descent with modification.
When ITU attempted to replicate these applications through intelligent-design-by-committe, the species that formed in 84 proved immediately non-viable. The second creation in 88 improved many of the existing problems; it did, however, equip these second spawn with sets of long, sharp, pointy teeth, in the form of government mandates requiring all government purchases have protected habitats for the X-creatures to frolic in.
2) When the explosion happened around 90-92, when the phyla that shape almost every modern Internet application first appeared in their basic forms, (gopher and http for browsing, WAIS for search, archie for indexing, etc) the struggle against OSSification was at its very peak.
If they're cute and furry enough, teams of mammals can take down the pointest of teeth ("This is a UNIX system - I know this").
3) People have been concerned about protecting copyrighted materials since the very beginning. For WAIS was put together by Brewster Kahle's team as way of letting Dow Jones customers do full text searches using servers running on Thinking Machines supercomputers. Marking documents as not for copying was an issue. I remember bar conversations about this after the Cybrarians BOF at the Jan 92 Usenix.
4) One of the biggest reasons that the web took off is that Tim Berners-Lee is one of the nicest people ever. The web wasn't designed to make you serve your data in the way it wanted; it was designed to hook in and work with the data as it already was, and oh, by the way, if you create add a welcome.html file, you can hyperlink from all these words.
By keeping things open, keeping things free, and playing nice with everyone, the foundation for the second generation of web clients was laid.
5) Probably the most important reason for the cambrian explosion was the loosening of the Acceptable Use Policies on the backbone. Hmm *de*-regulation making things better. Whould have thunk it.
Simon
Most technological advances would be impossible today.
Sure, *invention* would be possible, but you couldnt tell anyone else you did it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That is a recipe for piracy and pornography
Minitel was *always* all about the porn.
Da Blog
all bells and whistless without the balls ...
...
unsearchable graphical mess of information, full with flash-like programs annoying the hell out of me, and disallowing e.g. blind people to do anything online....
it would be completely proprietary, so to access someones network you would have to download 12312411233megabytes of trash windows-only programs, that would tell you after the installation something like this:
"your country code is not supported" or "you must enter credit card number before you can look at our programming or make a search of what we are selling"
napster or itunes are 2 perfect examples of a software being forced on you (just to do something that could be done on a text terninal or web browser) , most hip company websites are a perfect example of complete lack of usability and a mess of flash content (unsearchable, unzoomable, unsaveable, unbearable)
OK I like shortcut based BBS-style terminals, or sites with a design as complicated as dmoz.org
...then we won't be ready for it at all, and neither will the lawyers. If someone invented the web today, then perhaps the lawyers would be all over it, since they've had time to prepare. The next time something comes along that nobody has thought of before, we (and the lawyers) will be just as unprepared as we were when the web itself came along.
A lot of the reasons revolve around congress, laws passed, numbers of laws passed, and the demographics of congress in a historical sense. Lawyers have, as a profession, made up a huge number of the members of congress over the years. As such, it is in their pure selfish and planned economic interest to make laws as verbose and complex and numerous as possible. This leads to a higher potential pool of victims for the hired guns to aim at. In fact, I would state at this point in time, due to the sheer number and complexity of the "laws on the books", that just about every adult human in the US is most likely some form of "lawbreaker". You don't see these things? Where "sue happy", where the "hired guns" mercenaries can be brought in, comes about from the sheer number of ways that people can run afoul of "the law" someplace? It is an obvious and, to most everyone else who isn't a lawyer, an onerous and perpetual "job security" guild, a ruling class in a nation that is not supposed to have such a thing theoretically. We are supposed to have a government by and for "the people", not by and for a tiny subset of the population.
Where is the cutoff point? We have millions (whatever, some huge number) of laws on the books between the federal/states/local governments. When will there be "enough" laws? Really, name a calendar date, name a number, when is this time in the future when we will have *enough* laws to "be enforced"? Run a graph in your mind, see the jump historically? How is ANY normal human supposed to keep up with it? Where is an *honest* check and balance on this phenomenon when both major parties (I think of them as criminal gangs more than parties at this point) are very top heavy with lawyers, and all judicial nominees are combination party and lawyers union functionaries? Where are the public proclamations by the lawyers unions that they seek less laws, simpler laws and more fair laws, in order to make the system cheaper and fairer for the "end user", the public at large? Where is the effort to make the public law and judicial system "open" and not a closed shop with "vendor lock-in", that would be the envy of Microsoft?
Step out of your shoes and into a non-lawyers shoes for a moment, the "problems" and reasons for public enmity become rapidly apparent.
As to patents and "IP" styled law in general terms, where are the oficial stances on these laws? Outside of a very few, such as EFF type folks, etc, I am just not seeing any effort by the "law community" to make things fairer or simpler, it is the reverse, they are actively trying to make things more complex to the point of ridiculousness. And they are suceeding in these efforts.
But a college kid in his dorm room. Tons of ideas have come out of college. I think it's the right mix of youth (not knowing what you can't do) and maturity (you are an adult in the eyes of the law).
Since there are a lot of youngsters on Slashdot, it's not surprising that the memory of the web's genesis is fuzzy to nonexistent for many of you. Let's put things into perspective, shall we?
Flash back to the early 1990's. What was the term being bandied about by everyone, in the media, in IT, just about everywhere? Everyone was talking about the upcoming "Information Superhighway." And everyone assumed it was going to mean we'd have 500 cable channels. Digital shopping. "Video phones." Even a few scary elements of Big Brother. It was going to be a corporate panacea, and the media had the drooling masses convinced that they were going to love it.
What ended up happening was that while all the BigCo's fought over whose technology, whose network, whose pay-per-everything service was going to become "The" Information Superhighway, barefoot pilgrims like Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesen figured that the beginnings of that dream already existed in the then-current Internet, and all they needed was a killer app to bring it to the masses. And we all know what happened then.
Can you come up with any good reason why this couldn't just as easily have happened in 2005? Remember, if the web explosion hadn't yet happened, the big media pigopolists would not yet be on the defensive because people wouldn't be doing large-scale digital copying yet.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
The invention of the Internet could and would happen the same way. Many may not remember, but in the infancy of the modern Internet those corporate interests did seek to steer the masses away from it and the freedom of the Internet prevailed.
As the Internet was emerging into the mainstream with invention of the web browser it was very, very uncertain that the Internet could win over the masses. At that time Compuserve and AOL were king, they had all the content and it was packaged and controlled. Microsoft was also trying to get in on that by launching MSN which was designed around the Compuserve/AOL paradigm that content providers pay, users pay and everything is managed and controlled.
I worked at a university starting in the late 80's and I had been on the traditional Internet. It wasn't much then but I had seen the democracy of the Internet and what the infant web looked like. The concept that Compuserve, AOL and MSN might actually convince the unnetworked masses that they were the future was frightening. At the time they held all the cards. A seamless interface, email, tons of content. Meanwhile Internet access was harder to configure, email wasn't interchangable with the big services, and the baby web had no content. You either signed up with an ISP and started swimming in the empty wading pool or signed up with the big three and got instant beachside community and pretty packaged content.
Luckily some did choose the Internet. The researchers and education users of the traditional Internet were devoted. Other hardy souls signed on in those early days. The web ramped up and eventually the masses started trickling in. It wasn't long before MSN had to completely redesign to incorporate the web, Compuserve died and finally giant AOL had to adapt.
It was a grassroots evolution rather than a revolution but the power of an open platform won. It happened before and it could happen again.
Could the Web Not be Invented Today?
If by "Web" the submitter means "World Wide Web" and if by "not be invented" he means "uninvented" then yes, it's entirely possible that the rest of the world will screw things up to the point that the Web will be effectively uninvented.
Besides, he got his Yoda-speak wrong, the title should have been "Invented not the Web could today be"
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The big push to interconnect first came from E-mail. Business to business E-mail was a huge pain when GEnie didn't talk to MCImail. Businesses insisted that their vendors get interoperablity working. That's what finally made the competing services interconnect.
By the time the Internet grew out of its DOD and university stage it was far too large and complex for any corporation to fully get a hold of and regulate/sensor it. I don't see any problem in something like this happening again today. Corporate/university contracts might slow it down a little but I think it could happen again.
and if programmers interpreted the law, everything would be strict liability. ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If you look at a lot of things that we take for granted today, many would have trouble getting past the lawyers
Can you imagine putting electricity in homes today? I mean, that stuff can kill you if you touch it!
What saves us, and allows our society to progress technologically, is that the big companies and the lawyers never see it coming until it is too late.
That's the way it has happened in the past, and the way it will continue to happen.
The inability to invent the Internet today has nothing to do with technology. I agree whole-heartedly that the Internet (and many other technologies) cannot be invented anymore. However, it it only because the frivolous software patent environment that is destroying innovation in the U.S. and abroad prohibits this type of invention on a nearly absolute basis.
If individuals invented the Internet today, it would instantly drown in the sea of frivolous patent lawsuits that would inevitably follow.
Is it just me or is this a completely stupid and pointless question? (including this one!)
The only reason why the Web-as-designed-today would be infested by lawyers and controlled by Disney and RIAA is that the original Web gave so much freedom to the people. If that didn't happen, RIAA would be clueless that "pirates" may trade and share songs online.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The next disruptive communications technology is already here -- and they're trying to apply the broadcast flag to every portion of it. It's the ability to not only watch television any time afterwards that you wish, but anywhere you wish as well!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident. That is not a happy thought.
It depends on the people. People should really realize that they are the one who vote and elect politicians to create legislation. Lawyers can only do what legislation allows them.
Al Gore was mistakenly omitted from the "People" page.
This guy is the most impressive troll I've seen on Slashdot. If I hadn't just read this, I'd have believed him.
Actually, made that second most impressive: NSFW.
I quit!
The sine qua non of the anarchist intellectual tradition is simply the theory that the state is an unnecessary evil. Anarchist thinkers have come up with a variety of controversial ideas about what kind of society should come next. I have only attempted to suggest some common themes.
To put it crudely, you laugh at anarchists because you do not know what they stand for.
Simply pick your favorite conception of society out of the anarchist tradition, then. Certainly that society, if instituted, might put an end to some of today's problems and therefore meet the poster's challenge.
The Iraqi uprising is hardly anarchist; it's a coalition of Baathist remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime (i.e., adherents of a combination of neo-Stalinism and pan-Arab nationalism) and Islamists with the goal of establishing a global caliphate, quite the opposite of anarchy.
The situation in France, meanwhile, is nothing more than a good old-fashioned race riot, with little in the way of a coherent ideology to shape it into a revolution.
BitTorrent is not actually illegal. For one, it is just a means of accelerating downloading from a central server by getting the downloaders to help each other. And secondly, BitTorrent makes no provision for anonymity and is about as much designed with illicit activity in mind as FTP.
> Why on earth wouldn't http and html be invented today?
:P
You didn't RTFA
It's because you'd be sued out of existance for creating it, like the P2P networks are starting to be. They're not fundamentally different than the Internet itself, they just make it easier. And I don't think certain people have their heads around that quite yet, given all the nonsense about BitTorrent being a "piracy" tool. It's a better way to download, period. And a less anonymous one (people in the swarm can see you). And yet we hear all the time how much the MPAA/RIAA hate it simply because it improves upon the Internet, making downloads faster (and thus, copyright infringement faster).
Actually I did read the article, I just seriously disagree. That was the point of my post. A new web wouldn't be legislated out of business. Certainly the printing press allowed for all sorts of things to be created that the powers that be didn't like. Did it disappear or cause there to be no more innovation? Obviously not in the least. Where are the lawsuits against Bram Cohen and Bittorrent, Inc? Lawsuits against things like trackers are similar to lawsuits against websites - they have nothing to do with Tim Berners-Lee and http. To be sure perhaps if a completely closed web like system was developed and controlled by one company it might have opened itself up to lawsuits due to the use of the network - but then again a single company solution like that would have never come close to touching what the web became. Did you know that AOL had their own html like markup language and server system? That's ok, no one else remembers it either.
I know fear mongering and the idea that the big bad multinationals and lawyers are destroying everything is popular around here - and with reason. But think for yourself. Communications innovation hasn't been stifled at all - it continues on at a much faster pace.
There is no decision to make. Anarchism is full of different ideas about social balances, what kind of social relations are desirable, and how such relations might be put to practice. These ideas are "anarchical" in that they all judge the state to be an undesirable social institution, yet none can claim to be a necessary consequence of that judgment.
Ethical ideas (like what makes a good society) can't even be falsified by experience; the best thinking people can do is to point out their logical inconsistencies and unforeseen consequences.