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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.'"
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
Agreed. Why on earth wouldn't http and html be invented today? Only because possibly the niche is already filled. Does a would be inventor have to run their protocol by the property lawyers or disney before it gets popular now? Someone should inform Bram Cohen. I'm pretty sure the printing press, telegraph, radio, television, telephones and more were all disruptive technologies for some reason or another in their day. Thinking we've hit some kind of wall isn't looking very hard at the issue.
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."
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
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.
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.
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.
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http://www.milliondollarscreenshot.com/
Million Dollar Screenshot
Aren't we also misusing terms here? P2P has nothing to do with the WEB. The internet itself has been around a lot longer than the World Wide Web and P2P applications technically do not use the web. So even if the web hadn't been invented, P2P still might have.
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.
[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
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.
The Internet, often refered to the World Wide Web
You keep using that word. I donna think it means what you think it means.
The "World Wide Web" was the popular name coined to refer to documents offered over the HTTP protocol (and more specifically HTML documents). Why? Because HTML is a hyperlinking technology -- meaning that HTML document can theoretically refer to any other, thus creating a "web" of inter-connection between various computers. No, HTTP+HTML is not the only hyperlinking tech, nor were they even the first. However, they are the most popular (for several very good reasons, the biggest of which is that you can encode references to *other* protocols in HTML). www.* came to be used because it was the acronym for the World Wide Web, AKA HTML over HTTP.
Now for the other part -- the Internet refers to a plethora of local networks connected via TCP/IP (which is the most popular networking protocol today.) HTTP is a protocol that uses TCP/IP to function. So, the web we know and love is an application on top of the Internet -- but it is no more the Internet than FTP (file transfer), SMTP (email), or even my favorite, SSH (Secure [remote] SHell) are. They are all applications that run on top of the Internet, but none *are* the Internet.
Thus ends today's episode of "De-confusing Terminology For Non-Experts".
LART: Improving the human race one person at a time.