Not like government created Obamacare. There is a huge difference. One is extremely political while other is almost independent other than being funded (insignificant part of whole budget) by government. I would argue involement of government, while appreciated, was not essential in creating Internet considering how independently it was invented around the world.
Dude, read your internet history. We don't have a bunch of incompatible protocols tied to different vendors (That was how things were developing) because the DoD of the US said that anything that was to be sold to them HAD to use this TCP/IP thingy.
That's not the same as "enforced regulation", but it certainly walks and cuaks like it. No direct government intervention -> No freely interconnected internet.
Assuming that did happen, you are overestimitating its importance.
And what about consumer offerings ? There was no such restricitons. The simple reason an ISP did not create its own Internet because by connecting to bigger net it increased networksize and value of its offering. Thats how the whole world, not just US, settled on Internet.
Is the author underestimating the importance of the open, standard, non-profit, publicly-funded Internet vs all the for-profit private nets that got nowhere close to its impact? I think not.
The private networks are still making walled gardens with no innovation in fiber space with innovative, walled gardens in Internet space. Same old same old doing nothing of significance with pure self-interest unless building it on what government created and partly subsidizes. The latter groups usually also plateu into stagnation sucking profit while the open, less-selfish models grow in new ways.
Internet is ability of everyone to send any packet to any part of the world. Thats what matters. What someone builds on top of it and/or how open/close, It still does not negate that characterstics of Internet.
Inviting governments to regulate Internet is unnecessery risk.
"Internet is ability of everyone to send any packet to any part of the world. Thats what matters. What someone builds on top of it and/or how open/close, It still does not negate that characterstics of Internet"
Internet is a set of protocols run on top of huge pipes that interconnect across many companies, nationalities, etc. They all speak common language. You're trying to oversimplify it to expand on your false argument. What I just described was only achieved once... by governments & companies making money off government projects. No private industry has duplicated it.
Closest thing was the cell phone industry where they limited what type of traffic, kept the bandwidth minimal for high profit, charged per amount of data, and so on. They eventually started looking more like the Internet by internally using Internet technologies funded by DARPA, NSF, etc. Originally, though, their model couldn't have created something like we see with the Web or Internet-run commerce. Just like MA Bell before them with their schemes.
Private sector wouldn't have built the Internet on their own since it's too risky and costly with 3rd parties getting most of the benefit. Government did it better.
"What someone builds on top of it and/or how open/close, It still does not negate that characterstics of Internet."
It does within what they build. Much of online activity has transistioned from purely Internet technologies to Web technologies. Companies like Facebook and Slack are where content and activity is going instead of HTML web sites and IRC. The result is people are locked in to vendors to just get what experiences they allow in their walled gardens. With most Internet tech, I could just move everything I had to a different client or server if what I was using wasn't good enough. Standard protocols existed to help. Private sector prefers the opposite as lock-in equals more money.
So, they fail twice: preventing something like the Internet from occurring until government did it; trying to turn it back into wall gardens of the past albeit with web browsers and more graphics.
> What I just described was only achieved once... by governments & companies making money off government projects.
I am not refuting this. What I am claiming is it was not neccessery despite being helpful. After the market made absolute [1] long distance communication and processing on data cheap and at large scale, it was only a matter of time. Even we had/were to go through IP level walled-garden/subnets, the world would have set on non-discriminating Internet.
Think of this way, what Govt. created/helped-created intially was a local network and only after thousands of ISPs coming together, not because of incentives from Govt, but because of demand we have the Internet as we know now.
> Companies like Facebook and Slack are where content and activity is going instead of HTML web sites and IRC.
Facebook, Slack, HTML, IRC != Internet. Question: Is someone being restricted from sending/recieving anypacket to/from any IP in the world ? If no then Its not walled-garden from Internet point of view. Internet is not being harmed in anyway. However bringing Govt. into this will most likely make the answer yes.
> So, they fail twice: preventing something like the Internet from occurring until government did it; trying to turn it back into wall gardens of the past albeit with web browsers and more graphics.
I am not aware of any IP level walled-garden. Facebook/Slack/Myspace/etc are/were in app/website business not Internet business.
[1] Not telephone etc which transform the data nondeterministically.
"Even we had/were to go through IP level walled-garden/subnets, the world would have set on non-discriminating Internet."
It still hasn't to this day in private services. They almost all wall off whatever they build. Those that build connections charge out the ass for them with all kinds of restrictions and schemes. Many get acquired and then crippled.
You need to justify your assumption with evidence from the IT market. Vast majority of it works against your expectation. Further, something like the Internet would require vast majority working for that expectation.
"Think of this way, what Govt. created/helped-created intially was a local network and only after thousands of ISPs coming together, not because of incentives from Govt, but because of demand we have the Internet as we know now."
It was actually a combo of military needing survivable, distributed comms with universities needing to collaborate with groups that were basically self-less and highly cooperative at the time. There were private parties trying to do their thing with their self interests even at that time. It was called OSI and circuit-based lines. One failed entirely, the other isn't what Internet was built on, and itself diminished over time in favor of faster, packet-switched lines. Even in ideal environment the incentives of businesses killed their opportunity while incentives of groups not motivated by profit led to Internet.
They make up vast majority of Internet traffic along with Netflix and Google. That makes them the Internet experience for most people. A lot of the rest is walled garden apps on mobile. Sites and services purely building on Internet technology, like IRC networks or FTP servers, are barely used because private parties rarely invest in them. It's simply too easy to escape lock-in that way. We can't throw out how 99% of people and products use the Internet when discussing Internet regulations or issues.
"I am not aware of any IP level walled-garden. "
You should look up ISP's like Comcast policies on web servers or SMTP ports. Stuff exists even at that level to serve the monetary interests of private market. Most of the walled gardens are built on top of the Internet protocols with ecosystem effect meaning you have to work within them to reach users they hit with First Mover advantage in new markets.
