[TeMPOraL]

Depends. I accept the capitalism's ability to raise resources (capital) for larger-scale projects, but generally profit motive fucks everything up. The Internet was fine until every pathetic "enterepreneur" out there smelled easy money and come to ruin it all. It happens in every industry. Capitalism creates abundance - but abundance of worst possible crap sellers can still get away with.

[hueving]

The Internet wasn't even accessible to the general public without capitalism motivating the creation of ISPs.

[hollerith]

That's true. The free market was mostly [1] absent from the research into packet switching in the 1960s, the actual deployment in 1969 of the packet-switched network that became the internet, the invention of email, FTP, the domain name system, the mailing list, newsgroups, IRC, the MMORPG (initially referred to as a multi-user domain or a MUD), the web, webmail, the blog, the RSS feed, the wiki and Wikipedia, but, yeah, starting about 1987, profit-motivated ISPs started slowly to appear that offered access to the internet to organizations and individuals.

1: I use the qualifier "mostly" because the government did farm out most research and engineering tasks to a handful of for-profit companies (Bolt Beranak Newman, the Mitre Corporation, SRI International) that specialized in governmental contracts.

[josho]

That may be true. But, the Internet existed because of massive multi-decade investment from folks without a profit motive. All of the fundamental Internet protocols were created through those organizations.

Look at what capitalism gave us as an Internet like experience: compuserve, aol, etc. Those were all horrible closed wall systems.

[hueving]

But there are many massive investments at the academic and government research level that lead to nothing directly useful for consumers due to lack of investment interests in bringing it to market. Just look at the next generation Internet architectures that go nowhere. You can't ignore economics.

[karanbhangui]

What's the Internet you envision sans profit motive?

[TeMPOraL]

The one with free knowledge and kittens and no ads and SaaS bullshit.

[eru]

Who pays for hosting the kittens?

[jumperjake]

The same parties that hosted the old usenets and mailing lists; the users themselves.