[lmm]

> 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.

[Netisneverfree]

> 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.

[lmm]

> 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_kolila]

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.

[dang]

We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines in another thread. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33860465.

I'm duplicating this information here because the other thread was a few days older and the point of replying is to let people know that their account is banned.

[Netisneverfree]

I do now.

But that is not what I am doing.

I am doing what is more similar to what you claim to do. This is essentially a throw-away account, since I have found that on social media that the only reason why an account might persist, is because it conforms to the mainstream.

I do not conform to the mainstream, and for good reason. Not to mislead, but to help enlighten; presuming my opinion is enlightened at all proper and true. Regardless of that though, it requires doing things somewhat outside the box. So I understand your miss take on my intent.

Edit: I would add this. If anything else, if my commentary has made you or anyone else think about subject matters beyond their own opinions and comes to a better truth than either of us knew before; then my intent is still served.