[oblio]

The internet was a military need from what I remember.

The military said something like: "Telephone routing is point to point and inflexible, if the enemy cuts out 1-2 lines of communication, an entire section is completely cut off. We need something better." That something better turned out to be packed switching where you just throw stuff along a network and the network ensures that the packet reaches the destination, but you could theoretically have two packets going from Bucharest to Johannesburg, one through India and the second one through Canada.

[thereddaikon]

It started as a way to network air defense bases for AESA radars, NORAD and Nike missiles together across CONUS. Feature creep and increased scope grew it into a general purpose data network that linked not only military sites but also research institutes by the 80's.

[hinkley]

There’s about ten years’ of NSF funding between The Internet and the dotcom boom. So yes, but actually no.

[noobermin]

That said while the intent the current internet is pretty centralized at least in some senses.

[DecoPerson]

But it’s software defined, so it’s much quicker to work around failures of those centralised points.

[est31]

Yeah compare broken water pipes with broken facebook/whatsapp etc. If the former is broken, people don't have water until the issue is fixed. With latter, at least they can use one of the alternatives (and they do, usage counts of alternatives go up during outages).

[HPsquared]

That is, unless the water pipes require internet to work.

[noobermin]

Yeah, I'm not talking about broken facebook or twitter, I'm talking about the various cdns out there, cloudfare, etc

[oblio]

Even for those. Swapping a CDN or infra provider is difficult, but hardly impossible.

It's much easier than the same operation for physical infrastructure.