[newsereure]

I really don't follow. If something like facebook had gotten there first, your argument is that it would eventually not have been walled off? Or that there would be copies of it eventually, free ones? Isn't it more likely that had there not been a free version in the first place, we would ONLY have walled gardens?

[mpeg]

The main innovation of the www was HTTP/HTML which brought hypermedia capabilities to content, plus using DNS (which was already known by then) to connect directly to the content host instead of needing middlemen to distribute it (like USENET)

If HTML didn't exist, would we still be in text-only ceefax/minitel style networks? Unlikely.

It was a perfect storm of hardware getting better (most people didn't even have computers capable of displaying VGA images until the early 90s!), networks getting faster and more ubiquitous and there being a gap in the market for a protocol that made us of these advancements.

So my point is if we weren't using the www, it wouldn't have taken long for some other protocol to take its place.

Maybe an apt comparison would be Amiga vs IBM PC compatible, the Amiga had better hardware, more features, etc. But the PC compatibles were open, anyone could build them, replace parts, expand them. PC won. And it wasn't even an open standard to begin with, they were IBM owned until they were reverse engineered into the PC standard we still use today. If CERN had released the www as a closed protocol, maybe we'd be talking about www-compatible today :)