[gorgoiler]

My partner and I were re-watching Father of the Bride the other day (rest in peace, Diane Keaton) and during the early parents meeting the son-in-law to-be describes himself as a communications consultant, working on X.25 networking installations.

I had to pause the movie and explain to my partner just how close the world came to missing out on The Internet, and having instead to suffer the ignominy of visiting sites with addresses like “CN=wikipedia, OU=org, C=US” and god knows what other dreadful protocols underlying them. I think she was surprised how angry and distressed I sounded! It would have been awful!

Poor her!

[inejge]

> how close the world came to missing out on The Internet

Monday-morning-quarterbacking is an unproductive pastime, but I don't think it was very close, on account of the Internet side having developed a bunch of useful (if a bit ramshackle) protocols and applications much faster than the ISO team, because the specs were freely available (not to mention written in a much more understandable manner). I still rue the day the IETF dropped the "distribution of this memo is unlimited" phrase from the RFC preambles. Yeah I understand that it originally had more to do with classification than general availability, but it described the ethos perfectly.

It's not all roses and we're paying for the freewheeling approach to this day in some cases, cf. email spam and BGP hijacking. But it gave results and provided unstoppable momentum.

[cryptonector]

> It's not all roses and we're paying for the freewheeling approach to this day in some cases, cf. email spam and BGP hijacking. But it gave results and provided unstoppable momentum.

Those are hard problems that ITU/OSI did not exactly have solutions for. Literally any thing that can be a target of spam becomes a target of spam soon enough, and fixing that is hard.

As for BGP, the rpki should fix that, though I'm told if I look I'll be sad (so I'm not looking).

[jcgl]

> As for BGP, the rpki should fix that, though I'm told if I look I'll be sad (so I'm not looking).

Afaiu, it’s even worse than you might think: RPKI doesn’t actually secure BGP. It provides only origin validation (i.e. which ASes may use which IP blocks). It critically does not provide path validation (i.e. which ASes may provide transit for which other ASes). Which is kind of a big deal.

[talkingtab]

I get your point and it is reasonable. We are paying today. However, I believe part of the problem is that when you could make money from email, it froze. The evolution stopped. We could easily evolve email if ...

The "if..." is one of the two VERY BIG INTERNET PROBLEMS. How do you pay for things? We have an answer which pollutes. Ads => enshitification. Like recipes for how to boil and egg that are three pages of ads, and then are wrong. But we now have AI, right?

The other problem is identities on the internet. This is hard. But email? Nope. Login with Apple? Nope. Login with Google? Double, Quadruple Nope.

In the real world we have both privacy AND accountability. And. It is very difficult to maintain two identities in real life.

Privacy on the internet? Nope. Accountability? Only if you are invested in your account. Privacy and Accountability together? Nope. Two identities? You can easily do 100's or more. freg@g*.com, greg33222@g*.com, janesex994@g*.com, dogs4humanity@g*.com etc.

[EvanAnderson]

There would have been a network like the Internet if the "Bellheads" in the ITU won. It would have been pay-by-the-byte-transferred.

[cryptonector]

That's roughly the same thing as saying there would not have been an Internet if the ITU/OSI crowd won. I think that's quite right. The yahoos at Berkeley and a bunch of other U.S. universities won, and I can just imagine how the Europeans who had high falutin ideas about how the Internet should be felt, and it's delicious.

[pohl]

Something tells me the corporations will get the last laugh, once web browsers stop showing you "the web" and only show you LLM hallucinations that superficially seem like the web.