[hparadiz]

Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift. Sure it's created a situation where we sell the tech both as software and hardware and that has allowed us to redirect wealth from the world to the US however in hindsight it's making our enemies stronger and allowing technology like drones to proliferate. An alternate reality where we didn't do that would be a reality where people would be smuggling American tech to their countries the way they did with jeans in the 80s. We basically decided to make a bunch of money on the tech over the past 50 years but it's actually created a situation where our soldiers are gonna be dodging drones in the next big conflict where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world. In hindsight I'm not sure if it was a good idea.

[9dev]

If there's one thing all historians agree on, it's that collaboration has always been the winning strategy in human history.

If the US had never opened up their innovations to the world, they wouldn't have been able to extract the gargantuan amount of money from it they did. If the US had not instated the Marshall plan after WW2, there would never have been as close ties between Europe and the US. If American companies hadn't outsourced much of the manufacturing to poorer countries, the standard of living would be a lot lower than it is today. If USAID hadn't improved and saved the life of millions of humans, American companies wouldn't be met with such universal acceptance and opportunities to sell their goods as they have.

It's not like the US isn't massively benefitting of their investments in the rest of the world. But it sure looks like you're pretty aligned with the current administration there, so we'll both see how this plays out in real time.

[carlosjobim]

Hold on. Some people and institutions in the US are massively benefitting from what other Americans gave and are giving to the world. What they sometimes have been forced to give.

[9dev]

I don't think I implied they aren't, care to elaborate?

[carlosjobim]

So whether these things are good depends on if you are on the winning or losing side of the equation. If your job gets out sourced it's a negative. If your stock shares increase in value then it's a positive.

[ben_w]

> Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift.

You didn't give the internet to the world. The world made it by copying stuff you had no power to prevent them copying.

Also, the rest of the world had other networks, the US version (TCP/IP) just happened to win enough mindshare to replace e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols

The UK alternative was only phased out in favour of TCP/IP after the world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while working at the famously-not-American CERN. The American attempt at the web was Gopher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

> An alternate reality where we didn't do that would be a reality where people would be smuggling American tech to their countries the way they did with jeans in the 80s.

Only thing we might care to smuggle (if anything) would be the software, and it's not like a DVD is hard to hide. Nobody would be smuggling out hardware, we would not need to, we would not care to. And even that's a stretch, we're also quite capable of writing our own software, sometimes you buy our companies because they're better at it than yours.

> We basically decided to make a bunch of money on the tech over the past 50 years but it's actually created a situation where our soldiers are gonna be dodging drones in the next big conflict where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world. In hindsight I'm not sure if it was a good idea.

You say that like other countries don't make stuff. It's often the other way around, because we're as smart and capable as you, despite what you may think, and even when things have been invented "in" the US, it has often been by an immigrant who in your alternate timeline would not have gone to the US.

The chips are made by machines sold by EU companies; batteries and brushless motors? China; IMU? Japan, Germany, Taiwan; even GPS, despite the US one being the famous one, has alternatives of GLONASS (Soviet), BeiDou, and Galileo.

TBH, the only thing that America genuinely brought to the table was the interaction of the first amendment and cryptography. Insufficient cryptography, insufficient security, e-commerce remains limited.

[Ravus]

If we're on the topic of hardware, let's remember that a few years before ARPANET, Olivetti was a powerhouse rivaling IBM. The ELEA mainframe came out with a competitive design in 1957.

One of the reasons why things did not pan out is that, three years later, 58 years old Adriano Olivetti died of a heart attack on the train to Switzerland. Even discounting the theory of a CIA assassination (which has, nevertheless, been floated around), that was a butterfly-flapping-its-wings moment; without pressure from the US government wanting to maintain technological supremacy, he might have been under less stress and survived.

In that scenario, maybe the same international visitors who currently visit Milan for luxury fashion would also haul back high tech from the so-called Valle del Silicio stretching towards Turin along the Fondo river.

Or, of course, another one between a million different outcomes could have happened. Human creativity and inventiveness finds a way to flourish everywhere.

[ben_w]

  At one point in the 1980s, Olivetti was the world's third largest personal computer manufacturer[8] and remained the largest such European manufacturer during the 1990s

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti

Wow, I'm genuinely surprised. I don't think I've even heard of them before now, despite growing up in the 80s and 90s in the UK. ZX Spectrum, BBC Micros, Acorns, but not Olivetti.

[Fnoord]

Funny you mention that. For me (Dutch), growing up in same time, Wimbledon and Roland Garros are the two main tennis tournaments. When these were on TV, Olivetti brand was prominently mentioned at the scoreboards. I always imagined they were a brand who made the computers used for the scoreboards, but otherwise had no idea what that brand meant. You wouldn't 'Google' or 'Wikipedia' it. You saw it, you asked your parents (or other peers), and they'd either know or not.

[actionfromafar]

Apparently Olivetti controlled Acorn Computers (of ARM cpu fame) so maybe such things also contributed.

[InsideOutSanta]

> where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world

Much of America's technological progress is a direct result of them selling tech to the rest of the world and becoming the world's tech hub. Do you think that not selling anything to anyone outside the US would have had zero impact on tech progress across the world?

[PurpleRamen]

> I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world.

Then European countries would have continued using their own networks.

> It's basically been one giant gift.

And Europa gifted their own part to it. Remember, World Wide Web originates from CERN in Switzerland, made by a brit.

[Starman_Jones]

You’re dodging their question.