[eterm]

It hurts to read this. How did we lose the freedom, the idea that everyone is an equal peer?

Was it just the realities of money, that an end user would rather pay a tiny fraction of the real cost of being truly on line and pay instead with their freedom?

We used to laugh at AOLers because they weren't experiencing the real internet, because they sold themselves out to an online service.

Are today's ISPs with their filtering and port blocking and packet shaping, really any better?

[jstalin]

Wow, what's with all the frowns and sad faces? The Internet is perhaps the most incredible invention of humanity ever. Billions of people are connected to each other like never before, any information is at our fingertips, anyone who wants to create a web site is free to do so and post whatever they want (except maybe in China), commerce is available to the individual on a global basis, etc etc.

Whining about the "good ole days" when .000001% of the population had even heard of the internet and it was reserved, at great cost, to academics and researchers, is just pathetic.

[coldtea]

>Wow, what's with all the frowns and sad faces? The Internet is perhaps the most incredible invention of humanity ever. Billions of people are connected to each other like never before

And why is that a good thing in itself? Easy access to anybody else?

Ever stopped to think what kind of other side-effects that ability could have?

[mseebach]

I can come up with a number of reasons it would be bad, but none that doesn't make me sound like a rabid totalitarian.

[coldtea]

Actually if you were a rabid totalitarian, easy access to everyone would be the greatest gift you could ask for. Especially working towards building some large empire...

[seiji]

Billions of people are connected to each other like never before

All controlled by about 5 corporations at the top.

[marvin]

This is hyperbole. Yes, there is a small number of large corporations which have a lot of users. But the infrastructure of the Internet is still there, and is largely as unregulated as it ever was. It's just that it has become less visible in the enormous mass of people who use the internet in a "simpler" way.

[sneak]

Did anyone ever really think it would be any different?

At least we're still allowed to rent servers without a license, and make our own webpages.

[thisiswrong]

>Did anyone ever really think it would be any different?

Er, Yes! I'd say no one back then would have ever wanted the internet to be as privatized, militarized, and censored as it is now.

We need to take the internet back into the hands of the people by adopting mesh networks. This is how the internet needs to become... and fast :

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/02/24/activists-creatin...

With the rise of cryptocurrencies there is huge potential to make mesh networking catch on around the globe :

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=300911.0

Non-technical users can already easily set up mesh networks using smartphone apps : http://opengarden.com/

[mseebach]

> Er, Yes! I'd say no one back then would have ever wanted the internet to be as privatized, militarized, and censored as it is now.

Erm. The Internet is an explicitly military invention and without it's (controversial) privatisation, you'd be unlikely to have heard of it. It's not meaningfully censored outside of jurisdictions that already censors all other media extensively (DNS-poisoning consumer lines is bad and broken but really very low on the censorship-scale).

[anoncow]

To think that they can take away my "right" to make web pages is frightening.

[mseebach]

"They" can't. Stop the scare-mongering. If you're not a good terms with your local government, you have dozens of alternative jurisdictions to select from. Even if you can't find a single friendly government to setup under, The Silk Road stayed up for over two years. China isn't even pretending they're not censoring the Internet, and their well-funded censorship agency still has to play whack-a-mole with VPNs.

[mseebach]

> How did we lose the freedom, the idea that everyone is an equal peer?

It's not lost in any real sense, you just have a romanticised picture of "the good old days". Look up the the term BOFH for a reality-check.

A dial-up ISP would be oversubscribed and thus effectively throttled, just like today. Downloading too much on your university account, especially in peak hour, would get you banned.

If you want total freedom, then as now, you are free to buy a dedicated line - and they are much, much cheaper today.

[dijit]

$1,000 for a leased line half a mile away last time I checked, that excludes set up fee.

[mseebach]

Exactly. In 1995:

The cost of access to the Internet via 56 kbit/s or 64 kbit/s leased lines varies enormously throughout the OECD area (Table 9). In countries such as Canada and Finland it is possible to get extremely inexpensive access to the Internet via 56 kbit/s and 64 kbit/s leased line connections. In fact, the price quoted for a 56 kbit/s leased line access to the Internet by the Helix Internet, an IAP in British Columbia, was less expensive than a listed 56 kbit/s leased line charge, over two kilometres, from the PTO used in OECD comparisons in the “Communications Outlook” to represent Canada.

The reason Helix can offer a less expensive service is because it purchases capacity from a reseller of BC-Tel’s network in British Columbia. If best practice pricing is defined as the lowest available prices then the suppliers in Canada (US$7 000) and Finland (US$6 000) appear to have set the current benchmarks. This finding is confirmed from within the Internet access industry by EUnet’s Wim Vik who says Finland has the least expensive prices in Europe because of the competitive provision of infrastructure.viii In fact very little separates the prices of these countries when it is considered the Canadian charge includes a router at the customer site. By way of contrast with the low prices found in Finland and Canada, ten OECD countries had a leased line basket price per annum higher than US$10 000, five a basket price higher that US$20 000 and a further three with charges higher than US$30 000. Overall the average price for leased line access to the Internet in countries with telecommunication infrastructure competition was 44 per cent less expensive than countries with monopoly provision of infrastructure.

http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2758588.pdf

Don't forget inflation. In 1995 your $1000 was worth only $652. What was considered "extremely cheap" in 1995 is 10x more expensive than what you seem to imply is prohibitively expensive today. And never mind the speed - your leased line is probably 100mbps, that's 1800x faster than 56kbps.

EDIT: Strictly speaking off-topic, but in the spirit of this thread: I typed "what did a leased line internet conneciton cost in 1995" into Google, it transparently fixed my spelling mistake and gave my this PDF as the first hit. This is truly an awesome time to be alive.

[eksith]

> How did we lose the freedom

Money came into the picture. And I'd say we're in worse shape now since even in the AOL days, you would still know that this isn't the real "internet". Now, we've been lulled in the false sense that we're getting unfiltered (un-throttled) access, when in fact, it's just a carefully crafted image.

I look forward to the day "Internet Service Provider" has been completely replaced with "Ubiquitous Wireless Mesh".

[crusso]

Money came into the picture.

You have it completely backwards.

I "discovered" the Internet in 1988 when I got a job in the IT department of the University I attended. I LOVED it. I transferred files, participated a lot in news groups, played MUDs, made friends in Europe... it was wonderful.

When I graduated a few years later, I had to kiss the Internet goodbye. Without attending a major University that poured tons of money into maintaining a connection to the Internet, I had no hope of staying on it. I remember telling my parents about this amazing network of computers and saying something to the effect of, "It's fantastic, but I don't see how most people will ever get to use it because it's so expensive." Afterall, the Internet had been in existence for decades but was completely unavailable to home users.

Then they opened the Internet up for commercial use and the web came along. MONEY CAME INTO THE PICTURE. Tons of it. A few years later, every business felt like it had to be on the Internet in some way. With all that money flowing into web sites and interconnects, access from home became dirt cheap.

Commercialization is what made the Internet available for the masses. It amazes me that here we are not even twenty years later and people are rewriting history, demonizing the very framework that made the Internet successful.

[eksith]

Perhaps I should clarify.

When money came into the picture, small-time ISPs and countless dial-up providers (many who offered some short time free) were popping up everywhere. They were quickly gobbled up or mismanaged to the ground as time went on and what remained was far from the competition (the more equal peers concept) as now only handful of companies control access to the world.

Your university was likely connected via early backbone which would have been sold to a company or is being maintained outside it's jurisdiction and is likely being manipulated purely for exploitation.

Commercialization isn't killing the internet. Monopolization is.

[crusso]

Commercialization isn't killing the internet. Monopolization is.

At the end of the day, I look at the way that entrepreneurs like those on HN are able to exploit the Internet. With a laughably small investment in infrastructure and connectivity, a lone developer can spin up the "next big thing" in the cloud.

So sure, the structure of the Internet has changed and in SOME ways it may look like some major consolidation has happened. But in other ways, the diversity of connectivity options has exploded which more than balances out some corporate consolidation in the ISP space.

[VMG]

What are you talking about? The internet has been a great success for the masses: Wikipedia, Google, Youtube, Facebook all bring an immeasurable benefit to it's users. Of course not everything is perfect, but I much rather have today's internet than the internet of 1993

[romaniv]

I would postulate that if Wikipedia, Youtube and Facebook went permanently offline tomorrow, absolutely nothing of significance would change either online or in the society. People would still find ways to do the same things, maybe even better ways.

The Internet of the 90s wasn't as widespread, but it had a much greater impact on areas of life and people it touched.

If anything, your list shows how centralized the Internet has become. After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.

[crusso]

The Internet of the 90s wasn't as widespread, but it had a much greater impact on areas of life and people it touched

Having grown up before the age of the Web/Internet, I couldn't disagree more.

I use Youtube on a regular basis to learn about things. Of the top of my head: gardening methods, worm composting, repairing a cracked ipad screen, fixing a macbook with soda spilled on it, learning about new programming environments.

Facebook and other social media have been given much deserved credit for allowing democratic organization of an unprecedented level in the Middle East.

Wikipedia is astoundingly useful for learning things quickly about math, history, science, culture, etc.

Skype keeps my parents in touch with their grandchildren even better than I kept in touch with my own grandparents when I lived an hour away from them growing up.

You could go on all day describing companies and Internet industries that have completely changed the way people live: Ebay, Salesforce.com, CNN.com, Blizzard, etc.

After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.

The brands are the ones that dominate the services being covered, just like in the old days Xerox was a verb that stood in for the service of making photocopies.

[romaniv]

A lot of people drive GM cars to work, universities and shops. Your argument is similar to saying that without GM every one of them would be jobless, uneducated and could buy nothing. I.e. you conflating the possibility of doing something via a service with the service being the only outlet for doing that.

Internet of the 90s created a lot of possibilities that simply didn't exist before. Services of the 2000s mostly centralized and commercialized already existing trends. Of all the brands in your list, I would say Skype is the only one that profoundly changed something.

Also, I still stand by my statement that if the things I named disappeared tomorrow, the world would move on unscathed.

[crusso]

the world would move on unscathed

That clause is as true and unprovable for most anything you would put in front of it, depending upon your definition of "unscathed".

[eterm]

This was part of the point I wanted to emphasize.

This article talks at how amazing usenet was with it's millions of words a day.

Now any article would take of the valuation of usenet with it's millions of words a day. Someone making a modern usenet wouldn't open their protocol in fear of losing advertising money.

Would twitter, snapchat, etc have their valuations if they released fully open protocols (both client and server)?

[VMG]

> I would postulate that if Wikipedia, Youtube and Facebook went permanently offline tomorrow, absolutely nothing of significance would change either online or in the society.

That is insane. On the other hand, if you shut down 1993 internet, nobody would have noticed.

> If anything, your list shows how centralized the Internet has become. After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.

That's the natural evolution of every technology - I can imagine you yearning for the day when steam power and electricity wasn't commercialized and was a noble endeavor of hobbyists.

But I'll translate for you: I am talking about wiki software, multimedia streaming technology, social media and search engines, which you conveniently omitted.

Yes, these things are expensive, so they become centralized and commercialized. The world is still better for it.

[antocv]

The masses.

We lost because of the great masses, the eternal october but on a much major scale. The same people that still watch TV and who become numb from their everyday medium to low-wage work, all those who are fighting against each other to climb the ladder just a tiny amount up.

See the original internet users were scientists, officers, business people, those early adopters who have the resources and curiosity to use and shape it it.

Todays internet user is any modern slave whos interests dont stretch out further than facebook and easy entertainment. Most people dont even have a concept of what the internet is. They just kind of randomly click buttons and call their laptops "plaything".

Ive seen people pay for 4G but their modem only by default runs on 3G. Meh.

[junto]

That reminds me of this awesome picture: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Pyramid_o...

[tomrod]

Those unwashed masses are what make modern tech possible. Should we go back to BBS days?

[egypturnash]

> Todays internet user is any modern slave whos interests dont stretch out further than facebook and easy entertainment.

Did you ever hang out in a computer lab full of people busily attaining a PhD in muds? There were a hell of a lot of people who used the net as a toy, even back in the text-only days.

[DougBTX]

But aren't we too the masses? It was before my time, but wasn't it the Eternal September?

[crusso]

How sadly and extraordinarily elitist.