Could the Web Not be Invented Today? 267
An anonymous reader writes " Corante's
Copyfight has a
piece up about this new column
in the Financial Times by James Boyle celebrating (a few days on the
early side) the 15th
anniversary of
Berners-Lee's first
draft of a web page .
The hook is this question: What would happen if the Web were
invented today? From the article: 'What would a web designed by the World
Intellectual Property Organisation or the Disney Corporation have
looked like? It would have looked more like pay-television, or
Minitel, the French computer network. Beforehand, the logic of
control always makes sense. Allow anyone to connect to the network?
Anyone to decide what content to put up? That is a recipe for piracy
and pornography. And of course it is. But it is also much, much
more...The lawyers have learnt their lesson now...When the next
disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web -
is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more
evident. That is not a happy thought.'"
First thing we must do... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think (may be mis stating this) Napster was around for at least a year before the lawyers made their way into court. Of course, that just proves that "better late than never" is also on the lawyers play card.
Lets hope they don't shut down the current web as we know it!
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:3, Insightful)
Else there'd be a lot of people being sued for piracy at your 18th birthd
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:5, Funny)
Thank god.
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:2)
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:2)
All in jest I know... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:All in jest I know... (Score:2, Troll)
Re:All in jest I know... (Score:2)
Re:All in jest I know... (Score:2)
Lawyers stretch and manipulate the law to the furthest extent permissible by the system to fulfill the requests of their clients. This is what they're paid to do, and someone will fulfill this need as long as it is possible to fulfill. To change it, the law would have to change the rules by which lawyers operate.
If you don't like obfuscated laws, make a rule that laws cannot be obfu
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:2, Interesting)
Using such an ambiguous language as human language (English, or whatever) seems like a silly idea. Computer language - something with very clear syntax rules - is the way to
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:2)
Have fun parsing what I've just said.
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:2)
But spectroscopists do it with frequency and intensity.
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:5, Insightful)
I seriously hope you are joking. There's a bunch of problems with that idea that are immediately obvious. First, the main problem is that there is no hard line "right" and "wrong" in most cases. Whys is it safe to go 64.9 mph but 65.1 mph is unsafe? That's unreasonable. However, the law has to say something because going way to fast is definitely dangerous. The "reasonableness" is often part of the law. The only way to program that is with some sort of fuzzy logic.
Second, related to the first, is that the problem with the ambiguity of the law now is that it is, in fact, being written like computer syntax. Since there are few absolutes, all sorts of exceptions (if ... then) and variability ("reasonable") have to be built in. Ambiguities tend to be these cases. "Don't kill" is easy. Except self-defense. Except defense of a third person. If you are insane, different punishment. How abonormal do you have to be to be insane? Who judges? And so forth. That is exactly why laws are unreadable, because they try to fill loopholes and cover all cases like a computer program needs to do.
Third, how they hell are people supposed to understand what the law says? People speak in English, they don't speak computer languages. Programmers might be able to reverse engineer it, so then the programmers would effectively become the lawyers, which in follow the second problem above, is exactly the case now. Lawyers reverse engineer the language of the law to see what it says.
In short, computer-like syntax is the problem here already. Unfortunately, since all situations are essentially different, and there are few absolute rights and wrongs, there is no real solution that works well.
Oh! The irony! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh! The irony! (Score:4, Funny)
Defendant: Aren't judges lawyers?
Judge: *gulp*
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:5, Interesting)
Excellent!!! (Score:5, Informative)
From act four;
ALL God save your majesty!
CADE I thank you, good people: there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord.
DICK The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. How now! who's there?
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:3, Interesting)
Admittedly, lawyers always have the option to decline representation for something they find morally reprehe
Re:Stop giving them ideas. (Score:2)
I just thought (Score:3, Funny)
Thanks Tim! (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, the military may have created the fundamentals, but Tim was the first to put them to good use
Re:Thanks Tim! (Score:2)
Hell, Veronica was a slut for Archie. They also liked to use Gophers in their sex games, I heard.
Re:Thanks Tim! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thanks Tim! (Score:2)
You might want to check your timeline, 14.4kbps ruled the day back then.
56k only came after the WWW took off, circa 1993-94. And there were 2 competing chipsets then, Rockwell's V56 and US Robotics X2.
Re:Thanks Tim! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thanks Tim! (Score:2)
Lightning fast, just like plugging into a terminal line (also fed at 19.2k).
Unless of course the sole Trailblaizer line was taken, then it was back to 2400
Re:Thanks Tim! (Score:2)
Ha! You were one of those rich kids, huh? We were happy with our 300 bauds phone couplers, uphill both ways!
Re:Thanks Tim! (Score:2)
... even EMACS?
Re:Thanks Tim! (Score:2, Interesting)
ARPANET with 4-nodes was up and running Dec '69, MILNET came after that
80 something iirc
Anyway the point of the thread is still valid, the freedom of the network provided the environment for free thinking and sharing of knowledge.
email, ftp, usenet etc etc came along
I was working at Reuters in late 70's and we developed a packet-switching network for some of thier early Financial systems
They couldn't have been the only ones !
TCP came in 82 or 83
Then the layere
Disruptive technologies can't be controlled. (Score:5, Insightful)
We had Compuserve, Prodigy, Bix, eWorld, and probably a dozen other big ones that I can't recall. All of them got steam rolled by the internet because it was so 'disruptive'. One of the properties of being disruptive means upheaval and loss of a certain amount of control.
Perhaps google will introduce the next phase of communications through wireless gateways that are free, and put cell phone providers in the category of technological has beens...who really knows what will work and what will fail until it is done?
Re:Disruptive technologies can't be controlled. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Disruptive technologies can't be controlled. (Score:2)
Re:Disruptive technologies can't be controlled. (Score:4, Interesting)
We had fairly established, while unregulated networks. I won't say communication was fast, but it was there. I don't really need to review the wonderful capabilities of BBS's. Probably 25% of the folks who read here were users when BBS's were big.
Could the internet be reinvented? Sure. But, like any large platform, it started small. The next Intranet is being built by a half dozen teenage kids in their darkend bedrooms around the world. It isn't anything now, but will be the biggest thing the world has seen.
Re:Disruptive technologies can't be controlled. (Score:3, Funny)
*spits out jolt*
WHO LET YOU IN ON IT?
Re:Disruptive technologies can't be controlled. (Score:2)
No, they're too busy checking out the endless supply of free porn, looking too hook up with girls on myspace, downloading warez, and updating their blogs to do that.
Remember (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Remember (Score:3, Interesting)
The internet routes around... (Score:2)
Not always, but people invent new modes of communicating and sharing data regularly, and thinking that other interests would drive the evolution of a new medium ignores that ... we still are inventing things (P2P) and generally no, they aren't.
It's an impossible scenario (Score:5, Insightful)
If the internet were created today, none of us would be online. We'd still be doing all the tedious tasks like making phone calls to clients and friends, and using hardbound encyclopedias and journals to find information. Newspapers would be making a ton of money selling ad space and subscriptions. Television would probably have a lot more content related to the writers' and producers' interests rather than based on viewer feedback.
In short, if the Internet were invented today, it would not have reached us mere mortals yet. And there is no reason to think that an Internet created in 2005 would be significantly different or more advanced than the Internet created in 1974.
The Internet itself has changed the rules of intellectual property. Without it, the media conglomerates would not be in the tizzy that they currently are in. It is precisely because of the ease of broadcast that the Internet gives us that we have media content creators trying to find ways to use the law to restrict users. In very real terms, the Internet that we are talking about here is the one created 1999 by Shawn Fanning. Until the arrival of Napster, Internet piracy was a drop in the bucket. Now it is one of the most often used features of the Internet, and it is because of that initial software that media companies sat up and took notice of all the copyrighted bits being transmitted right under their noses.
Re:It's an impossible scenario (Score:2)
Becoming bitstreams made copyrightable works act like the ideas they are in theory; "intellectual property" is therefore exposed as an awful misnomer, I assert, because ideas do not fit the property model very well [slashdot.org].
Re:It's an impossible scenario (Score:2)
Re:It's an impossible scenario (Score:2)
It's a chicken vs Egg thing. The US is currently so litigous because of the internet, so if the Internet did not exsisst and I just invented it and had militry.gov support. It would all happen all over again.
What I'm hearing you say is... (Score:2)
Apologies to Voltaire.
Re:It's an impossible scenario (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, the article is asking you to consider how a massively disruptive new communications technology would be developed, if we understood its implications in advance. The very first thing to become obvious when you consider this is that one of the fundamental principles of disruptive developments is that we do not and cannot understand them in advance.
Might as well write an article asking us to consider what sex would be like if we started out by having the orgasm, and then moved on to intimate touching. Easy enough to consider, but so far removed from reality as to be an exercise whose brevity was exceeded only by its pointlessness. Kind of like the exercise being proposed here.
Re:It's an impossible scenario (Score:3, Funny)
Premature ejaculation is a medical condition, you insensitive clod!
Re:It's an impossible scenario (Score:2)
Re:It's an impossible scenario (Score:2)
Somebody doesn't get it (Score:2)
The web, both its Light and its Darkness, is an unavoidable result of the transistor.
Trying to control disruptive technology puts you squarely on the wrong side of history. The only thing to do is to spot the inexorable trend and adapt to it.
Free software is next.
Or else, global Bird Flu. Hard to tell.
When the next disruptive communications technology (Score:2)
What are you joking? The lessons learned from the transition from radio to television, movie theaters to Betamax, CDs to MP3s...
And then a few years later, they are making three times more money than they were before.
This is the most ridiculous "theory" I have heard (Score:3, Interesting)
The web couldn't be invented today because the lawyers learned their lesson... from the web? I've heard the "hindsight is 20/20" saying, but this is ridiculous. Further, why the hell are they talking about WIPO and the Disney corp? It took the brightest minds on the planet, found at places like CERN -- and research budgets of an astronomical scale that could only have been bankrolled by government agencies like the US Army -- to get where we got with the internet and the web. I have never even heard a suggestion that something like this could ever have come from a pile of douchebags like WIPO.
After reading this article, I wish I had found it in a magazine, so I could have the pleasure of throwing it in the trash. This is garbage.
It's time to look forward, not back. (Score:2, Interesting)
Abandon Hope? Not Just Yet (Score:3, Informative)
Bull crap, new technology wouldn't matter. (Score:2)
It woudn't! The thing about the internet and the www is that it grew out of research and academic use first. The corporations didn't even pay attention to the existence of a new media until years after it had been invented. I remember having discussions about the commericalization of the web in the 95/96 time frame. And this was what 5 or so years after the html had been devoloped and 20 or 30 years
Lawyers are, in general, the most immoral. (Score:2)
I had a friend who graduated in the top 5 of his class at an important law school. His entire approach was that he was learning how to break the law safely.
You have to take the bad with the good (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You have to take the bad with the good (Score:2)
Pay television (Score:3, Interesting)
Pay for content. The revolution with the Web is that there is no limitations or anyone controlling the contents there. It used to be, with television, radio, and books, that only the select few producers were able to reach a large audience. Now this has changed to be determined by what you, YOU the reader and potential producer, have to say, and whether, or rather to what extent anyone's interested in it. Now anyone can read, and thanks to Google, anyone can find something they're looking for (as in it may not be what they want, but it will be what they need).
Had the web been created today by any media corporation or association of these, it would have been just another variation on the pay-for-content and "We produce, you consume" theme that is the bread and butter of the media companies today. They do not want to have any competition. And they do not want to surrender their control of the distribution channels.
Remember (Score:2)
The internet was already there and it was ok the way it was. Then came more sites, search engines, Netscape, Windows 95, cheaper and faster private internet access. And with it all the vultures who came to sell things over the internet and all the lawyers who came to get their piece of the cake.
Then
Electricity (Score:3, Insightful)
If electricity were discovered today, it would be deemed too dangerous for the public.
"We the institutions" (Score:3, Interesting)
In the beginning there was the PLATO network which had a working prototype designed for mass-market which would have amortized itself within 5 years easily at $40/month service, including the rental of a bit-mapped graphics, touch screen, plasma displays. It had realtime multiuser games, even some multiuser 3D first person shooter games [geocities.com], as well as email, discussion fora (the origin of Ozzie's "Notes") and the ability for anyone to write programs for anyone else to run via the network. A single Cyber 760 benchmarked out at several thousand simultaneous users with 1/4 second response time. "Management" decided to focus on the higher profit margin corporate education market.
So I left PLATO and took up position as architect for the authoring system for the mass-market videotex experiment conducted by AT&T and Knight-Ridder News called "Viewtron" -- a service of the joint-venture company, Viewdata Corporation of America. They had done market research which showed that the thing people most wanted was discussion. Having been from PLATO this was no surprise and indeed it was obvious to me people wanted to be able to provide publications and software services to the public. But when I presented an architecture whose primary discipline was to treat the desktop computer as the host system nearest the user (ie: P2P in 1982) I was told by a decision-maker that "we see videotex as 'we the institutions providing you the consumer with information and services'" Yes that was what he said. He may have been trying to get my goat but that is in fact the direction they took things. In any event I was about to be told by the corporate authorities that my P2P telecomputing architecture, which would have provided a dynamically downloaded Forth graphics protocol in 1983 evolving into a distributed Smalltalk-like environment beginning around 1985, would be abandoned due to a corporate commitment to stick with Tandem Computers as the mainframe vendor -- a choice which I had asserted would not be adequate. (At least Postscript survived.) I was subsequently offered the head telecomputing software position at Prodigy by IBM and turned it down when they indicated they would not support my architecture either, due to a committment to limit merchant access to their network to only those who had a special status with the service provider (IBM/CBS/Sears). The distributed Smalltalk system was specifically designed to allow the sort of grassroots commerce now emerging in the world wide web. (Now that via AJAX people recognize JavaScript is similar to the Self programming language and the Common Lisp Object System there is some resurrection of the original vision.) But this wasn't in keeping with IBM's philosophy at that time since they had yet to be humbled by Bill Gates coup but already Gates had locked in his position as the bottleneck between Moore's Law and software by retaining ownership of MS DOS while it was being distributed on IBM's hardware.
Lest people think the government is the ultimate savior in all this -- I did make a run at developing this sort of service on my own nickle using PC hardware but was squashed by the U.S. government when it provided UUCP/Usenet service, via MILnet, to a XENIX-based competitor in San Diego and would not offer me the same subsidy. MILnet was, by law, not for public access. Rather it was exclusively for military use. My complaints to DoD investigators resulted in continual "We're looking into it." replies. By that time Usenet was taking off and I couldn't get a seed market to finance any further work.
What Berners-Lee did was admirable in that he aimed lower -- for the low hanging fruit of simple document presentation. The sacrifice of P2P was, however a bit much to sacrifice. I still think that should have remained the "primary discipline". Things are slowly recovering though.
It would easily be invented today (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it would have been much slower to penetrate the US market, but that would not mean it couldn't exist basically as it does now.
There have been recent articles here about how the US is slipping into a technical dark age. This is just one more example of how that's true.
Re:It would easily be invented today (Score:2)
Given the cynicism about Microsoft their proposal would be rejected, likewise with Apple (but then they use open source, they don't release any of their work other than patches to open source). There's few companies who would be trusted.
So it just leaves the standards bodies like W3C.
Bulletin Boards and CompuServ (Score:3, Informative)
BBS's had global electronic messages too.. (Score:2)
In some ways, BBS's were better than the 'net today, it was a real community since people tended to call BBS's that were in their own city. Nowadays, I don't have any idea where Slashdotter's live... plus there are sooo many more users per site...
Yes: Disruptive Technology (Score:2, Interesting)
One fun point (Score:2)
Maybe this was possible only in France where sex is not too much a problem..
It probably helped that at the time, the sex was very abstract on the minitel: only crude drawings and text interaction, no photograph.
Apart from this inacurracy, I agree with the article.
Actually a Very Happy Thought (Score:2)
A future where IP eventually stops progress and would ultimately then be reformed sounds far better than one where we are insidiously subject to more and more control with corporations deciding not to give us internet porn and other disruptive and disliked social changes.
This is why (Score:2)
Can you imagine all the sorts of property holders that would be affected by 3D rapid prototyping and would be getting involved in intellectual property issues if that technology debuted?
Think of the 19th centrury (Score:2)
Minitel (Score:5, Informative)
At the time it was released (begining of the 80's), minitel was probably one of the most advanced and low cost electronic net in the world, it greatly helped many people to get acquainted with technology. And it had porn too.
Lack of evolution and internet competition killed it, but for 15 years I can't think of anything more or less competing with it anywhere in the world in terms of accessibility and richness of content. And it delivered for (almost) free ! The terminal was lended by France Telecom to anybody at no cost. You paid for the service, at the price of a (sometimes premium) communication. Not really cheap, but a strong incentive for sure.
For certain services, I still use it today, because minitel warrants the user he's talking to the right person (no MIM hack), and the price has no hidden traps.
The structures of history tend to repeat (Score:2)
will be as clueless as they were before. Will think that the new technology is some geek playground with no real world use. And then it'll be too late.
the internet != the web (Score:2)
Please stop. The article references the web. The web is not the internet. It is merely one of the services available on the internet. The internet was invented in the late 60's by the US Defense Dept (DARPA). The web was invented in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee as a way of sharing documents that was better than Gopher and FTP.
Not Fair Comparaison (Score:4, Informative)
1) Cheaper
At that time, connections were charger per minute. The range for the minitel was between $0.05 and $2.00, the range for the internet started at $0.35. Addtionaly, the terminal was FREE.
2) More used
There was millions of minitel users in France, and only tens of thousands of internet ones.
3) Faster
Well, the minitel modem was only 1200-bps, while you could get a 9600-bps one for the internet. However, the route was direct and the pages much lighter. So the time-per-page was lower.
4) Styled
The minitel was a character terminal, black and white. Colors and graphics were introduced later. Same for the web. But you could get some effects.
5) More organised
The minitel had a single namespace (mainly 3615). Not a really good thing but definitively more organised and controled.
Finaly, the minitel could be connected to a PC (via serial). You could use it confortably from your PC or you could connect BBS. You could even host your own server. At that time, it was almost impossible on the internet.
----
http://www.milliondollarscreenshot.com/ [milliondol...enshot.com]
It's been attempted (Score:2)
Perhaps as The Microsoft Network [wikipedia.org] was originally supposed to be? Before everyone decided that they didn't care for it, that is.
For those who don't remember back to 1995, Microsoft had originally intended to make The Internet obsolete by leveraging its OS monopoly to steer everyone to the alterna
Question (Score:2)
And it would be better! (Score:2)
A net entirely built and controlled by citizens!
Now imagine a Fidonet protokoll that supports web-like features such as easy cross-referencing and images.
The quality of a network like that would be much higher than what we have as the web today.
I'd pick an entirely cititzen controlled modern asynchronous net over the web any day.
Blah, blah, blah (Score:2)
James Boyle might write in a formalised and superficially eloquent style, but this last sentence proves that he is still what is referred to on Usenet (and here) as a troll.
A question for Boyle and all the other such fearmongers:- If Disney and the other robber baron conglomerates
Libraries (Score:2)
When you think about it, libraries are a bit socialist, but I think the benefits far outweigh the harm.
Wait.
What harm?
.
Readeasies (Score:2)
Nonsense ! It will slip right under their radar. (Score:2)
No they won't. The "next web" will be a disruptive technology therefore the effects cannot clearly be foreseen. Lawyers & "logic of control" type people will not even notice what's happening until it's already too late. These people operate strictly within existing mental frameworks.
To be able to forsee what's to come they would need to be visionar
The corps were trying to create an internet (Score:2)
I also disagree with the concept that lawyers will hammer down the next disruptive technology because now they're "prepared" for it.
Sorry, but disruptive technologies are the ones that sneak in the back door, it's that thing nobody thought they needed but they really did. Lawyers by nature won't believe such a simple thing noone needs will be disruptive.
They may react a bit faster once it becomes
The Internet: Inevitable (Score:2, Interesting)
Open standards are part of this - they do a better job for customers than closed ones do. Remember, people tried this with various services. How big are MSN, AOL, Compuserve and al
Personal recollections (Score:2, Informative)
1) Before the great Cambrian explosion of 90-92, only a few, simple internet applications existed - primarily telnet, smtp, ftp, and DNS. In a manner that would shock most members of the Dover school board, these applications envolved through a process of trial, error, and descent with modification.
When ITU attempted to replicate these applications through intelligent-design-by-committe, the species that formed in 84 proved immediately non-viabl
Not just the web (Score:2)
Sure, *invention* would be possible, but you couldnt tell anyone else you did it.
Minitel... All About The Porn (Score:2)
Minitel was *always* all about the porn.
if the web was invented today it would be (Score:2)
unsearchable graphical mess of information, full with flash-like programs annoying the hell out of me, and disallowing e.g. blind people to do anything online....
it would be completely proprietary, so to access someones network you would have to download 12312411233megabytes of trash windows-only programs, that would tell you after the installation something like this:
"your country code is not supported" or "you must enter credit card number before you can look
How quickly we forget! (Score:2)
Flash back to the early 1990's. What was the term being bandied about by everyone, in the media, in IT, just about everywhere? Everyone was talking about the upcoming "Information Superhighway." And everyone assumed it was going to mean we'd have 500 cable channels. Digital shopping. "Video phones."
Public networks before the Internet (Score:3, Informative)
The big push to interconnect first came from E-mail. Business to business E-mail was a huge pain when GEnie didn't talk to MCImail. Businesses insisted that their vendors get interoperablity working. That's what finally made the competing services interconnect.
Re:Google's parallel internet (Score:2)
Solution?! (Score:2)
No, not a problem that anarchy would obfuscate behind an even bigger problem. Something anarchy would actually solve.
See, I don't think anarchy even qualifies as "a" solution--just another even worse problem.
Example: there are armed anarchist revolutions going on in Iraq and France right now today. What problems are they solving? In what way are they "a" solution?
Re:Solution?! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Solution?! (Score:2)
It would make me feel better.
Why does everything always have to be about you?
Revolution in France? (Score:2)
Here I am, in France, sitting next to the window enjoying a cool november sun, next to one of the *worst* places in my french town. No cars burning, no burnt cars, no mobs looting the local stores...
I was in Paris several days this week and mainly nothing unusual is happening there.
Remember the riots in L.A. in the US some time ago? Did it really qualify as a revolution? I did not say so then, and given that nothing has changed I will not say so now.
Just
Re:Actually, (Score:2)
Re:What!? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What!? (Score:2)
Re:What!? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What!? (Score:2)