How could the early Internet have evolved differently?

[rfmcdonald]

With the 30th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web being celebrated last month, there have been some interesting retrospectives on early Internet experiences. The Guardian shared, for instance, a lovely collection of memories from readers who remember their positive experiences on the early Internet. (Who, indeed, can forget LiveJournal?)

My attention was caught particularly by a post written by Rhett Jones about some of the artifacts of the early web, like personal home pages and walled gardens, that did not take off.Could at least some of these have survived, I wonder? Personal home pages may have been doomed, given the energy and skill needed to create them from scratch. What about walled gardens?

Before the web came along, companies like America Online and Prodigy were offering people limited access to the internet with their own special portals to curated content. It was kind of like Facebook’s web-within-the-web strategy of being everything to everyone. The attitude at the time was something like “How many options do people really need in order to check the weather or get the latest sports scores?”

As the potential for the web’s wild west started to come into view, these companies began to open up their platforms to the wider world that was slowly being built. However, their proprietary browsers didn’t play well with other programs and were getting creamed by more flexible options like Mosaic and NetScape Navigator.

The strategy of boxing in people’s web experience managed to hang on in one way or another until the end of the ‘90s, but it officially died when Prodigy announced that it simply couldn’t continue its “Classic” format because it wasn’t Y2K ready.​

From my 2019 perspective, seeing how much of my online experience is mediated strictly through apps not terribly different from walled gardens, I wonder if these could have survived. Would it have been possible for more forward-thinking media companies to come up with walled gardens that were viable competition to the more open Internet?

 

[Aisha Clan-Clan]

Stricter than OTL, but different in some ways CDA is passed, sees 90% of the law tossed out except for safe harbor provisions. The difference comes from sites being more liable for content the more they moderate/do algorithms, thus incentivizing completely ignoring it. Net effect would be to generalize pre-2007 4chan style moderation as the norm on most public facing/large sites/social media megacorporations.

A legal environment where website owners would rather not mess with trending topics/algorithms or remove even illegal content because touching either would get them in trouble with the FCC because people used bad words like "crap" nevermind trouble for anything else from other agencies.

 

[Mark E.]

A legal environment where website owners would rather not mess with trending topics/algorithms or remove even illegal content because touching either would get them in trouble with the FCC because people used bad words like "crap" nevermind trouble for anything else from other agencies.

By the late sixties, words like hell, damn or crap could be said on the radio or TV, but the point is well taken. While pay-TV (cable) could broadcast obscenity and some porn, unrestricted sites could have been made subject to proper language and etiquette. In other words, webmasters would be required to censor entries, perhaps with simple "bad word" spell checkers. The web makes every contributor an independent publisher, and thus could be held responsible for "hate" speech. In the eighties, the SPLC defeated the KKK by bankrupting the United Klans of America over a magazine cover that featured a blackface figure with a noose around the neck. The SPLC filed a civil suit on behalf of a family who lost a son to hanging/lynching that was shown to be inspired by the magazine cover.

 

[Aisha Clan-Clan]

The US isn't canada/western europe so there's no "hate speech" laws, regardless of what say google/faceboo's owners might think.

Anyways, That sort of requirement you propose as a shift would be similar to mine except more extreme. Yours would prevent big sites from emerging at all by nipping silicon valley in the bud. Mine would just prevent sites from consistently removing stuff that isn't spam without getting into risky territroy.

 

[Mark E.]

The US isn't canada/western europe so there's no "hate speech" laws, regardless of what say google/faceboo's owners might think.

Hate speech may be protected by the First Amendment, but insighting riots or violence can be prosecuted. Also, threats or misinformation spread by US Mail can be prosecuted as federal crimes. At some point, you need the notion that the Internet is a public trust and entry can hold a contributor responsible.

 

[Analytical Engine]

"Freedom of speech" only applies to the government and other public bodies not being able to arrest you just because you said something they didn't like. IIRC, it doesn't mean that private bodies can't have their own rules about what you can and can't say on their platforms.

 

[Aisha Clan-Clan]

"Freedom of speech" only applies to the government and other public bodies not being able to arrest you just because you said something they didn't like. IIRC, it doesn't mean that private bodies can't have their own rules about what you can and can't say on their platforms.

That's really not a good take to have at all. Sure, it might be technically true but it'd be better to have norms of censorship being avoided generally. Plus you know, the implications of enabling witch hunts. I'm old enough to remember when modern-style doxing/social media witch hunts was a weird thing from china called "human flesh search" engines and not acceptable here.

Conservatives had that take when they owned all the publishers/media companies and well, it hasn't worked that well.