It's A Wonderful Life
A colleague wrote to me and reminded me that the telcos waaay back in the days before 1995 wanted a particular approach to networked communications to prosper — managed communications, easily-controlled billing….X.500 was the shorthand he used. AT&T had no fondness for NSFnet. (We'll have to dig up the correspondence with Congress.)
We need the “It's a Wonderful Life” of the internet. Not the happy ending — the alternative middle.
What if the telcos had won at the outset? What if they had managed the managed network? Would we have had PCs in such profusion? Low-cost online applications? Many walled gardens? Would the internet have ended up at the center of things, as it has now?
Probably not. Bleak, very bleak.
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