The Accidental Internet

When data centers still had acoustic modems…

Any informed analysis of the current state of the internet needs to start with an appreciation of how little actual planning or public policy debate went into its creation. Calling it an ‘accident’ is not much, if any, of an exaggeration. The creation of the modern internet is inextricably intertwined with decades of pro-corporatist U.S. government policy that is fairly evenly divided between both majority political parties. Those policies all start with the long-held assumption that “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”

Substitute “Verizon”, “Comcast”, or “Google” for “General Motors” in that frequently misquoted statement, and you have a pretty fair idea of how the core infrastructure of our country and our planet managed to avoid being the publicly regulated utility any such core infrastructure should be. But the accidental nature goes further than that. The original internet was never intended for public use in the first place. The role it has served in creating what was once envisioned as an “information superhighway” could have been as easily filled by other networks and other technologies. Anyone old enough to recall CompuServe, AOL, or even BBS systems knows that the commercialization of the internet, the network originally developed by the U.S. Defense Department, was far from inevitable. Other networks were always available. But the internet was already in place, it was “good enough”, and legislation like the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 provided an easy on-ramp for corporations wanting their piece of the pie.

But for all of the high-minded rhetoric about how widely-accessible digital telecommunications infrastructure would “save lives, create jobs, and give every American the chance at the best education available” (per Vice President Al Gore, speaking at the 1994 Superhighway Summit), remarkably little planning went into how these benefits would be guaranteed or delivered.

It’s not impossible that, had Gore gone on to become President, more informed policies might have developed. But it is equally likely that it would have made no difference. Other attendees at that same summit included the executive leadership of ABC, Walt Disney, and Newscorp/Fox News (yes, that Rupert Murdoch). The Democratic Party’s acquiesce to neoliberal corporate capitalism was already well underway.

Also, to be fair, it is highly unlikely that any attendees at that conference had even a beginning glimmer of how utterly pervasive and critical the network would become. “Cloud computing”, as we understand it, was a good decade away from being defined or deployed. The emphasis at that time was on communications and education. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy, Netscape’s rebranding of the Mosaic browser having only been released within the last year. Business organizations were still struggling to unite legacy resources into the first corporate intranets. There was no common architecture or protocols that could enable computing resources to be scaled as a commodity.

That would come later, largely as a result of Microsoft’s aggressive embrace of TCP/IP (the core protocol that runs the internet) as a native protocol for its first generation of server products with a built-in web server (IIS). Had this not occurred, there is no small likelihood that debates over networking standards could have delayed or even circumvented Amazon’s rollout of Amazon Web Services in 2002.

The internet as we know it is the largely accidental result of pro-corporate public policy, available infrastructure that had been developed as a public asset for the American people, and the coalescence of communication standards and network protocols at exactly the right time and the right place. Had any one of these factors not been in play in the formative era of the 1990s, the end result could have been massively different.

No happy accident is going to result in a rebooted internet that lives up to the original vision of an information superhighway. The enshittification of the world wide web is not going to reverse on its own. The possibility of potentially lethal cloud service interruptions is going to remain in place until those of us who depend on those services demand accountability from the would-be trillionaires who own those services – or demand accountability from governments more interested in serving billionaires than serving us.

Rebuilding the internet into a reliable and dependable public commodity is going to require a vision, a plan, and a shared commitment to the shared common good. The inspiring vision for the 'information superhighway' was the physical network of physical superhighways that became the Interstate Highway System under the guidance of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower. It should be pointed out that another accomplishment of the Eisenhower era was, effectively speaking, the American middle class -- which directly benefited from from an effective 90% taxation rate on the would-be Bezos, Musks, and Zuckerbergs of that era. 

There's an inspiration to be had there as well -- or at least a working budget.