The Internet runs on free and open source software and so does the DNS

Even among the open protocols there was healthy competition like Gopher and BBS networks

It was truly a time to be alive, the 1980s and 1990s, if you were into technology. The change was interesting and quite rapid, lot of variety and experiments

Yep, services like AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and so on, would absolutely be separate. As it was, each of these services basically had to allow access to the greater Internet.

So true. I find another prove that altruist collaboration wins any other model although users may not perceived as such or there is no interest spreading these facts.

We would have had telcos (or satellite TVs) creating and competing on siloed services and eventually some big company would buy a telco to have access to their customers. Some multinational telcos would provide the same services around the world but most countries would have a wall at the border.

The protocols were made open by necessity, not by design. The motive was to connect academic , government, and commercial institutions across the country, all of which operated on incompatible operating systems and data networks. However, the common man would not have benefited from this before 1993, as the government effectively operated as a semi-competent firewall against commercial content and the broader public. They even sued ISPs that permitted legitimate accounts from remotely accessing the net through PPP or SLIP protocols. Not even commercial news feeds were permitted until the late 80s.

The only Internet the common man interacted with is the one that began to flourish as the government relinquished control. The Internet since the mid-90s is and has been a purely commercial achievement.

> we would probably have a number of competing closed platforms instead of a single Internet, with paid services to perform protocol translations between them.

That did exist with the likes of Tymnet and the various Online Services (AOL, CompuServe, etc). The Internet won out over those because it was open, as you alluded to. Internet adoption really exploded with unlimited services rather than ISPs that billed hourly.

Not really surprising when you have political parties and large tech companies both either outright minimizing the role public institutions had in developing anything or outright lying that the public sector can't possibly do anything at all.

Open source and hacker culture is basically a massive ethical triumph that has catapulted humanity forward.

There isn't a single person living on the planet that isn't touched and benefitted by this in some way, even remote island tribes we consider untouched, there is hardly a single ounce of space payload that doesn't have open source in it's causal chain.

There is no more pragmatically altruistic culture that has ever existed or impacted more people.

In the U.S. no culture has helped lift the impoverished out of poverty into the upper middle class through empowerment (ask any of us adults who were once kids going to bed hungry.)

People have their pet beliefs and metaphysics and ideological communities but "information deserves to be free" is the goat.

Too often unpaid too. Certainly taken for granted and exploited by the corporations. We should have more copyleft than permissive software.

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

In the same analogy, doesn't that mean that vendor-locked software like iOS or ChromeOS would be akin to vendor-locked seeds from Monsanto?

Raspberry Pi's obviously trying to make this a reality.

Learning to self-host and get off cloud services might be one of the most personally freeing feelings I've had in a long time.

Rent-seeking is obviously growing out of control and one of the most powerful ways to combat it is personal ownership (if possible).

Land for garden in my town costs like 1000 eur per square meter. Gardening clubs are full of old dudes, who want to have a sex with me. Public libraries are homeless shelters now. If I actually plant some vegetables (in pots or front yard), it will be full of dog/cat excrements the next day!

You are living in imaginary land, nothing is free in todays society!

Not to mention how much better it is for standards/protocols/standarization to have multiple implementations of the same protocol in real-world usage so we can nail down the protocol in all situations. Bind9 almost ended up being "DNS" itself, which would have been bad overall, and instead we're seeing more diversity which means we'll be able to make better use of the specifications.

That hasn't been true for at least 15 years. I was a k-root DNS operator then, and we ran several software stacks on each cluster in case one had a bug.

I don't understand your sentiment against Cloudflare here.

Cloudflare also delivers a rather large portion of said public infrastructure free of charge. They also released a few of their own projects as FOSS, and regularly contribute.

Granted, the centralisation part worries me too, but it feels like a bit of a cheap shot against CF just because they are a large player.

We do tax them, my dude.

It's all cURL.

There can be and are multiple competing systems. There are alternative dns roots, opennic.org for example, and entirely separate protocols like ipfs and i2p with their own methods of mapping names to numbers.

You can go make your entire own alternative DNS system, with your own governance and policy. Free as you like. You just have to convince people to resolve against you.

I think that permanent identifiers might be helpful, which could include a timestamp and other stuff. This can be combined with web of trust, that it can then be verified in this way.

I think you may be applying a very weird definition of "free software", even compared to the usual gratis vs libre axis.

Also, I really don't think controlling a domain name NFT in a system that's mostly computers you neither own nor control constitutes "more ownership" than the IRL law and contract bound rental world we currently live in. Especially if all the requirements and outcomes (payments for control resulting in land grabs of valuable names) are the same as our current system.

They just run one root. You can run a different root. E.g. Some people run an ENS bridge.