muon2
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« on: November 20, 2017, 08:38:05 PM » |
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It's unfortunate that so few of the officials involved in this (elected or appointed) were active on the internet in the years just before the World Wide Web rolled out. There was no net neutrality, but the big telecoms weren't involved. Once the WWW came out, no one cared about the service providers other than that their interface had a url entry.
However, for a few years before the WWW there were dial up portals through companies like Compuserve, The Source, GEnie, Prodigy, and AOL that also controlled the content. I subscribed to most of them in the late 80's and early 90's. The problem was restricted access to just those commercial sites that had relationships with the ISP unless you knew which specific IPs you wanted to reach. For example, it was hard to find appliances other than Kenmore on Prodigy which was owned by Sears. If the officials involved truly realized how parochial those early providers behaved without net neutrality, I'm not sure they'd be happy with the direction things could go.
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