Net Neutrality. What good is a free operating system without a network?

[Tom Buskey]

On 5/10/06, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ----------
>
>   There is this myth that "the Internet" exists as a single, cohesive
> network. It does not, and never has. "The Internet" is a network of
> networks. What that means is that a bunch of independent network
> operators have agreed to exchange traffic with each other because it
> benefits them. When you dial in to your ISP of choice (or plug in your
> Ethernet cable or whatever), you're not connecting to the Internet.
> You're connecting to your ISP. Your ISP probably connects to their
> ISP. Their ISP (if you're lucky) connects to several other ISPs, who
> connect to other ISPs, and so on.  All these independent network
> operators form "the Internet".


I'm old enought to remember before web browsers when I was in college.  My
college was on Bitnet (Because It's There) which connected at 9600 baud
IIRC.  Somewhere, there was a gateway that connected to the Arpanet (which
morphed into what we think of as today's internet).  There was telenet,
Fidonet (BBS based with modems & PC and a store and forward system for mail
and file transfer), UUCP base networks (usenet?) and several others.

Arpanet was originally for government and research.  No commercial traffic
was supposed to travel on it.  There were newsgroups for selling/buying
stuff that was a grey area.  Heck, I sold a macintosh SE on it and at work
bought a Sparc 1 motherboard.  It took faith to buy something before eBay!

UUNET started to create another backbone (I forget the name) that allowed
commercial traffic.  This eventually led to AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and
others to have an email gateway for thier users.

At some point, just after Mosaic came out (for the macintosh?, before the PC
version certainly) Arpanet split into MILNET for the .mil sites and the rest
of the net.






--
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad
measures.
  - Daniel Webster
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