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Why did people in the 90s/early 00s say that the internet "couldn't be taken down"?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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This opinion remains largely correct - the Internet as a network is very difficult to take down.
However things have happened that have undermined the Internet in favour of commercial priorities.
Net Neutrality was a major principle of the Internet but that is under attack, particularly in the US, where infrastructure providers want to maximise profit by linking their income to each Gb used rather than just paid as a utility. Their costs are largely fixed in infrastructure but they push the lie that they need to be paid for how busy that infrastructure is. A network router doesn't care whether it's transferring 1gb or 10gb, it only matters if you hit capacity and the network needs to be expanded. The Internet providers instead want profit profit profit so are pushing for a way to maximise it.
The other major issue has been consolidation and that's thanks to monopolies being allowed to form and dictate how the Internet works. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple - they've all used their services to try to manipulate customers into their walled gardens and prevent competition.
So the Internet as many people think of it is very vulnerable - big centralised services can have outages that affect everyone because people don't have much choice.
But the reality is the underlying protocols and infrastructure remains robust. Google might have an outage, but the Web itself is still functional. Email protocols and file transfer protocols still work. The problem is people who are sitting in Googles walled garden of services are locked out of everything. And with Googles huge monopoly on search and advertising it means lots of other major services are out too.
So the Internet itself is fine. It's the services and monopolies built on it thay are the problem.
Not really focused on the US. Every nation, every corporation, every venal special interest group is fighting against net neutrality.
To expand upon “walled gardens”, the customers are not just you and I, it includes the majority of the Internet since they’re all running on the cloud, a.k.a., AWS, MS Azure, and Google Cloud.