The great mistake I see here: everyone worth discussing is an organization.
The best corners of the internet are not groups of people: they are collections of content. The content cannot pay you a license fee. The content cannot demand itself be constrained to non-profit ends.
in 01993 only organizations had internet connections
i mean in some places you could get a dialup slip connection from something like netcom, but you would put the files you wanted to share on netcom's ftp server, not your own
Even if that isn't 100% ubiquitously true, it's true enough to provide important context, so thanks for that.
My overall point doesn't just apply to this instance, though. It's something I see all over the place, even today; particularly in conversations about moderation and censorship.
Content has been siloed off so intensely that it's hard to even imagine a modern internet without arbitrary borders. Most of those borders are made across organizational lines. They are often made out of copyright, with the notion that some deserving party will be monetarily compensated.
Those borders usually don't align to the content itself. Instead, they become arbitrary hurdles, or even walls; making it unfeasible or impossible to truly benefit from content. Nearly every incompatibility in software was created intentionally, to cement and enforce these borders.
Now inference models (overconfidently called AI) like LLMs are all the rage. What do they do? They draw new borders. What are those borders meant to align with? The patterns that are already present in the content itself.
you're right, what i said was actually false, because there were a number of individual people who had their own internet connections. i've met some of them since then. but we're talking about maybe a thousand people out of the millions on the internet. i didn't know any of them in 01993. literally everyone i knew on the internet got their internet access by belonging to an organization that had internet access
A few people had t1 connections to their home, something i was jealous of, but no way I could afford the cost. By the time I graduated ISDN was available and my company paid for it so even affordable. DSL came soon after and was affordable to 'normal' people.
The best corners of the internet are not groups of people: they are collections of content. The content cannot pay you a license fee. The content cannot demand itself be constrained to non-profit ends.