Despite the Internet's origin in the late 1960s as a government sponsored means of communication between the Department of Defense, private industry, and academia, it has been at its best — and generated the greatest economic, social, and technological benefits — since it was 'liberated' by the hordes of 'geeks' who were originally hired to run it by employers who were not themselves conversant with computers, and couldn't tell when their employees were exchanging official traffic or trading dirty jokes and recipes for marijuana brownies.
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In sum, all the key technological developments that led to the internet were built around government institutions, major universities and research centers. The Internet did not originate in the business world. It was too daring a technology, too expensive a project, and too risky an initiative to be assumed by profit-oriented organizations.
The origins of the Internet are to be found in ARPANET, a computer network set up by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in September 1969. ARPA was formed i 1958 by the Defense Department of the United States with the task of mobilizing research resources, particularly from the university world, toward building technological military superiority over the Soviet Union in the wake of the launching of the first Sputnik in 1957.
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The internet itself is just a modern technology originally invented for US military information network. Yes, we cannot live without it anymore, It does amplify people's dark emotions, but if you can have a good happy real life with friends and family, you can realise there is just nothingness in the internet. There aren’t two worlds really, we should just use it as a useful tool.
Both Penang and the Internet were established basically for strategic military reasons. In both cases, what was built by the military was merely a kernel for a much vaster phenomenon that came along later. This kernel was really nothing more than a protocol, a set of rules. If you wanted to follow those rules, you could participate, otherwise you were free to go elsewhere. Because the protocol laid down a standard way for people to interact, which was clearly set out and could be understood by anyone, it attracted smart, adaptable, ambitious people from all over the place, and at a certain point it flew completely out of control and turned into something that no one had ever envisioned: something thriving, colorful, wildly diverse, essentially peaceful, and plagued only by the congestion of its own success.
When I invented the web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA. … Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it. Let's see whether the United States is capable as acting according to its important values, or whether it is, as so many people are saying, run by the misguided short-term interested of large corporations. I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated.
I did spearhead the introduction of the Internet in countries like Russia, the former Soviet Union, because it is a very open system of communication. I think it has great potential for self-organization and self-organization is very much at the heart of an open society. The Internet is sort of a medium of open society. However, it can also be a medium of control and so we have to be careful it doesn't destroy you.
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Just as the printing press led to the appearance of a new set of possibilities for democracy, beginning five hundred years ago — and just as the emergence of electronic broadcasting reshaped those possibilities, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century — the Internet is presenting us with new possibilities to reestablish a healthy functioning self-government, even before it rivals television for an audience. In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But just as it is important to avoid romanticizing the printing press and the information ecosystem it created, it is also necessary to keep a clear-eyed view of the Internet’s problems and abuses. It is hard to imagine any human evil that is not somehow abundantly displayed somewhere on the Internet. Parents of young children are often horrified to learn what obscene, grotesque, and savage material is all too easily available to children whose Web-surfing habits are not supervised or electronically limited. Teen suicides, bullying, depravity, and criminal behavior of all descriptions are described and — some would argue — promoted on the Internet. As with any tool put at the disposal of humankin
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