t’s almost hard to remember now, but the early years of the Internet were a carnival of crazy, chaotic amateurs.
When the web first went mainstream in the mid-’90s, the early
sites weren’t big, glossy ones created by corporations. They were
strange, offbeat ones crafted by individuals: diarists posting diaries,
video-game fans creating encyclopedias of old arcade titles and
discussion boards teeming with “X-Files” arguments.
Indeed, commercial activity was suspect, and anyone trying to make a buck online was shunned. When the lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel spammed newsgroups with a text-only ad for their green-card services, the outcry was so loud their Internet provider canceled their connection. The Internet, aficionados proclaimed, would always be a Wild West—amateur and proudly uncommercial.
This was naive, of course. By the early 2000s, commercial activity and huge firms boomed, as retailers like Amazon exploded in size and “netizens” began streaming video from services like YouTube and eventually Netflix and Hulu.
Today, it’s the little guy who looks to be in danger. The Internet service providers—like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T—have long pushed to create “speed lanes” online. If you run a website and want to make sure your connection moves swiftly to the end user, you’d need to pay these companies an extra fee.
If you don’t pay? Your signal might not move as fast as you’d like. The Federal Communications Commission this spring drafted rules that would allow for fast and slow lanes. If they take effect, it would be the end of “net neutrality,” and critics worry it would spell doom for amateurs online. Sure, established sites like YouTube or Facebook could pay those fees. But quirky little upstart websites—or even nonprofits like Wikipedia—couldn’t.
If amateurs really do get squeezed out, it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen this happen. Precisely the same thing happened a century ago to the original “people’s medium”: radio.
The idea of transmitting sound waves through the air caught on especially after the experiments of the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi in the late 19th century. The technology wasn’t complicated, and by the first decade of the 20th century, American tinkerers began building their own sets to transmit and receive radio signals. With relatively small amounts of power, someone at home could broadcast for dozens of miles.
Magazines printed schematics. “Any boy can own a real wireless station, if he really wants to,” urged The Book of Wireless.
Stations popped up everywhere—run in churches, fire departments and even businesses, when the owner bought a transmitter and started talking into the ether. Much like the first bloggers, early radio adopters were thrilled that they could reach a distant audience. They needed a new word for this; as Columbia law professor Tim Wu notes, they settled on “broadcasting,” which originally meant casting seeds in a field. “This was the first time in the history of mankind that people in different places heard the same thing at the same time,” notes Anthony Rudel, author of Hello, Everybody! The Dawn of American Radio.
Read more: The Debate Over Net Neutrality Has Its Roots in the Fight Over Radio Freedom | Innovation | SmithsonianIndeed, commercial activity was suspect, and anyone trying to make a buck online was shunned. When the lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel spammed newsgroups with a text-only ad for their green-card services, the outcry was so loud their Internet provider canceled their connection. The Internet, aficionados proclaimed, would always be a Wild West—amateur and proudly uncommercial.
This was naive, of course. By the early 2000s, commercial activity and huge firms boomed, as retailers like Amazon exploded in size and “netizens” began streaming video from services like YouTube and eventually Netflix and Hulu.
Today, it’s the little guy who looks to be in danger. The Internet service providers—like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T—have long pushed to create “speed lanes” online. If you run a website and want to make sure your connection moves swiftly to the end user, you’d need to pay these companies an extra fee.
If you don’t pay? Your signal might not move as fast as you’d like. The Federal Communications Commission this spring drafted rules that would allow for fast and slow lanes. If they take effect, it would be the end of “net neutrality,” and critics worry it would spell doom for amateurs online. Sure, established sites like YouTube or Facebook could pay those fees. But quirky little upstart websites—or even nonprofits like Wikipedia—couldn’t.
If amateurs really do get squeezed out, it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen this happen. Precisely the same thing happened a century ago to the original “people’s medium”: radio.
The idea of transmitting sound waves through the air caught on especially after the experiments of the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi in the late 19th century. The technology wasn’t complicated, and by the first decade of the 20th century, American tinkerers began building their own sets to transmit and receive radio signals. With relatively small amounts of power, someone at home could broadcast for dozens of miles.
Magazines printed schematics. “Any boy can own a real wireless station, if he really wants to,” urged The Book of Wireless.
Stations popped up everywhere—run in churches, fire departments and even businesses, when the owner bought a transmitter and started talking into the ether. Much like the first bloggers, early radio adopters were thrilled that they could reach a distant audience. They needed a new word for this; as Columbia law professor Tim Wu notes, they settled on “broadcasting,” which originally meant casting seeds in a field. “This was the first time in the history of mankind that people in different places heard the same thing at the same time,” notes Anthony Rudel, author of Hello, Everybody! The Dawn of American Radio.
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