AHC: No Internet

Your challenge, would you choose to accept it, is to butterfly away the existence of the Internet as we know with a POD no earlier than January 1, 1989. Bonus if the Soviet Union survived without being turned into the Union State.
 
Your challenge, would you choose to accept it, is to butterfly away the existence of the Internet as we know with a POD no earlier than January 1, 1989. Bonus if the Soviet Union survived without being turned into the Union State.
Honestly, I have no idea, by 1989 you already had the ARPAnet and multifarious hackers using their own MODulator DEModularos to connect their computers to other computers in other locations and you already had computer to computer communications for defense, commerce, communications you name it.

I think at that point the die is cast.
 
With a Pod after 1989, I'm afraid butterflying away the Net as we know it is ASB, barring some sort of Nuclear conflict (which in itself probably requires Alian Space Bats). Perhaps there are ways of making it less popular, maybe more government interfearence and fewer people realising how useful the new technology is? I think even that's a challenge though.
 
That's really difficult. You are getting in before the rise of the ISPs, but not much before. Let's see. Bob Rieger founded Netcom Online Communications in 1988, so you can't block that. Even if you could, there were enough people thinking in terms of dialup Internet access that it'd be hard to screw it up by blocking any one of them. The World out in the Boston area could have taken Netcom's place. PSINet probably could have managed it as well.

If you'll give me latitude of two months, hm. OK, best I can do:

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On November 2nd, 1988, Robert Morris accidentally released the Internet worm. He had intended it to merely measure the size of the Internet, but he made an error in his coding. His plan was for the worm to check potential targets to see if the worm had already infected them; if he got a "yes" in reply, 1 out of 7 times he'd do the infection anyhow. That would prevent people from blocking the worm simply by writing a program to answer yes to worm queries. If he'd been a better coder, everything would have been fine. But he made the classic careless mistake; he used "=" to compare two values instead of "==". As a result, the worm would always attempt to infect new targets no matter what the reply. This meant that any infected computer would quickly run out of system resources and become unusable.

The fledgling Internet ground to a halt. Most of the activity on the Internet was academic in nature, but the military was minorly affected and deeply concerned. The court of public opinion was quick to decide that the Internet could not be a Wild West any more.

Jon Postel had been slated to be Director of the new Internet Assigned Numbers Authority in December of 1989. That appointment was put on hold while Congress investigated the Morris Worm. The IANA was meant to have authority over the distribution of IP addresses and the naming scheme of the Internet. We can only guess what might have become of a non-governmental body with such authority.

The public's paranoia was cemented in April 1989, when Clifford Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg became a runaway best-seller. His story of how he chased a Russian hacker through the wilds of the Internet was gripping, interesting, and all too threatening to a public that was primed to mistrust the Internet. If the people attacking weren't just Americans, like Robert Morris, but also Russians? Too dangerous for words.

In July 1989, a bipartisan panel led by Senator Al Gore persuaded Charles M. Herzfeld, founder of ARPANET, to return to government service as the Director of a new organization: the Defense Advanced Internet Projects Agency (DAIPA). This agency was spun out of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to manage the Internet before it became unmanageable.

Under Charles Herzfeld, by harsh necessity, use of the Internet remained restricted. In the late 1980s, Internet usage by college students was spreading -- but they were rarely justified users given the Internet's purpose. This ended by 1990.

And a good thing too. If the Internet had become a general purpose communication network, we would never have seen Fidonet rise to become the most thoughtful, contemplative means of communication ever invented. The inherent "store and forward" design of Fidonet, in which messages are collected and stored before transmission to the next node, permitted the development of the "really REALLY?" filter. Life without it seems unimaginable; consider what a mess email would be if it was sent as soon as you hit return? Many friendships are saved by the chance to think twice before a message is sent.

Further, free communication is not valued. When we must pay to call BBSes in other states, we value the time we spend on them and we are more careful in our words. It's basic marketing: free services aren't valued as highly.

In a very real way, Mr. Morris did us all a favor.

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Notes:

The = vs. == bug is the POD. In OTL, the worm did reinfect 1 out of every 7 computers, which turned out to be way too high a ratio anyhow... but it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

I don't know the exact date Stoll's book was published, but it was 1989. His original article on the hacker came out in 1988; I assume that Doubleday put more promotional muscle behind it and urged him to finish it more quickly given the increased attention given to the Morris Worm. It's also possible that they got a ghostwriter to help, making the book a bit more accessible to the masses, which would also help popularity.

After the big changes -- the Worm, the IANA going fully government, and Cuckoo's Egg providing political cover -- I didn't bother working anything out in detail. Fidonet probably would have been a bigger deal; it was a functional BBS network and there would have been an alternative. I'm pretending that AOL and Compuserve die to Fido the same way they did to the Internet in OTL, but you could make a case that AOL would be the dominant online service, probably.

If you wanted to be cute with this timeline, you've got every excuse in the world to hand the 2000 election to Al Gore. ITL, his assertions about his role in the early Internet would have been accepted, because the Internet never became the commercialized free zone it was in OTL. A minor thing but it helps shift the narrative, and we all know how close 2000 was.
 
Bryant you leet haxor you!

Bravo capturing the glimmering dawn of the Web!

Um, porn is a lot more text-based in this dial-up, pay-per-minute, much more regulated network and still video-based (tapes/DVD's)?
Phreaking becomes a capital offense?
Have the FCC take an active interest in regulating it?:eek::eek:

The bad news is the fun side of the Net (porn, ripping content) is a lot more limited. :(:(
The good news is, phishing, virus attacks, ID theft and other stuff gets stomped on with full Federal fury!
YMMV on that.
Part of me wants government to be competent and effective. I just don't like it pointed at me! :p
 
Sorry to burst your bubble but I don't think this is terribly plausible, bar some sort of restrictions on civilian tech development.

ARPAnet can be possibly be butterflied with the right PODs but some form of the civilian Internet is inevitable; it will be created in some place at some time(also, don't forget, ARPAnet didn't exist until 1971-72. The Internet itself goes back to 1969).
 
Bravo capturing the glimmering dawn of the Web!

Thanks! I have the significant advantage of having worked at Netcom back in the early 90s, and I was at Harvard when the Worm went out, so this stuff comes to mind reasonably easily.

I agree -- porn will be way more text-based and there'll be less drive for high speed networks. We'd still have CD-ROMs and DVDs, though!

I think the FCC is more likely to get involved in phreaking. You could call it either way but people might get pretty paranoid. Microsoft remains the dominant player in personal computers. Steve Jobs still started NeXT after being kicked out of Apple, but NeXT would have gone under by 1992 -- OTL, Steve took them into high end software with OPENSTEP and WebObjects. No WebObjects ITL! Probably no Jobs return to Apple.

Sun doesn't rise as high, but maybe doesn't fall as low. Oracle is still Oracle, albeit not as large.

Culturally speaking the changes would be immense. The relatively poor communication technology makes me sad. I think it would wind up relatively dystopian. If I wasn't an AH noob I might think about developing this, but it's too big a job for me. :)
 
To concur with CalBear, it wouldn't have taken much for the FCC in the Tipper Gore era to make the Net as kid-friendly and sterile of anything vaguely offensive to be plausible.

@ Bryant, sometimes it isn't the stories you tell, but the stories people make in their heads when they hear yours that makes nightmares! Which makes you quite the AH author already!
 
Sorry to burst your bubble but I don't think this is terribly plausible, bar some sort of restrictions on civilian tech development.

ARPAnet can be possibly be butterflied with the right PODs but some form of the civilian Internet is inevitable; it will be created in some place at some time(also, don't forget, ARPAnet didn't exist until 1971-72. The Internet itself goes back to 1969).

I don't think it's very likely, but I don't think it's completely unlikely. In OTL, the Commercial Internet Exchange didn't happen till 1991. Commercial traffic was pretty controversial with the techies who ran the NSFNet at the time.

You can't keep the impulses and desires that led to the Internet from boiling over -- I completely agree with you there. But it's possible that they'd boil over via Fidonet and UUCP networks, which were both fairly wide-spread at the time. Heck, UUNet had plenty of UUCP expertise -- that's what they were named after. So it'd be easy for them to go in that direction.

Put differently: yep, the Internet and ARPAnet go way back, and it took 25+ years for them to go non-commercial. So if you delay that transition by another 5 years, why couldn't the commercial networking impulse be expressed elsewhere?
 
I don't think it's very likely, but I don't think it's completely unlikely. In OTL, the Commercial Internet Exchange didn't happen till 1991. Commercial traffic was pretty controversial with the techies who ran the NSFNet at the time.

You can't keep the impulses and desires that led to the Internet from boiling over -- I completely agree with you there. But it's possible that they'd boil over via Fidonet and UUCP networks, which were both fairly wide-spread at the time. Heck, UUNet had plenty of UUCP expertise -- that's what they were named after. So it'd be easy for them to go in that direction.

Put differently: yep, the Internet and ARPAnet go way back, and it took 25+ years for them to go non-commercial. So if you delay that transition by another 5 years, why couldn't the commercial networking impulse be expressed elsewhere?

True, the commercial Internet could perhaps have had run into some serious issues early on; your scenario, IMO, is one of the most plausible I've ever seen on a subject of a corraled internet, as well as more prominent alternatives to what we'd call the 'regular' 'net IOTL. :)
 
You can't stop the internet without draconian measures, and then you have to try to explain the measures. You can slow it down quite a bit though I imagine.
 
Large-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union? Between the United States and China? I don't know, that's probably the only thing that's going to stop it at that point. The building blocks are all there; your only real chance is a event so catastrophic it prevents development for 20 years.
 
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