How would the internet develop in a multipolar world without WW1?

So, say World War 1 doesn't occur and so decolonization is averted and by the time the technology needed for the development of the internet is invented, at least Africa is still under European dominance and so European languages are the first tongues of lots of people similar to the Americas. I mentioned Africa as the many countries in Europe are more for themselves than the Continent so no alt European Union or alt UN as their are multiple great powers that are unwilling to give up power for anything, when they have their own spheres of influence within their colonies, thus making a multipolar world.

So, how would the internet develop and who would invent it? Would the internet even be developed at all? When it develops isn't as important( I am guessing much later than OTL) ,but how it develops is important.
 
So, say World War 1 doesn't occur and so decolonization is averted and by the time the technology needed for the development of the internet is invented, at least Africa is still under European dominance and so European languages are the first tongues of lots of people similar to the Americas. I mentioned Africa as the many countries in Europe are more for themselves than the Continent so no alt European Union or alt UN as their are multiple great powers that are unwilling to give up power for anything, when they have their own spheres of influence within their colonies, thus making a multipolar world.

So, how would the internet develop and who would invent it? Would the internet even be developed at all? When it develops isn't as important( I am guessing much later than OTL) ,but how it develops is important.
I recall off the top of my head three other threads along these lines of "internet in another language"... is there some reason people are so fixated on wanting something other than English? Anyhoo- by the time the technology for the internet exists decolonization will have occured. Not having WWI doesnt mean people become ok with living under another people's rule or that the home country doesnt realize they lose money on having colonies (Adam Smith demonstrated that in the 18th century). A POD of 1914 does nothing to slow the American hegemony in the economic and technological realm, the internet is probably invented in the US anyways given the history of General Electric and AT&T, along with IBM, Xerox, Western Union, Eastman Kodak, Westinghouse, anyone of which could have invented the internet with or without DARPA. In fact most likely way the internet is created in a non-US govt educational partnership is the scenario in which corporations like Apple, IBM, GE, Microsoft, AT&T all make their own internet in an early AOL-like fashion (Millenials may not understand, ask a Gen-Xer to explain the history of the internet). Butterflies away Google and Android, but most likely everyone except Apple allows their internet to communicate and be searched from each other with the *www. Apple of course in an attempt to force everyone to use only Apple products in order to search Apple internet doesnt cooperate (as they chose to do with everything they invent).
 
I recall off the top of my head three other threads along these lines of "internet in another language"... is there some reason people are so fixated on wanting something other than English? Anyhoo- by the time the technology for the internet exists decolonization will have occured. Not having WWI doesnt mean people become ok with living under another people's rule or that the home country doesnt realize they lose money on having colonies (Adam Smith demonstrated that in the 18th century). A POD of 1914 does nothing to slow the American hegemony in the economic and technological realm, the internet is probably invented in the US anyways given the history of General Electric and AT&T, along with IBM, Xerox, Western Union, Eastman Kodak, Westinghouse, anyone of which could have invented the internet with or without DARPA. In fact most likely way the internet is created in a non-US govt educational partnership is the scenario in which corporations like Apple, IBM, GE, Microsoft, AT&T all make their own internet in an early AOL-like fashion (Millenials may not understand, ask a Gen-Xer to explain the history of the internet). Butterflies away Google and Android, but most likely everyone except Apple allows their internet to communicate and be searched from each other with the *www. Apple of course in an attempt to force everyone to use only Apple products in order to search Apple internet doesnt cooperate (as they chose to do with everything they invent).
Well, why not. This is alternate history. Personally, I'd like to see how different the world would need to be for German or Italian to be the language of the internet. Also without the World Wars, German is still the language of science and French is still the language of diplomacy as I believe that English really became dominant after World War 2 as the US and USSR split Europe in half and turned each half into their sphere of influence, not to mention that much if Europe was destroyed,so American businesses didn't have to compete with European businesses. Like , I would think that the American internet companies would have to compete with European internet companies, so I would think that there may be attempts to make regional "internets" based on countries and Empires.
 
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Well, why not. This is alternate history. Personally, I'd like to see how different the world would need to be for German or Italian to be the language of the internet. Also without the World Wars, German is still the language of science and French is still the language of diplomacy as I believe that English really became dominant after World War 2 as the US and USSR split Europe in half and turned each half into their sphere of influence, not to mention that much if Europe was destroyed,so American businesses didn't have to compete with European businesses. Like , I would think that the American internet companies would have to compete with European internet companies, so I would think that there may be attempts to make regional "internets" based on countries and Empires.
Misnomer that French was the language of diplomacy at the time. Plus the shear size of the British and American empires at the time guarenteed English was needed for travel greater than that of French.
 
The other assumption here is that there will be an internet. Firstly, you might never get fiber optic cables good enough. Secondly, there might be dozens of national or proprietary nets, and no single 'internet'.
 
Assuming that international borders are similar to around 1900, this would mean the British Empire would dominate the map. So you might get an "Empirenet" similar to the "All Red Line" telegraph network:

460px-All_Red_Line.jpg
 
The other assumption here is that there will be an internet. Firstly, you might never get fiber optic cables good enough. Secondly, there might be dozens of national or proprietary nets, and no single 'internet'.
Maybe not, but with a world not devastated by two world wars and possibly more than a hundred million deaths besides (between the 1918 Pandemic and various decolonisation and sectarian wars I'd say that the number of needless deaths outside of the World Wars could easily top 100 million), I'd say that someone would probably eventually come up with the idea.

But on the internet itself, I'd say it would be more 'nationalised', not disconnected from the outside, but for example the English-speaking sections of the internet would be split more evenly between the US and the Commonwealth.
 
If no WWI, I would bet on German being a lot more widespread in technological matters especially; basically a tossup between German and English, with whatever language is local enjoying partial translations from one or the other of these.

And I would think the empires would have broken up, to the extent they did OTL anyway--even now we have some overseas departments of France, Britain has Gibraltar and could easily have kept Malta, various Caribbean islands, etc. By and large though the empires are going down.

Really, you ought to like that better--it means way more language diversity after all! Why call a non-unified Europe "multipolar" when it is a handful of languages mainly in three big families (Romance, Germanic, Slavic) when you can have the hundreds more languages of Africa and Asia--and even a couple Native American ones as in Paraguay for instance?
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This is not the ASB forum, so one cannot simply stipulate that the Belle Epoque, as it looked in retrospect after the Great War to Eurocentric peoples, just soldiers on in fusty civilized stasis. There were reasons for a Great War and they are unlikely to hold in abeyance indefinitely. Meanwhile there were (and still are) reasons for disruptive phenomena like the Great Depression; I do believe one can butterfly the timing, and perhaps spread the intensity of that crash around, but a comparable net dip in global capitalist production, with associated political and social consequences, is just plain in the cards I think. The kind of social progress that leads to the breakdown of the several European centered imperial systems is also in the cards.

It is much easier to stipulate that the Central Powers could win the Great War than it is to suppose that the war can simply be averted indefinitely. It seems to me that despite its recent problems and perhaps total shipwreck, some kind of unified Europe is far more likely to be involved in high tech development of the kind that might support an Internet of some sort than that the several imperial powers manage to coexist in Europe and at the same time dominate separate colonial systems that fail to rebel and throw off the formal rule of Europe--if a European power is going to succeed in some combination of suppression of the discontent of the world's billions and coopting them, it seems more likely a unified European imperium would do that than several fragmented ones, particularly if they are maintaining their independence and not getting merged into a single union by patriotic resistance--which is to say, at bottom, threatening to be at each other's throats! Union might be the result of a rational federation, or the result of outright conquest, or intermediately the result of the hegemony of some pretty much forcing the others to "voluntarily" merge to some extent. But without such union, one way or another, it seems just a matter of time before the colonial peoples figure out how to manipulate the rivalries of their pretentious European masters to throw off formal rule.

Only, perhaps, to fall under informal rule. OTL the East/West divide formed by the Soviet Union and its attempts to secure its position while declaring hostility to the fundamental institutions of the rest of the developed world put the United States in the hegemonic position in the West, and under the rhetoric of political liberation the "imperatives" of anti-Communism gave Europe, the USA, and Japan the leverage to manipulate the nominally independent and free peoples of the Third World so as to position them as so many chess pieces in the east/west battle--the only recourse of the free but poor nations formerly subordinated as colonies to continuing to serve an essentially still colonial role being to side with the Eastern bloc, and then only rarely, under indigenous leadership, did a few of these nations manage to remove themselves from the global capitalism that subordinated them; this generally meant they were locked in poverty of one type, where collectively they were apparently worse off and certainly lacked liberal freedoms. But in the other nations that did not aggressively go Leninist, liberal freedoms were generally but weakly observed and only to the extent that individuals could get rich and therefore better connected with the global power system (and more trusted by it, having joined individually the ranks of the better-off global elites that First world citizens generally considered themselves to be in by right of birth, even if they were poor within these nations).

In fact the Internet of OTL emerged from a Cold War US defense program, the DARPAnet.

In fact I can't really picture the world simply proceeding from the premises of 1912 without some huge disruption or other; it might go on very different tracks than OTL but cannot reasonably proceed on the same tracks as then. If by some weird miracle it somehow managed to stumble forward along the lines you suggest...
Honestly though I take pride in the technological leadership of the USA OTL, without the catastrophe dealt the Central Powers of OTL WWI, there is every reason to think Germany would lead in terms of advanced tech; Americans would be trailing behind them, licensing and rebranding--and Englishizing--largely German inventions. Every now and then it would go the other way, because the US market, although somewhat smaller than the huge Eastern European hegemony German Reich based firms would enjoy (because they would the be default suppliers for the Austro-Hungarian Empire) is richer in that the potential customers have more money. But the Americans will be behind in the institutional support that German firms get from well-funded universities. To a limited extent, a USA that never goes through the mill of two world wars will probably step up and develop some faint analog of the German central support for basic science and research--but faint and shadowy it will be. Where major German universities enjoyed the patronage of both the state on its several levels and the private corporations tied to aristocratic wealth, the parallel process in America was always weaker. OTL American academia, particularly in the physical sciences and engineering, enjoyed the benefits of a brain drain from old Europe, especially from Eastern Europe, in the wake of the disruption and chaos caused by losing the Great War and by the unsettled situation afterward, culminating in the rise of Hitler and other reactionary regimes there that drove dozens of top-rate minds across the ocean. At the same time the requirements of preparing for participation in WWI laid a lot of the groundwork for government-coordinated patronage of the sciences and engineering that US corporations benefited from. It is possible that the USA might conceivably have developed robust linkages between basic research and industry without the premise of two great wars to form organizations founded on government, if instead the "Robber Baron" era aka "Captains of Industry" had gone unchecked by American democracy; if the USA simply turned into a plutocracy that had no quarrel with that identification, the kinds of business organization that in fact lay at the basis of the USA being a growing industrial power on the same sort of scale as Germany might have served to support a comparable scientific establishment. But for good or for ill, Americans don't like trusts and monopolies and cartels. That doesn't mean we don't form them but we do enact laws and courts do uphold rulings that make it necessary for American cartels to disguise themselves. In those circumstances, the positive aspects of them, including the ability to invest in long-term development on the basis of private interests, fall by the wayside. We therefore need government institutions to do this for us. Given no premise to develop such institutions, I don't see Americans proceeding on a 1912 sort of mentality to do more than play catch-up behind the German-led scientific leadership of Europe. A certain amount of innovation would sprout first in America and make its way east instead, especially when the items involved serve a mass public, but on the whole the leadership would be in Germany.

Would a Germany leading the world in technology such as was cutting edge in the USA of OTL in the 1950s and '60s be motivated to develop any sort of Internet at all? The essence of the idea is to enable computers to exchange files with each other. it comes down to telecommunications. I'd think any such thing would emerge from the global telephone and telegraphic systems. As another poster pointed out, despite general German dominance in high tech, if we have the premise that somehow or other all the empires of 1912 are still standing and more or less functional in 2012, then surely it is the British, more than anyone else, who own most of the communications links and have the most territory to coordinate. On the other hand in a colonialist model of the world, much of the world does not require much in the way of intelligence; the "brains" are in the European political and commercial capitals, and in New York, maybe Tokyo too. If, while the social and political systems somehow stand still despite their manifest (in retrospect anyway) instability in the real 1912. somehow technology evolves so that computing power comparable to what we see in the world as a whole today is constructed and used, most of that will be in the North, most of that will be concentrated in elite corporate and governmental stations of great power--the situation would be a lot more like 1970 than 1990, with what dispersed computational power there is serving to run factory machinery or perhaps switch railroads or the like.

Instead of an Internet as such, I suppose there would be extremely high capacity trunk lines connecting a relative handful of mega-sites within each "empire" in Europe--lots of links between Ministries and the City of London, not so many to the factory towns up north; intense traffic between cartel HQs scattered in various German cities and universities there, connecting to Berlin for governmental coordination; the French might just have all their computing power to speak of all located in Paris! And then the telegraphic system would be enlarged to the extent necessary to send blocks of coded orders to the peripheral sub-command centers of political/commercial empire, and send back digested data in relatively simple form. The closest thing to an actual internet might indeed be in the USA, but I don't see it being a general public service, except to the limited extent that individual homes--perhaps middle class ones anyway, if not mass public--would have terminals allowing them essentially to send self-typed telegrams, perhaps with video and audio--basically videophones with type capability, and the ability to write virtual documents. I think the vast potential market of video gaming might go completely missed, as the penny might never drop that intensive computing power is something to play around with.

Note that if a "data wants to be free" culture were to somehow develop, personal computing be developed for both fun and profit, this would probably spell the downfall of the centralized colonial civilization if nothing else did before. The necessity of everything being coordinated by godlike ruling elites on a distant continent would cease to be obvious whereas the tools for both self-coordination and disruption of imperial rule would be falling into mass hands.
 

So if I get your post right, you don't think that at some point a capitalist, in any country, won't come up with the idea of the World Wide Web or anything similar? And you don't think that someone won't come up with the idea for using computers to create video gaming? The latter I especially take issue with, since people had been creating and marketing video games since the 60s using the technology available and beyond the Internet, that's a blatantly obvious way to market computing technology which no one with any market sense who knew of computers could ignore. There's also all the people with access to those university networks to consider, at least some of whom will be technically savy enough to start marketing computers and their uses. The connectivity is simply too much to ignore. And I fail to see why a network in the United States and a network in the United Kingdom could not merge, unless everyone's holding

I mean, I think you gave a great idea of how people in 1914 pre-Great War might perceive and incorporate the Internet into their world, but the societies in 1914 could not survive, war or not, and would change, and thus the idea of connectivity Internet style would evolve as those societies changed over the next few decades.

From there, all I can really think of is your Internet might have far more national lines drawn. Like how the Chinese Internet tends to rarely interact with the Anglo Internet. Some people might cross over, but not many. But globalisation is the huge driver of the Internet, and its hard to imagine how or why globalisation might cease to work. Globalisation can easily drive the Internet, and anyone who seeks to make money off of it can easily see the potential.

For Africa, you can see right now Africans posting all manner of stuff on the Internet, and like with the Anglo Internet, much of it is trash. I don't think you'd be changing the African Internet much based on your scenario, just the languages people are posting in.

Overall, you'd just be changing things up language-wise and the cultural background of who's using the Internet. A more segregated Internet overall.
 
Assuming that international borders are similar to around 1900, this would mean the British Empire would dominate the map. So you might get an "Empirenet" similar to the "All Red Line" telegraph network:
Cool. Thanks for the image.
So, how would those "national nets" look like?
But on the internet itself, I'd say it would be more 'nationalised', not disconnected from the outside, but for example the English-speaking sections of the internet would be split more evenly between the US and the Commonwealth.
You know, even in OTL, 'the Internet' wasn't a given.
You had AOL and Compuserve etc., in the US; you had Minitel in France; etc.

The idea that a US Defense department research concept would be released to the public domain and take over the whole world, was NOT a forgone conclusion. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the probabillty across all timestreams of it happening might be less than 50% with a 1960 PoD (say).

I could easily see every major European nation with their own national system; one for WarPac; and about 5 separate ones in the US. A Darpanet for Defense use; a research internet paid for by universities and education funding; AOL; Compuserve; and a couple of others. With gateways, no doubt, to communicate back and forth between networks, but each network might use its own protocols. And graphics interfaces staying pretty much proprietary.

Look up Minitel as a good example of what such an early system might look like.
 
You know, even in OTL, 'the Internet' wasn't a given.
You had AOL and Compuserve etc., in the US; you had Minitel in France; etc.

The idea that a US Defense department research concept would be released to the public domain and take over the whole world, was NOT a forgone conclusion. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the probabillty across all timestreams of it happening might be less than 50% with a 1960 PoD (say).
All it really takes is someone like Tim Berners-Lee, who was smart enough to realise that if you made it free (rather than requiring a paid membership) everyone would use it.
 
All it really takes is someone like Tim Berners-Lee, who was smart enough to realise that if you made it free (rather than requiring a paid membership) everyone would use it.
???
Tim Berners Lee developed HTML, not the internet. People like AOL only accepted the Web after it became so popular - but the public, universal internet had already been around for some time as infrastructure that the Web could sit on top of.

Infrastructure costs money. Gating access to your version of the 'net' is a good source of income. OTL, the 'internet' became essentially free, initially for students using university systems, then for any university related stakeholder, etc. If DARPA keeps control of the Defense and Education nets, that's not going to happen.
 
???
Tim Berners Lee developed HTML, not the internet. People like AOL only accepted the Web after it became so popular - but the public, universal internet had already been around for some time as infrastructure that the Web could sit on top of.
Tim Berners-Lee developed HTTP in 1990/1, when AOL was still Quantum Computer Services. HTML followed two years later.
 
The basic scenario "no Great War" needs to be gamed out for a meaningful answer. The society I described was absurd because it was a lame attempt to project a minimally evolved society. Of course I get silly notions from it!

Yeah some kind of gaming culture seems likely to evolve. I personally encountered Star Trek games on a USAF suite called "ACMI," which was an interceptor combat training tracking system in the mid-70s. It was not a simulator. Real Air Force and perhaps foreign fighters would get pods attached where one of their missiles would normally go and the system would use the transponder installed there to track their training exercise maneuvers over a range; when the pilot pushed the "fire" button the system would internally simulate the flight of the missile and determine whether it was likely to have killed the target or not, in the light of the target's real-world maneuvers and the simulated "action" of the virtual missile tracking system; once a target was deemed killed the system would then X out the plane and inform the pilot he was out immediately. The contractor and USAF crews maintaining the computers that ran the system kludged up a Star Trek combat simulator to run on it. Years later at Caltech I encountered other legacy games made up to run on mainframes dating back to the 1960s.

OTOH it was rare to the point of science fiction for people living in the places i did anyway to encounter computer games of any kind accessible to the general public until the late 1970s. In the early 70s it was possible to buy a game console called Odyssey that could manage Pong and a few other games on a TV screen, but it was pretty expensive; I suppose the same handful of very well-off people who could afford VCRs back then may have indulged in buying these. Once true personal computers of the most primitive kind, Apple II and TRS-80s and so forth became something people could just buy at local stores (for still considerable prices comparable to a low-end new car, mind) then games on them followed very shortly, and then the price of basic electronics came down to the point that dedicated game consoles became something ordinary households that could afford a couple color TVs would have by 1980 or so. It wasn't much sooner than this, 1978 or later, that video arcade games became common. I don't know when I might have first seen one available to anyone with a quarter in hand in public if I'd lived in Los Angeles or New York City, but in places like Panama City Florida we didn't get them until after Star Wars had come out. I think the first one I saw ever was a Red Baron type game in the Tyndall AFB Officer's Club.

So yeah, computer gaming certainly took off as soon as people had access to computers--and what that means is, first in the hands of the academic hot shots who built the first computers, then in the hands of privileged military types who got first dibs on using the things. I have no idea what went on in corporations that purchased computers for business purposes, I suppose their system administrators wrote some of the early games.

Note I stipulated distribution and access analogous to 1970. That meant if you wanted to play on a computer, you either went to a university, got hired at a rich company (not ultra rich, Fortune 100, probably every medium sized town had a factory and/or bank in this category, but not a small business either) to run its computers for it, or joined the military and got the right technician assignments. All these people, amounting to hundreds of thousands or perhaps a million or two in a country the size of the USA, were indeed gaming away very happily whenever they could get away with it. (I gotta wonder how many wound up fired or in the stockade at Forth Leavenworth in consequence). No one ever purchased a mainframe for home use, to my knowledge anyway--only a handful of families, maybe just the Fortune 100 top stockholders, could afford to and they would simply steal the use of company machines that were earning suitable tax write-offs as well as earning their keep, I suppose. To everyone else, "the computer" was something akin to the Oracle of Delphi and its direct users had rather the social status of one of the fume-inhaling priests. Perhaps some of the smell, too, a fair number of them.

Would it be reasonable for computers to stay in the 1970s confines once the basic tech advances beyond 1970s levels and fundamental capabilities match say an Apple II in an Apple II type box? I suppose not--though in my pretend 1912 social time warp, there might be a significant delay past 1980 (assuming given tech corresponds pretty well year by year across the TLs--that seems reasonable to me).

Of course if we game it out year by year after avoiding a flare-up in 1914, very carefully steering past all the explosive reasons why war was set to break out mid-decade, world societies will evolve quite differently than either OTL or this cartoon continuity I ginned up to gratify the OP. A very likely way they are to evolve is with another war just years or even months later. One reason among many Europe was poised for war was fears of internal class insurgency, clearly threatening full revolution in some countries, but posing stiff challenges to the status quo in essentially all of them. It is quite clear that part of the thinking in going to war is that it would silence the striking trade unions and suffragettes and so on. So if the leadership manages to evade going to war, they have to turn around and face those strikers again...armed revolution is definitely in the cards in Russia, and perhaps in Germany and even Britain. (As for France, with her unstable governments, who can tell the difference?) If there is no war, the recent economic boom that has slowed down emigration to the USA to a crawl (so when new restrictive immigration laws kick in, they would not be noticed at first since hardly anyone compared to a decade ago is knocking at the Golden Door anyway) which was premised on arms buildups all across Europe is going to grind to a halt triggering a general economic crash on top of a social situation that already had the crowned heads and Prime Ministers of Europe chewing their nails. If no war greatly delays the spread of subversive nationalist and egalitarian ideas among the colonized peoples in Africa and Asia, still if the mother countries are to profit by these colonies they will have to invade with new centralized business schemes to mine and expand plantations and even set up factories, that demand massive disruption of traditional societies there and will accomplish within a couple decades at the most what a couple years on the Front of the OTL War did for these peoples. These couple decades might be delayed by a decade of European depression first, which may or may not lead to European revolutionary civil war, and may or may not lead to a different kind of disruption of the colonies as desperate formerly working people are perhaps funded by a desperate government to try their luck in the tropics. (More likely the colonies stagnate during the Depression).

I'm pretty sure the USA is not going to sit all this out in idle slumber either.

Great convulsions of one kind or another seem likely. The formation of rival blocs, either on nationalist/imperialist lines or lines of revolutionary ideology seems highly likely, and all this would partition the world up making any single global standard problematic.

The thing is, just focusing on "the internet"-probably several different systems--in this context is to focus on a footnote and skip the broad outlines let alone relevant details that make sense of it completely.
 
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