What if there were multiple Internets?

What if the various different systems that made up the early Internet had not all agreed to become a single system with a single computing standard and language in '83?

What if instead, several different systems had developed that would eventually either be internationally linked through a specific company's systems or would be universal (all companies connect and use them like the Internet) but localized to one region or country?

How would this have changed the modern world?

What would these Internets look like and be perceived by the public?
 
Ultimately, one of the systems would either start ofering more services or get greater coverage. That would allow it to grow faster than the others, getting more clients, which would spread it and make it grow, at the expense of the other systems. Eventually, you'd probably get one big internet, with greater international coverage, with a perhaps local internets covering subjects of local appeal (like local newspapers), forums and chat rooms of local people, etc.
 
Well, in OTL Microsoft tried to purchase some critical parts of the internet's infraestructure in the early 1990s but was denied*, and originally MSN (Which stands for the Microsoft Network) was intended to be a walled-off "Microsoft Internet".

I can imagine a world of separate "privatized" internets existing, behind paywalls, with much more limited free speech, less users, and sluggish tech growth post-2000s. There would be no dotcom bubble, but also no Facebook, no Instagram, and so on. There would be three or four large internet providers with their own separate webservices.

There is a scene on the Science Fiction movie "The Island", in which the characters go to a MSN payphone-like internet booth to search up something. It looked very alt-historish, and reminded me of this scenario.

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Eventually I imagine these companies would merge their internets into one big network, for growth's sake, but they would still be under paywalls and tolls unless government steps up. (Unlikely once such a market is consolidated)

* This was told to me by a College Professor. Maybe someone more knowledgable than me on the topic can expand on it.
 
What if the major Telephone monopolies, AT&T in the USA and the various government ministries in Europe had better retained control over the infrastructure? Would they, rather than universities, own the servers? If the internet had developed in academia first but then transitioned to the "commercial" communications industry as another part of their services, for example the German Postal ministry owned the posts, the phones and here the internet becomes just another means to move information. Then you might see a fractured internet based on domestic technology, at some point you get common standards, but each domestic provider is stand alone. Imagine what desktops looked like in the early 80s, expensive, limited and thought of as nothing but extensions for the mainframes. Perhaps it becomes like cellular service, independent networks accessed by users who are billed by their provider who provides the access equipment, but you get billed for your usage. I suspect it gets more censorship as it belongs to a "private" industry with more government oversight. One might not see the proliferation of pornography or the intrusion of copyrighted materials freely shared. I suspect access remains costly unless it gets public subsidies to create a virtual "library" network. In some ways you might see accelerated development since there is now competition and profit motive, but it would likely not be as organic and unpredictable.
 
What if the major Telephone monopolies, AT&T in the USA and the various government ministries in Europe had better retained control over the infrastructure? Would they, rather than universities, own the servers? If the internet had developed in academia first but then transitioned to the "commercial" communications industry as another part of their services, for example the German Postal ministry owned the posts, the phones and here the internet becomes just another means to move information. Then you might see a fractured internet based on domestic technology, at some point you get common standards, but each domestic provider is stand alone. Imagine what desktops looked like in the early 80s, expensive, limited and thought of as nothing but extensions for the mainframes. Perhaps it becomes like cellular service, independent networks accessed by users who are billed by their provider who provides the access equipment, but you get billed for your usage. I suspect it gets more censorship as it belongs to a "private" industry with more government oversight. One might not see the proliferation of pornography or the intrusion of copyrighted materials freely shared. I suspect access remains costly unless it gets public subsidies to create a virtual "library" network. In some ways you might see accelerated development since there is now competition and profit motive, but it would likely not be as organic and unpredictable.

So, something like the Minitel network?
 
I would say this is unlikely to happen, but if it did it would have likely have killed growth and would have made trading in the stock markets on the internet a nightmare.
 
So, something like the Minitel network?

Yes, I forgot about that one but it was rattling around in my head as I imagined the way things would go under state-owned Postal/Phone operators. As far as I recall it was rather workable and held on for years in the face of the decentralized "free" system we know. One might imagine the interloper cable industry getting involved in this earlier and with better bandwidth than phone lines being stiff competitors. I am not certain the internet is all that different to the end user, international standards likely get set and the infrastructure might be better.
 
I think it's interesting how everybody seems to think that there would eventually be one Internet.

Looking at how all other communication technologies are treated in the United States, I think the Internet being what it is was an anomaly more than anything. It was taken very seriously as a platform for free speech and expression in a case before the Supreme Court very early on (over twenty years ago) and that is what I think cemented it as an institution that couldn't really be controlled by any one group.

And with the PoD I came up with, where every piece of the Internet was running on a totally different sort of code, each being built up for decades would make it a pipe dream to integrate them. Even all of the way back in '83 the decision seemed odd and the workload to convert everything was so high that many did not reach the deadline and were not connected to any network for months afterwards. If somebody was to propose we do that with as many people on the Internet as there were in the early 2000s, it would take years and would probably seem pointless.
 
IOTL America's internet was too dominant compared to what the French and others had. Maybe if the competitors were more equal...
 
Unless I am misunderstanding you, this is essentially how the consumer internet first emerged. People subscribed to AOL, Compuserve or one of another couple of services that were available. These were essentially closed internets. But this was always unlikely to remain. The internet is the ultimate network effect and network effect systems tend coalesce around a monopoly or a single standard as it maximizes the value or utility of the network.
 
Unless I am misunderstanding you, this is essentially how the consumer internet first emerged. People subscribed to AOL, Compuserve or one of another couple of services that were available. These were essentially closed internets. But this was always unlikely to remain. The internet is the ultimate network effect and network effect systems tend coalesce around a monopoly or a single standard as it maximizes the value or utility of the network.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say AOL and the rest of that era were really closed off. Someone on AOL could email someone on Prodigy, and both of them could access any web site from their clients.

To me, your best bet for a fractured Internet seems to have a Soviet/Eastern Bloc 'internet' alongside the proto-internet and a more successful (Franco-German?) Minitel. For maximum success, have the Chinese come up with their own independent system. The Internet is likely to still render Minitel obsolete (or vice versa), but the Russian and Chinese systems might well survive to the present day.
 
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say AOL and the rest of that era were really closed off. Someone on AOL could email someone on Prodigy, and both of them could access any web site from their clients.

Yeah, I misspoke/exaggerated. But I think this is essentially what the OP was asking for. It wasnt the purely open platform that you have today.
 

CECBC

Banned
I could see a Warsaw Pact internet, a PRC internet and a NATO/western internet along with a few smaller nets like a N. Korea internet (already exists) and a Cuba internet.
 

Devvy

Donor
I posited a TL a while ago, with a European Community formed from an alienated UK & France coming together post-Suez. This kind of "third power" Europe would be in healthy competition with the US, especially with regards to technology.

I can well see a European internet, likely rising from the Minitel-system. Such a system is likely to be a lot less anonymous then today's internet, which has good and bad points to it, and will use wildly different software protocols. Given that the internet rose from the US military, and then built upon by US universities, I can well see OTL internet being the "US Internet" (or North American). I could then see a USSR imitation coming forth, giving 3 largely independent networks, with all 3 vying to export their respective technology to the rest of the world, which would probably lead to technologically similar, but legally separate, networks in Latin America, and possibly southern Africa. Something roughly analogous to IPX in Europe and TCP/IP in North America, with some tweaks to make IPX more scalable.

I doubt you'd see an actual merger in to one internet, given the large legal and political barriers given the different starting blocks (rather then starting out with basically one internet as we did OTL), but I think you'd see something analogous to the world wide web available on each internet, with portal web sites allowing access off your local net to one of the other ones, also used for handing off email from one internet to the next. Such a system would likewise have it's pros and cons; you could filter messages coming in to and out of your country/region for security purposes if needed, whilst leaving domestic traffic alone as they do in normal mail. Likewise, it would be easier to filter illegal web sites and crack down on people selling illegal goods.
 

soundnfury

Banned
We actually saw OTL how this kind of thing played out: back before the IP stack was ubiquitous, there were many networks. FidoNet (and other BBSes), Usenet / UUCP, ARPA-ish things like NSFnet, JANET in the UK. Some of these (like JANET) were institutional and lived in the minicomputer world, while others were anarchic clusters of micros like FidoNet. Some would even argue that FidoNet or even UUCPnet were "internetworks", as they connected together various networking domains with different local protocols. But they lacked a global and uniform address space, leading to kludges like UUCP bang paths and BITNET-to-ARPA gateways. This is why FidoNet, despite having had the best part of a decade as the de facto standard for microcomputer networking, never made the kind of mass-market breakout that the (TCP/IP) Internet managed in the early '90s. If you think that it's business use, rather than consumer use, that drives these things, in which case it's UUCP on Unix minis, rather than FidoNet on a million incompatible micros, that's relevant; but UUCP also never became a true internetwork, and for the same reason.
The very name "Internet Protocol" hearkens to the goal of connecting together _everyone's_ network into one big system, where not only can any node send a message to any other node, but (crucially) all the nodes agree on what a given node is called. Of course, the domain naming system that's overlaid on this doesn't have to be uniform, but the addressing system really does. (Of course, IOTL there are multiple Internets; what do you think RFC1918 is for?)

So, in a TL where Jon Postel gets hit by a bus, all these various networks will soldier on, and will probably continue to grow gateways joining them together. But with addressing being highly source- and path-dependent (having to route across FidoNet to the UUCP gateway, then a series of bang-path hops to arrive at a JANET host, will give a very different-looking address to the one used to reach that same host via an ARPA gateway elsewhere in the JANET), there is no way a global namespace can emerge - which means you may never even form the idea of separating addresses from names. It will be impossible to create something like the Web, because — no hyperlinks. How can I link to someone else's site, when I don't even know how to address it from the reader's machine? The nearest equivalent you can get is hyperlinks within one networking provider's customers; far more of a walled garden than AOL or Compuserve ever created. Even other providers on the same network can't crosslink, because the address will be different. There will be various technical attempts to solve this problem in the client software — an automated version of "...{{bigsite,otherbigsite}!foovax,barvax}!utzoo!henry" UUCP addresses (an inverted tree of routes from well-known sites to the user's local machine) — but they will be fragile and flaky, and every time the network topology changes for technical or political reasons (University of Foo notices their CS department's huge phone bill and shuts off foovax's phoneline) old hyperlinks cease to be followable. A further problem is that many of these networks are store-and-forward message-routed systems, piggybacked on the telephone network not just for the last mile but for the backbone too. The latency this produces (Usenet articles commonly took multiple days to propagate) means the kind of interactive browsing we take for granted today would rely heavily on caching proxies which would only be practical for a small number of popular *websites; most content distribution would follow the flood-fill method as used by Usenet.
With such limited applicability for Web-like technologies, probably no-one will put much effort into trying to develop them; in this world Gopher, far from being an historical footnote, is a technophile's plaything — something many people wish they could have, if only they weren't stuck on a multi-hop store-and-forward network, or just a horrendously underprovisioned walled garden. ("Those lucky Californians, with ARPANET nodes on every campus, I hear they're even managing to share video over Gopher now.") No-one bothers with a massive build-out of backbone networking capacity because — without the Web, no killer app. Large companies will have their own cross-country network links, but those probably won't even be gatewayed to any of the 'public' networks (every sysadmin has seen WarGames, and besides, our network is for Serious Business Business, not for programmers in Palo Alto to read alt.*).
(Acknowledgement: This dystopian timeline is partially inspired by Eric Raymond's World Without Web.)

Would the idea of the global address emerge? Eventually, probably; some of the Unix hackers at Bell Labs were complaining in 1985 about the networking namespace botches and comparing it to the elegant uniformity of the Unix file system namespace (trees, rooted on mounts, with a single simple syntax). But even they appear to have been advocating simply a more regular and standard way of expressing gateway-hopping (in the filesystem analogy, gateways are mounts). On the other hand, I wouldn't like to bet against Unix hackers, and it seems they would have acquired sufficient clue sooner than others. If internetworking came out of a Bell Labs summer project, rather than being an external invention grafted on by the tasteless folks at UC Berkeley, we might even have a proper Unixy sockets interface (where everything really is a file). But it seems a small consolation for an Internet delayed by perhaps as much as ten years.
 
@soundnfury Wouldn't the whole differing address systems thing be partially avoided if there were national "internets", or at least a nationally-approved address protocol?

Say France develops Minitel TO THE EXTREME!(TM), and the French government sets up a national minitel standards agency (because France), and they use the nationalised telephone network (again, because France) to communicate between nodes. Therefore, any "website" registered in France would have to use a specific address format, and some sort of code indicating which set of protocols it's using (if there is even more than one), to allow the "browser" to know how to display it properly.

Similarly, the UK's system in the same world, which is effectively Teletext TO THE EXTREME!(TM), is developed in association with Post Office Communications, and uses the nationally approved address system for the UK.

Possibly, some "internets" are actually nationalised monopolistic ISP-expys, thus bypassing the whole issue of differing address formats and protocols. Some authoritarian governments could use this as an excuse to censor internet content, as (a) it is illegal/impossible for their citizens to connect to foreign networks, and (b) because it's got regulations built in, allowing them to better control what kind of content can be added to it (probably only from approved sources, rather than letting anyone create their own site).

Some countries could adopt the system of their neighbours because of (a) cost, and (b) good relations. For example, there may be a single Benelux internet, with pages in Dutch/Flemish, French and German.

Eventually, an international conference may be convened, or an organisation similar to the Universal Postal Union established, to help bridge between differing national/corporate standards. Of course, not all countries would agree to such a thing, because of (a) nationalism and/or (b) censorship...
 
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