Depends. I accept the capitalism's ability to raise resources (capital) for larger-scale projects, but generally profit motive fucks everything up. The Internet was fine until every pathetic "enterepreneur" out there smelled easy money and come to ruin it all. It happens in every industry. Capitalism creates abundance - but abundance of worst possible crap sellers can still get away with.

The Internet wasn't even accessible to the general public without capitalism motivating the creation of ISPs.

That's true. The free market was mostly [1] absent from the research into packet switching in the 1960s, the actual deployment in 1969 of the packet-switched network that became the internet, the invention of email, FTP, the domain name system, the mailing list, newsgroups, IRC, the MMORPG (initially referred to as a multi-user domain or a MUD), the web, webmail, the blog, the RSS feed, the wiki and Wikipedia, but, yeah, starting about 1987, profit-motivated ISPs started slowly to appear that offered access to the internet to organizations and individuals.

1: I use the qualifier "mostly" because the government did farm out most research and engineering tasks to a handful of for-profit companies (Bolt Beranak Newman, the Mitre Corporation, SRI International) that specialized in governmental contracts.

That may be true. But, the Internet existed because of massive multi-decade investment from folks without a profit motive. All of the fundamental Internet protocols were created through those organizations.

Look at what capitalism gave us as an Internet like experience: compuserve, aol, etc. Those were all horrible closed wall systems.

But there are many massive investments at the academic and government research level that lead to nothing directly useful for consumers due to lack of investment interests in bringing it to market. Just look at the next generation Internet architectures that go nowhere. You can't ignore economics.

What's the Internet you envision sans profit motive?

The one with free knowledge and kittens and no ads and SaaS bullshit.

Who pays for hosting the kittens?

The same parties that hosted the old usenets and mailing lists; the users themselves.

Not so sure about that - the web has become a lot less fun since capitalism took it over.

Wat. You want to go back to pre-1995, the Netscape IPO?

I'd date the actual, functional takeover somewhat later than that, but the web really was a lot more fun pre-dotcom-bubble. I'm not sure I would say I want to go back to it, exactly, but there sure is a lot that I miss.

Eh, there is a lot to be missed from the 'net, yes; but from the web? Like what? I mean, even when we're generous, 'pre-dotcom-bubble' is 'pre-2000' - the web was crap back then.

- It was much lighter; entire websites used to weight less than a single JS file today. We've increased the size of pages by an order of magnitude (and processing expense by at least two) for no real reason except laziness.

- The SaaS/cloud model wasn't so popular, which means trying to lock you in by stealing your data, or doing absolutely ridiculous things like IoT does, wasn't something you saw.

But that's how it's presented, not content. Look I dislike 5mb pages with 2 paragraphs of text content as much as the next guy, but if I had to choose between that and 1000 shitty Geocities 'personal homepages' and the vast wealth of information that can be found on the internet today, I'd choose today in a heartbeat.

How can someone claim with a straight face "but the web really was a lot more fun pre-dotcom-bubble" ? Good luck trying to find anything outside of nerd subculture and physics/math/CS content (exaggeration of course, but the core is true). (of course it could be 'true' if all one cares about is nerd subculture and physics/math/CS content...)

There is little actual content in present day Internet relative to its size. Look, what is produced on those websites that also tend to carry heavy presentation is not content. Real content is Wikipedia, or Hacker News, or various people and their various topical subpages, personal blogs, up and including stuff hosted at Geocities and Tripod Lycos. What is not content is most of the stuff that's created for money, including majority of today's "journalism". Information that is shallow, false and/or useless, and that exists only to make you click or buy.

90% of for-profit content could disappear just like that, and humanity would be much better off. Every information that is valuable, you can almost always find for free, posted by people who don't try to use you.

I don't care about content/download size ratio, I care about content (quantity and quality) in absolute size. Download speeds have progressed faster than page bloat.

Wikipedia didn't exist in 1999 (not for years, and even Slashdot was barely more than a gossip site. Good quality discussion back then was on usenet or irc. The concept of a 'mooc' was just a wet dream of some 'cypherpunks' and 'technoanarchists'. Download a manual for your microwave or car, do online banking, email anyone but your hardcore nerd friends? Forget it. Price comparison shopping, ordering something from another continent? Lol. I remember riding my bike to a local bank branch to pick up foreign currency, which I stuffed into an envelope and snailmailed. Had to ask at the counter of the post office how much the postage was, because there was no way to look that up online.

Mp3? Sort of existed, you could download song by song from geocities pages; that was before the crackdown that led to Napster even. But the "selection" was minuscule, compared to today.

Oh and back then, when you wrote a site, you chose between supporting ie or netscape, or browser sniffing and serving two versions, or sticking to yhe lowest common denominator which wasn't much, to put it mildly. Ffs people won 'best of the web' awards for html that worked on two browsers and didn't look like crap! Like obscure competitions today where you build a file that is both a pdf and a jpg! My first job, back around that time, was to 'port' a website from ie to netscape.

The more I think about, the more convinced I get - any claim that it was better in those days is just rose-colored glasses.

I didn't make any claims about the things you are talking about, only that it was more fun. Which it was. It's boring now. I used to go poke around, following random links just to see what was out there, encountering all kinds of oddball pages which represented nothing more than some person's individual gift to the world, and it was fascinating. It was fun to watch it all grow. I felt motivated to contribute, to share my own pages full of whatever information or opinions I happened to have. Photos of interesting places, stories about cities I'd visited, didn't matter; it all seemed like it was worth sharing, because that's what the web basically was.

I don't find that anymore. Homepages came and went, blogs came and went, and if there's still a thriving web out there beyond the big commercial sites, I don't know where to look to find it.

I still have my personal site, and I still post on my blog occasionally, but it increasingly feels like calling into the wind. I'm not going to just switch over and post all the same stuff on some big commercial site; fuck that. The web was awesome when it looked like it was going to be a new way for humanity to talk to itself; now it seems like little more than another way for rich people to make money. It does that very impressively, but who cares? Rich people always had ways to make money and will always find more; it's not very exciting when they turn yet another collaborative community project into a profit center.

Remember Usenet? Ah the good old days.

Bandwidth was more scarce too. If not for the commercial explosion the Qwests and Level 3s of the world would not have spent billions laying fiberoptics.

Love that social bonding that capitalism provides.