An interesting thing about Wikipedia is that it's not very compatible with charging for access, but not because Wikipedia editors are desperate for distribution (we do our best to discourage the ones who try to use Wikipedia to get distribution for their point of view). It's more that charging for access discourages people from contributing in a variety of interestingly different ways.
I don't know if it's true that Jimmy Wales named one of his daughters after an Ayn Rand heroine (none of them seem to be named Dominique or Dagny, but maybe I just haven't read enough Ayn Rand) but he is definitely pretty bullish on liberalism and specifically capitalism.
I think it really is plausible that transaction costs of various kinds would have confined Xanadu to a niche, which would have been particularly catastrophic for the two-sided market they were trying to build. But CompuServe and AOL seemed to do okay, and that wasn't in fact what killed Xanadu.
Yeah, it's questionable whether their business strategy could've evolved into a winning one even if they'd made it to launch.
I was just questioning the parent's perspective on "right libertarian ideology" -- my impression of Xanadu's vision was not so much "people love markets for information!" as "it's vital for the health of the info ecosystem that basic costs be paid directly", so e.g. the problem of UIs that people can rely on against scams should be faced and not avoided in favor of structurally leaning hard on advertising. (Yes, some kind of ads are inescapable.)
(It sounds like you've gotten to quiz MarkM on Xanadu directly; I'm going by largely-forgotten reading mostly in the last millennium.)
No, I was arguing that there is sufficient evidence that the basic internetworking would have been independently invented even if ARPANET had never happened, and that as such, this is also not supported by history:
> What I was saying is that the US is where the internet got deployed
This is why I said it read like a "history by the victors" view.
"The internet" got only got deployed in the US if you take the view that the dozens of other contemporaneous networks at the time did not combine with ARPANET to form the internet, but that ARPANET alone became the internet and replaced the others, or in the strict technical sense that "the Internet" was first used about what sprung out of ARPANET. So, sure, "the" Internet arguably got deployed in the US.
But many internets were built in the 1970's. And while ARPANET was early in some respect (e.g. packet switching was first invented at RAND), many of the aspects were also invented or reinvented independently elsewhere, and both academic and commercial deployment of internationally internetworked networks was well developed long before ARPANET connectivity became widely available internationally.
As such, an internet would have still existed had ARPANET never happened. It'd have looked different, but not that different.
We're left with something ARPANET flavoured because TCP/IP won and existing networks were gradually switched to TCP/IP, not because there weren't alternatives, because there were multiple commercial and public alternatives by the late 70's, predating both TCP/IP and the opening up of access to ARPANET. If you wanted global networking at that time, you'd likely buy access from an X.25 provider, so had ARPANET and/or TCP/IP failed entirely, at worst we'd still have services built on an X.25 descendant (that truly is the worst timeline.... shudder). [Compuserve and Tymnet both used X.25 for at least parts of their networks]
Even by the time I started an ISP in '95, not everyone were still convinced TCP/IP was the way forward, and people were still doing things like tunnelling TCP/IP over X.25 because X.25 was still more easily available some places.
> I don't think "everything should be a market" is orthogonal to liberalism. At a large enough social scale, liberalism always produces markets unless warfare erupts; strong restrictions on commerce are necessary to prevent markets from arising among groups much larger than Dunbar's number.
The point is that the commenter above was not arguing against the existence of markets, but the kind of nickel and diming proposed by Xanadu on expectation of markets for everything. But in terms of writing and knowledge, one of the things the Xanadu people failed to grasp is that the supply far outstrips the demand. For most writing there is no commercial market. In fact, for a whole lot of writing, the commercial value of the writing as a product is negative: people want to pay to push it on others more than people want to pay to read it. Trying to build markets for ideological reasons even where a whole lot of people are desperate for distribution rather than payment is a folly.
So I agree with you that liberalism will always produce markets, but I don't think that is relevant to the point. The ideological bent to try to find ways to extract money out of everything is a particular right-libertarian/objectivist subset of liberalist ideologies that most liberalist ideologies do not share.