> By the mid-'90s, NSFNET was formally dead, after years of accepting commercial traffic.
Mind you: Your statement says nothing about profitability. Until 1995 the NSFNET was the most important backbone of the American internet and it was paid for by the US government. Of course, other countries lagged way behind the US' development where the Internet still remained primarily a research network until the late nineties.
The German Telekom e.g. was still pitching its BTX service in 1995 (kinda like teletext for modems) that could be used for shopping, online banking and stuff -- stuff which you could not really do on the WWW yet. I remember my first experiments in browsing the WWW happend over a BTX gateway and it was awfully slow even by the standards back then. The first DSL service only started in 1999/2000 in Germany in the form of a test program where you were required to answer market research question to get a cheap, subsidized service.
(I mean we are talking about the _World Wide_ Web, here, not the _American_ Web.)
Furthermore, your argument also says _nothing_ about how commercial Internet services where financing themselves back then which was the original topic of this thread. GeoCities, Yahoo, AltaVista, Google -- all those sites featured adds back in the 90s. If I remember correctly, Netscape Navigator also featured a "what's cool" button that -- I believe -- brought you to sites that payed for being advertised that way. So even back in the Internet's infancy it was largely commercialized using advertisements. This has never changed. And this was my original point.
I am not saying I am big fan of ads. But this is largely a problem of news agencies that work around a clock to bring you news (or rumors) and are currently unable to finance their services by subscriptions alone. This is the sector where ad spam is most visible. Despite all that the Internet has become a tremendously important part of our lives bringing real value: We get the news from there, we go shopping there, we watch live broadcasts there, watch movies, stay in contact with our friends, hold meetings, apply for jobs or housing and even work in there. The Internet was a toy in the 90s. These days it is central to our social lives. Saying the Internet is "broken" today and we have "skrewed it up" just because of its advertisement sector is a bit naive ...
Mind you: Your statement says nothing about profitability. Until 1995 the NSFNET was the most important backbone of the American internet and it was paid for by the US government. Of course, other countries lagged way behind the US' development where the Internet still remained primarily a research network until the late nineties.
The German Telekom e.g. was still pitching its BTX service in 1995 (kinda like teletext for modems) that could be used for shopping, online banking and stuff -- stuff which you could not really do on the WWW yet. I remember my first experiments in browsing the WWW happend over a BTX gateway and it was awfully slow even by the standards back then. The first DSL service only started in 1999/2000 in Germany in the form of a test program where you were required to answer market research question to get a cheap, subsidized service.
(I mean we are talking about the _World Wide_ Web, here, not the _American_ Web.)
Furthermore, your argument also says _nothing_ about how commercial Internet services where financing themselves back then which was the original topic of this thread. GeoCities, Yahoo, AltaVista, Google -- all those sites featured adds back in the 90s. If I remember correctly, Netscape Navigator also featured a "what's cool" button that -- I believe -- brought you to sites that payed for being advertised that way. So even back in the Internet's infancy it was largely commercialized using advertisements. This has never changed. And this was my original point.
I am not saying I am big fan of ads. But this is largely a problem of news agencies that work around a clock to bring you news (or rumors) and are currently unable to finance their services by subscriptions alone. This is the sector where ad spam is most visible. Despite all that the Internet has become a tremendously important part of our lives bringing real value: We get the news from there, we go shopping there, we watch live broadcasts there, watch movies, stay in contact with our friends, hold meetings, apply for jobs or housing and even work in there. The Internet was a toy in the 90s. These days it is central to our social lives. Saying the Internet is "broken" today and we have "skrewed it up" just because of its advertisement sector is a bit naive ...