Throughout the 1960s to 1990s, the foundation of today’s internet was built through a variety of consortiums and informal working groups composed of

Apple, Its Control Over the iPhone, The Internet, And Yes, The Metaverse

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2021-05-27 14:00:05

Throughout the 1960s to 1990s, the foundation of today’s internet was built through a variety of consortiums and informal working groups composed of government research labs, public universities and independent technologists. These typically not-for-profit collectives typically focused on establishing common standards that would help them share information from one server to another (i.e. messages or files), and in doing so, make it easier to collaborate on future technologies, projects and ideas. 

The internet’s quirky provenance is responsible for many of its best modern attributes. Today, everyone can create content on the internet, everyone is technically capable of accessing everything on the internet, and every web page on the internet can connect to another without the user needing to change browser, device or client. This flexibility, interoperability and universality isn’t by decree - there’s no Head of the Internet mandating the right to create, host or access/connect to a website. 

Instead, this is a byproduct of the internet’s open standards, programming, markup languages and so on. These ensure that a user doesn’t need to pay for a web browser or to load a website, nor does the owner of a website need to pay for the code used by their website. Services like Zoom also work because they leverage actively maintained standards that are free to use and designed to support any device. Every device maker needs to support these standards in order to have happy customers. Some of us now recoil against aggressive data collection, ad insertions and tracking, but this is partly because we don’t need to give these up. The use of standards, such as HTML, means that browser extensions can block ads or tracking. We may be willing to give up data for a free service, but the Internet’s makeup means we don’t have to.

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