The history of USENET and the alt. hierarchy shows what we lost when the Internet stopped being about protocols and started being about products—a catastrophe adversarial interoperability staved off for decades, until we blocked it with terrible tech laws. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial
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@eff Sadly all regulated systems will be monopolized and the issue this great article points at, is not limited to technology and services.
Globalization is a destructive weed but the weed killer will have to be bigger than the internet if we are to poison the roots. Decentralization begins off-line first, on-line second.
