I'd always maintained that much of the anarchy and craziness of the early Internet had a lot to do with the fact that governments just hadn't realised it was there.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The history of the Internet is not, as some people have tried to make it, a libertarian just-so story. It is a messy tale in which the government played a significant role. That role was, however, far more subtle than the plans of industrial policy gurus or techno-boosting politicians.
The idea of the Internet as sort of open and democratic and free and with no hierarchy, the libertarian beginnings as it were, with peer-to-peer networks... I'd sort of like for everyone to just admit that we're beyond that now.
The hope of Internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the Internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information, or restrict Internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the 21st century, as North Korea has done.
The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
The notion of the Internet as a force of political and social revolution is not a new one. As far back as the early 1990s, in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were technologists and writers arguing forcefully that the Internet was destined to become the most important tool for cultural change in human history.
The World Wide Web went from zero to millions of web pages in a few years. Many revolutions look irrelevant just before they change everything swiftly.
When I was born, the Internet was barely two years old. It was the preserve of academics, used to connect dozens rather than billions of users. There weren't many who predicted it would transform our world.
From early on... we really looked at the Internet as a whole new way to provide storytelling and entertainment.
Five or ten years ago, when it was clear the Internet was becoming a mainstream phenomenon, it was equally clear that a lot of people were being left out and could be left behind.
I don't think many people anticipated how the Internet was going to revolutionize the way we disseminate information.
No opposing quotes found.