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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Nit: "Web" and "Net", or more specifcally, "Internet", are problematic terms. They're used poorly in TFA's title.

The Web -- WWW -- invented by TBL at Cern, is a set of data representation and request protocols, but doesn't address underlying royting and peering, the domain of the Internet itself, and BGP specifically. The WWW could splinter, but it would do (and may be doing) so along protocol lines, not underlying connection levels.

App-level proxies and DNS further complicate the discussion, an legal and regulatory matters operate at yet another level. Largely these too were not invented in the EU.

The Bloomberg article is clearly referencing the Internet as a whole, title ambiguity notwithstanding, and that was created in the United States, not the EU. As AnonymousPlanet notes, CH is not an EU member state.

So your statement is false.

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Sorry, I forgot about the mentality here for a second. I will spell out the point I was trying to make through provocation. It destroys the fun/joke, but whatever...

The Web was invented a few meters away from the EU, in a lab that literally sits in the border between the EU and a non-EU country that is mostly aligned with the EU, by a EU citizen, funded mostly by EU money, is the only reason why anyone cares about the rest of the technology stack and infrastructure that we call "Internet". It was a dream of creating an interconnected system of knowledge and communication, that transcended borders and would move humanity to a higher stage of civilization.

The Web matters because of what it allows one to do, the implementation details are only relevant in a narrow technical sense.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for many American achievements, and I grew up thinking that the USA and Europe were close friends and allies, fundamentally sharing the same values. NASA and its many achievements inspired my lifelong interest in Science.

I am not nationalistic, and I don't care how invented what. What I am fed up with, is this USA-centric view of the world, as if freedom emanates from the USA, without whom we would be condemned to vile authoritarianism. I am also fed up with the idea that invention comes from VC money, which is largely untrue. Even the Internet as you describe it was invented using government money.

Nationalism really has nothing to do with my response. A fully-admitted-in-advance pedantic sense of accuracy does.

The Web is significant. I'm well aware of its history, and the (yes, publicly-funded) Arpanet and Internet. But the WWW not the whole 'Net, and other than some path-dependent accidents of history (see Meredith L. Patterson's "On Port 80" https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a) would probably be subsiding now largely due to mobile tech. Designed in Cupertino, built in China. (And likely designed in China before much longer).

The point remains that TFA talks of partitioning the Internet, not merely the Web, via mostly Internet-specific, not Web-specific, mechanisms.

Cheers.

I actually intended to type “splinternet” but I think due to years of dadjoke “interweb” muscle memory typed something else.

Splintertubes!

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