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> People say that if public libraries didn't already exist and were proposed today as a new thing, they'd be found illegal

ARPANET was gracefully turned over, for the most part, to the commons, as was GPS. Public libraries are a millenium old as a concept [1], but only half a century (EDIT: millenium) old as a continuous practice [2]. We're not at the tail end of a collective-action halcyon; we're in the centre of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Knowledge

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malatestiana_Library

A half century? Surely that must be a typo?

Why? People have been illiterate for most of human history. So even if libraries existed, they could not be used.

I think the OP meant ‘half a millennium’.

I imagine today you would have libraries, but they would be like Netflix with maybe some small physical outposts in really major cities.

So instead of the Seattle Library, it would be the some big tech nonprofit at best that would lisence content in bulk.

It’s the same with search engines. Look how the news aggregation business has shaken out.