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Comment by mingus88 | Hacker News Reader

The gov project was ARPANET. The public internet was not intended to be a classified wartime network.

Then we had Internet2 which is backbone dedicated to research, again, not a tool for coordination or control.

If you were online in the 90s, a popular refrain was that the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it. It was very much operated as a free space for ideas. There was no centralization of platforms, no apps, and anyone could host whatever they wanted.

Depending on your age, that is the internet built by your parents.

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Err, you have some things mixed up.

The (simplified) sequence (in the US) was:

ARPANet (1969 - 1990)

"Commercial Internet" (1989 -)

NSFNet (1990 - 1996)

Internet2 (1996 -)

NSFNet, overseen and partially funded by (unsurprisingly) the National Science Foundation, had quite a number of restrictions and an acceptable use policy that prohibited commercial use. To get around those restrictions, the "Commercial Internet Exchange" was formed allowing commercial networks to easily interconnect.

As for "apps", the World Wide Web was invented in 1989 and publicly released in 1993. Prior to that, there was "Usenet News" and a service called "gopher". There were many centralized services that interconnected with "the Internet" (mostly NSFNet), e.g., Compuserve, AOL, MSN, etc.

By apps and centralized platforms I am referring to how most internet use happens in 2025. I get sent links to Meta properties or X and they are useless to me because I don’t have those apps or even accounts on them.

The majority of most peoples lives online are locked up and controlled by a few. Whereas anyone with any gopher client or IRC client could participate in any number of nets back then as equals.

TBH I had forgotten about Compuserv or AOL, because at the time that was a walled garden for a different class of user, and private sites have always existed.

Neither of which are really too relevant for the internet “built by our fathers” because I interpret that as the open, standards based internet that allowed all that innovation to take place

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