Suppose the internet was still a major success and was sustainable without compromising for commercial interests. How do you think societies around the world may have changed, or not?
Consider the optimistic angles of such an unencumbered space extended out from the internet’s earlier days to the present. What if some of those possibilities had been realized?
fwiw I don’t think you’re wrong given the circumstances the internet came about in, and that persist in a different form today, however the idea behind the question was to try to encourage one to try to imagine different circumstances. If the internet/the web had managed to develop and be widely adopted despite the circumstances around it and commercial pressures that have arguably warped it into something rather different than what it could have been, how might that have influenced society in turn?
It’s less about looking back with rose-tinted glasses, and more about trying to re-envision how it might have developed differently. One could very much say that the whole pitch of stuff like lemmy and federated software is an attempt at doing just that, but I think it’s even more interesting to consider on a broader scope.
i’m not really sure we can reliably re-envision how something could have been without being influenced by how it actually was - and that’s especially true for anyone who was directly influenced by it. just about every single kind of job in our society has some aspect that was directly changed by the internet, or by technology derived from globe-spanning interconnected networks. we’re several generations of technology deep now.
you have to keep in mind though that the mass commercialization of the internet didnt evolve in a vacuum - for example, without the technology to mass archive large amounts of data on optical disc formats in a time when the average connection speed to the internet was limited by your PSTN dial up modem, there would have been no ability to rip music from CDs. sharing music on the interwebs was just an evolution of the mix tape, but it was the commercialization of music itself and the fact that no one wants to pay for something that they dont have to that directly led to P2P networks/piracy.
in a certain sense, the FOSS/linux movement is as old as the internet (possibly older), but to a certain degree its mindset is much younger as well - rebelling against the older generation’s hegemony (apple, ibm, microsoft, etc) by striving to offer free options - though nothing is truly “free”.