That works, too!

Seriously. Fines need to eat into their profits at the bare minimum.

The fine for this is less than the obscene profits they made, so no.

Ok, you win that one.

My dad worked at Novell, so we had the internet in our house well before most people had it. I remember my mom telling my dad “this internet thing is just a fad”. We laugh about it now, but I was exposed to it very early on.

Ads and popups and shitware were absolutely present then, too. Maybe not as common as they got in the late 90s, but they were there.

There was no advertising

Oh yes there was. Flashing banners “ONE MILLIONTH VISITOR!!!11!!1!!” that launched 1,000 popups simultaneously and installed malware if you even dared to hover your mouse over it.

I’d give anything for the internet to go back to how it was in the early/mid 90s.

No you won’t. You wouldn’t survive a day.

I grew up with that internet as well, and despite the corporatization, I vastly prefer the internet with the technological advancements made over the last 3 decades. Using an adblocker is trivial, even certain mobile browsers support uBlock Origin.

You probably don’t remember, but the early internet was filled with shitware as well. Popups would fill your screen by themselves and eat up all your memory to the point of crashing the whole PC, malware hosted on any particular shady server would straight up install itself in the background without any user input needed, dialup was hot garbage and hogged the phone line (unless your family was rich and had a dedicated line, or even D$L), and GOD FORBID your parents were technologically inept and blamed you for their PC mishaps.

Fun fact: Sneakernet has far higher bandwidth than any physical network connection. Latency suffers horrendously, but it’s not important in most cases involving such.

Wouldn’t really help IMO. To most people (even here), “web” = “internet”.

It’s a shockingly (and relatively) small amount of people who understand that WWW ≠ TCP/IP.

PS: Funny story last week I was at CERN at the CIXP, the CERN Internet Exchange Point, to upgrade a connection to 400Gb/s, and in the lobby of the building they hung up the cover pages of Tim Berners-Lee’s original Hypertext and HTTP papers. And further in the have his original NeXTStation displayed

Way cool!

Where did I say it was useless. You’re trying hard to be offended.

Well, your intentionally inflammatory comment certainly doesn’t help your case:

You mean spam trap? Outside of 2FA or a few other small things, which even those are using it less. Who actively engages with it on a regular basis. I can DM friends and family easier, with less spam and restrictions on multiple other platforms. And those that do actively engage with it are often using HTML hypertext interfaces. (Proton Gmail etc) I didn’t mention Usenet either. Or ssh that I use daily.

Most people don’t have a pop or SMTP app installed anymore. Not outlook, not Thunderbird, etc etc etc. It’s easy to imagine a world without email. So many other apps and services easily slot in to replace it. And already have in many places. Now, try to imagine a world without HTML or HTTP servers. What would that even look like?

I use Thunderbird on my personal phone, and Outlook on my work phone (configured via MDM). The Gmail app that so many people use can also download emails.

Web portal, web portal, web portal, oh and web portal. Web portals are what people use.

That just sounds like “there’s an app for that” with extra steps. Why use this when you can just get the app? Why use that when you can just get the app?

That’s part of what put us into this “everything is tracking you” predicament today.

Apps, too. Email, you mean GMail and Outlook?

I use Thunderbird on my phone and Outlook on my work phone. Also, email accessed through a web portal vs locally doesn’t mean anything when SMTP is used for both on the backend.

That said, I hate web portals for everything. Many are poorly optimized for mobile, I don’t want to be stuck on desktop just to get a PDF of an invoice, and none of them actually notify me about anything. Email is already on my phone - it’s one of the definitive features that created the “smart” phone segment in the first place.

Email is still extremely popular and used quite frequently for more than chatting with friends. Businesses use email to communicate with customers. Schools use email to communicate with parents. Doctors use email to communicate with patients. Utility bills are sent via email. Etc, etc, etc.

Just because you don’t have a use for it doesn’t mean it’s useless.

Literally just tribalism. Trump is on “their team”, therefore whatever he says is good.

Oh, for sure.

The logic being: I’d rather be killed by a fascist psycho than not be helped as much as I want by a way more moderate person, that isn’t actively supporting killing me

That’s too much logical thought.

Much closer to “woman not like me bad, man like me good” than anything else.

Can, or can’t?

Yeah. This isn’t the first time we as taxpayers have paid for “infrastructure upgrades” with nothing to show for it. They straight up pocketed the money.

Valid point. MAGA is just the latest iteration.

MAGA would be screaming about it until the end of time if that happened. Because it’s different. Somehow.