I'm curious about the "if traffic was billed, it wouldn't have happened" part... are you saying that if traffic had been billed per [unit]byte, there would've been no incentive to build fiber networks?

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AnimalMuppet a day ago | parent [-]

No, if traffic were billed rather than free, we would only get traffic that was deemed to be worth the bill. Most spam, for example, has a very low rate of return. If it cost to send - even a little bit - much of it would become unprofitable.

So in that world, we would have fiber, but not (much) international spam.

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cryzinger a day ago | parent [-]

Ah, I understand :)

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Animats a day ago | parent [-]

The Internet could have worked very differently, with virtual circuits instead of raw datagrams. That's what the telco people wanted. See TP4.[1] Although there's a connectionless TP4 mode, one plan was that you'd only be connectionless within your own organization. If you wanted to talk to the larger world, you'd have to dial up a billed virtual circuit via your telecommunications provider.

Really cheap fiber backbones are make a pure datagram Internet work. We still can't handle congestion in the middle of the network. Congestion has to be forced out to the edges. There was a period in the late 1990s when MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST, the big peering points, routinely went into congestion collapse and only about 30% of packets got through

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionless-mode_Network_Se...

	▲	cryzinger 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ha, not to say too much, but I've been reading a bunch of network history stuff lately as research for a speculative fiction setting where there's no unified TCP/IP spec like we have today. (Although I'm far from an expert on networking in general, lol.) I've read a little bit about OSI and the protocol wars, but the CLNS stuff in that wiki link is totally new to me, so this looks like fertile ground for me. Thanks for sharing!