This season, Mitch Kapor is delivering a trilogy of lectures on “Disruptive Innovations I Have Known and Loved” at the UC Berkeley School of Information. I missed number one, which covered Kapor’s role in the early years of the PC (podcast audio is here). Wednesday evening I made it to the second lecture, which focused on the rise of the Internet, and particularly the early, pre-Web Net era — the time when the Internet was considered a hopelessly geeky backwater for Unix heads and the golden road to the future lay with outfits like Prodigy and Compuserve and AOL. (The third lecture, on virtual worlds, is on Nov. 28.)
I first heard Kapor speak on this topic in the summer of 1993, at the Digital World conference in Beverly Hills, where, amid a throng of cable executives and Hollywood honchos and telco bureaucrats, he was the only speaker to make the then-fringe-y claim that the Internet offered a better model for the networked future than the “Information Highway” then being touted as an inevitability. His concern — one that resonated with me at the time — was that we try to create something better than “500 channels with the same crap that’s now on 50,” some system that would not only be open to corporate entertainment and commerce but would offer “a migration path for the weirdos and the outsiders to get into the system, mature and blossom.”
Kapor’s espousal of the Internet in those days was part of a wider activist portfolio; he’d cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation only a few years before. But it also stands as one of the more accurate acts of long-shot prophecy in technology history. At his talk Wednesday, Kapor looked back on that time and filled in some of the details of his own role.
He’d joined The Well early on, in the late ’80s (a year or two before I did), and “lost the next two weeks of my life” absorbed in the online conversation. A bit later the Well gave its members Internet access, making it one of the only ways that members of the general public could connect to that network. Around then the National Science Foundation began an aggressive project to open the Internet out to the public and to private businesses. In 1992 Kapor was spending a lot of time in Washington doing EFF work and got to know the founders of UUNet, which was one of the first firms to resell Internet connections to other companies.
“Why,” Kapor asked, “wasn’t this an obvious investment?” He tried to interest John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, but Doerr “wouldn’t take the meeting.” Kapor himself ended up putting some of his own money into the company. He provided no details, but it must have been a lucrative move: UUNet went public in 1995, shortly before Netscape, and was gobbled up in an accelerating series of acquisitions that made it part of Worldcom, in the days when people thought Worldcom was taking over the known universe. (Today what’s left of Worldcom — after a storied detour through the courts and various name changes — is part of Verizon. Full timeline here.)
My recollection of those days — when I was a recent immigrant to technology journalism from the arts — was that, much as I rooted for the Internet-style future as a healthier one for our culture, it was awfully hard to see how anyone was likely to make money via such a system. Kapor said he looked at the open network’s advantage in generating innovation and encouraging participation and concluded, “I think this is the one that’s going to win.” He was right.
It’s incredibly useful to keep that era in mind today, I think, because it provides not just a heartening saga of the triumph of free expression and open participation, but also a clear case in which those ideals were more practical, too.
The Internet’s victory over the services we now derisively dismiss as “walled gardens” was an instance, within recent memory, when the idealists weren’t hopelessly outgunned by the cynics — when, in fact, the idealists turned out to be the realists, and the cynics took a bath. That’s worth keeping in mind as today’s tech industry — powered by Google’s success and enthralled by innovators like Facebook — races through yet another cycle of debate over what “open” really means.
[tags]mitch kapor, uunet, lectures, berkeley school of information, internet history[/tags]
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