"The Internet will not be another TV." (And certainly Fidonet will not become him.)

Pay attention to this example of modern European poster propaganda:



This poster, aimed at introducing the idea of ​​a free Internet into the minds of ministers of telecommunications in the countries of the European Union, was coined by an informal but significant meeting held in Granada .

_{You can select and download a multi-pixel version of the poster — to print on A3 or A2. It seems that by default only the versions written in Castilian dialect are available; English versions can be opened from the list of files that can be shortened by URL. Over there , for example, is a thirty-megabyte version of 3579 × 8088 pixels.}

On this poster, it is not for the first time that I see the understanding, expressed by means of painting, that the Network provided to the will of corporations can split into narrow proprietary (proprietary) fragments: it seems that this visual metaphor of narrow enclosed spaces has come across to me on some other caricature of that modern Internet in which users of LiveJournal and Facebook (or, for example, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte) are unable to communicate with each other on equal terms. But for the first time I see the “TV” metaphor with separate “channels” completely separated from each other and accessible (or inaccessible) depending on the tariff plan. Yes, alas, this is the very future that the rejection of “network neutrality” will lead to: let's say, exactly as the artist points out, Skype and file sharing will be available only to subscribers who have paid a special fee - as now the night television satellite and cable TV channels are available Only subscribers of this particular service.
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I would like to remind once again that Jonathan Cittrain in his book “ The Future of the Internet and how to stop it ” noted that the reason for Fidonet’s powerful growth in popularity was his appearance in the times preceding the emergence of commercial providers of the unified Internet network (which began to appear only in 1989) , that is, at a time when not united, but disconnected commercial computer networks — CompuServe, The Source, America Online, Prodigy, GEnie, MCI Mail, and so on — each of which belonged to a separate commercial company and provided prevailed in the US lyala access only to its own information, and gaming and email resources. In those years, users of any provider to access the information resource of another provider (or even just to send mail to one of the clients of another provider), inevitably had to start an account with this other provider for separate money. Fidonet appeared as such an alternative, which (due to the free connection) turned out to be able (at least theoretically able) to cover all users and eliminate disunity. (Another such alternative was Usenet, which, by the way, exchanged traffic with Fidonet in both directions since those times.) And now the Internet is regressing to the level of the 1980s by disconnection, despite all the elements of technological development that it has accumulated over two decades what, above all, warned Cittrane.

From the same place, from the past millennium, I draw soothing and happy (perhaps naive, but no less firm and unshakable) confidence that a single information network can exist even if (or even when) Internet elements for this role will not fit. Rest assured: even if the current hypertext Internet crawls on proprietary scraps (which were once the networks that later united in the pre-hypertext Internet), then the hypertext Fidonet will once again appear on the scene as a great unifier (as happened with pre-hypertext Fidonet).

_{Such things in history are generally inclined to repeat: for example, Russia first broke the back of Napoleonic Europe, and then Hitler's. And isn't it symbolic that (since 2001) it is in Russia that the number of Fidonet nodes is larger than in the rest of the world combined? ...}

It was my subjective answer to the questions “where are we going?”, “What to do?”, “Why?”. (In spite of subjectivity and even prejudice, it will nevertheless be naturally useful to many, if only because it mentions an amusing poster and an interesting book, about which many had not had the slightest idea before.)

The answer to the questions “how?” And “what?” Is also possible, but I will dedicate to it a separate blog post, and certainly not in the coming days.