"But the people who were actually building this system, they weren't really thinking about Russian attacks. They were kind of rebellious anti-authoritarian types — they wanted power to the people. They called it 'computing power to the people.' And so they created a system in which every node on the Internet has the ability to store, to forward, to originate information. ... This decentralized system made it hard for the Russians to blow it up, but it also made it hard for the government or corporations to control the Internet. ..."
Free speech is not part of Darpa's motivations for inventing the predecessor of internet.
Note that Internet is driver from some evolved tech off Darpa's research.
Again, internet was not designed to advance any political goal, but to withstand nukes. And the internet now days is different from Internet when it's born. The difference is probably more prominent than between a monkey and a human being.
BTW not sure a statement from a media expert can be a proof of Internet's design and implementation goal. I never saw Viny Cerf's similar statement. He did mention Internet is made open in the recent gcp event.
You're right. Freespeech wasn't DARPA's motiviation. However it was the motivation of at least one of the engineers of ARPANET.
"My bias was always to build decentralization into the net. That way it would be hard for one group to gain control. I didn’t trust large central organizations. It was just in my nature to distrust them." -- Robert (Bob) Taylor
DARPA may be the main source of funding, but without the caliber of the team that implemented it; it probably would have either failed or faded into obscurity. A lot of people who live on the edge, tend to have a very strong independent spirit that tends to be at odds with figures of authority.
FIDOnet's temporary connections over POTS copper is arguably more resistant to censorship of a populace.
FIDOnet is arguably the precedent to the Internet, certainly Net culture derives more primally from the BBS scene than any IP transported culture.
Broadband connects an IP addy to a blameable citizen.
This produces a fear of sharing a connection ( and thus liability ) - this is concurrent with the demise of public WiFi.
Wynn Wagner III (Opus BBS) reports a support request from a doctor in Vietnam,[1] who states the (Vietnamese) internet is censored but the phones are not.
For similar but different reasons Tom Jennings reports FIDOnet support requests from .ru domains.[2]
The internets current distribution model seems unlikely to survive massive infrastructure attack, major connection bottlenecks are too narrow now.
Radio HAMS remain the likely communication network of first resort after any large scale devastation.
Facebook is not particuarly more than a very large BBS, (with the addition of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon[3]).
"Though actual observation may be discontinuous, fear of observation is continuous. And, this constant fear of observation produces self-censorship, which, according to Winston, is a “habit that becomes instinct”. Consequently, the panopticon’s monopoly on the body gradually becomes a monopoly on the mind." [4]
