
How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet" - Swizec
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/how-the-robber-barons-hijacked-the-victorian-internet.ars
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m_myers
Interesting bit toward the end:

    
    
        But the collapse of the Populists after the election of 1896 and Western Union's enormous political power
        kept this reform movement at bay. Not until 1910 did Congress clearly define both the telephone and telegraph
        as common carriers. By then many newspapers had glommed onto a new service: Marconi's wireless telegraph.
    

One has to wonder: did the desire to be rid of the Western Union monopoly
influence the creation of the radio? Would there have been less pressure to
develop alternative methods of communication if WU had been broken up? Or
would there have been more, since each competitor would presumably be racing
to generate some kind of advantage over the others?

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jordanb
Yeah that's a good question. Wireless was popular for maritime use even in the
very early days when it was dreadfully expensive and unreliable.

I think it would have continued to develop if only as specialized shipborne
equipment until it was cheap and reliable enough to compete with wires on the
basis that the network is so much cheaper.

This raises a thought in my mind though: If the battle is lost over network
neutrality for the wired internet, I wonder if that will spur the development
of more practical satellite-based wireless internet.

PS: I think the "Victorian internet" analogy is hugely overstated. The
telegraph network was an electromechanical system that used large amounts of
manual labor for very little channel capacity. There were technological
limitations that guaranteed it would remain expensive and exclusive.

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alexqgb
From a strictly technical standpoint, you may be right. But I think name
alludes to more than that. Specifically, it encompasses the social impact of
sudden, instant, global communication (remember, it wasn't just American -
there were trans-Atlantic cables operating at this point too).

It's arguable that the impact of the 'Victorian Internet' was actually greater
than that of our actual internet. Of course, it's hard to separate the changes
it triggered from the larger cataclysms of the Industrial Revolution, of which
it was a deeply embedded part. But this, too, only onderscores the extent to
which sudden, massive development in communication technology has a profound
effect on nearly every business it touches.

My suspicion is that we'll be another decade into our own communications
revolution before we match the scale of the social disruption produced by the
onset of the Machine Age.

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jordanb
Well, I don't disagree that the telegraph was a major earth-shrinking
development. I just disagree with the analogy with the internet.

The telegraph dramatically reduced the latency of communication (from the
maximum travel speed of a courier to that of the speed of electrical
impulses). It didn't improve channel capacity at all though. In fact, it had
less capacity than paper in a courier's satchel.

This restricted the communication to those who can pay. And even they
preferred to write crude, abbreviated messages due to cost.

The internet didn't improve latency over the telex or phone networks (in fact,
you're almost certain to see more latency on the packet-switched internet than
on the circuit-based PSTN). What it did do is dramatically increase channel
capacity, driving the cost of communication down to the point where anyone can
communicate across the planet for nominal cost -- and can even send
information-rich messages in data-hungry formats like video.

The telegraph was the _invention_ of instantaneous global communication. The
internet was the _democratization_ of it.

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goatforce5
Tom Standage's book "The Victorian Internet" is an entertaining and easy read
on the history of the telegraph system. Recommended:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Victorian-Internet-Tom-
Standage/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Victorian-Internet-Tom-
Standage/dp/0753807033)

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showerst
If you're interested in this, Tim Wu wrote a more general book about the
history of information economies from the telegraph/phone through to the
internet that's a pretty engaging read:

[http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires-
Borz...](http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires-
Borzoi/dp/0307269930)

He does a great job explaining the interaction of technology, industry titans,
markets, and government and how they've influenced media over the past century
(and right through to the modern net neutrality debate.)

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dagski
just wait until Comcast/NBC gets going... they'll have us all under their
thumb before long.

~~~
joshontheweb
That was my thought. Modern telecoms are chomping at the bit to land us in the
same boat. In some ways we are already there.

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zeteo
It sounds more like a case of political corruption, rather than unregulated
market failure. I'm not saying market failure does not exist, just that this
article doesn't seem to prove it.

