History of the Internet

Court Cleared the Liens. The Registry Made the Buyer.

The Court Cleared the Liens. The Registry Made the Buyer.

On 26 April 2011 a Delaware bankruptcy judge authorised Nortel Networks Inc. to sell roughly 666,624 legacy IPv4 numbers to Microsoft. The order settled liens, competing claims and the identity of the seller. It did not make anyone a registrant. That happened in a second document, signed by a different party, under a different policy.

Wikipedia Made Its New Editor the Default. Editors Made It Optional Again.

In July 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation put VisualEditor in front of every logged-in editor on English Wikipedia. The old source editor remained one click away, but the new interface no longer required an invitation. Editors then used Wikipedia's own discussion process to ask for the beta software to be opt-in. By September, the Foundation said it had made that change. The fight was over a small setting with a large consequence: who gets to choose the tool through which the next volunteer changes the encyclopedia?

Firefox Put the Feed on the Shelf. Then It Took Away the Shelf.

In 2004, a website could declare its feed and Firefox would offer to make it a living folder of headlines. In December 2018, Firefox 64 withdrew the built-in reader, feed preview and Live Bookmarks. Mozilla saved subscription addresses in an OPML file and, where it could, left ordinary bookmarks behind. The web pages stayed put. The browser stopped making their updates a first-class way to read.

MDN Let Your Wiki Edit Go Live. Yari Put a Reviewer at the Door.

A typo in a web reference once had a direct route from an MDN editor's screen to a public page. In December 2020, Mozilla moved that route through a GitHub pull request. A reviewer could now discuss the correction before it appeared, while the person who found the typo had to work through a repository and wait for a build. The trade was larger than a change of editing software: Mozilla moved the moment when it exercised editorial control.

Google Set the Login Deadline. The Account-Migration Standard Arrived Four Days Before It.

Google told sites using OpenID 2.0 to move to OpenID Connect before 20 April 2015 or risk losing Google sign-in. The OpenID Foundation approved the final specification for carrying old account identities into the new protocol on 16 April. The calendar looks like a last-minute software scramble, but Google had announced the date more than a year earlier. The hard problem was narrower and more dangerous: when a new credential appeared, who could prove it belonged to the person behind an existing account? A site that gets that answer wrong can keep its login button working and give the wrong person the key.

W3C Approved the Video Door. The Decryption Room Kept Its Own Rules.

In 2017, W3C gave encrypted video a common browser interface and left the machinery that actually decrypted it to separate systems. A civil-liberties group wanted a binding promise that those systems would not be used to punish legitimate security research. The standards body recommended the interface without that promise. Its members then voted on the appeal. The tally reveals who got to decide what counted as an open web standard when the valuable part of a movie still needed a key.

Knol Gave Authors the Red Pen. Google Kept the Lights.

A Knol author could put a name on an article, accept or reject a reader's edits, and decide whether to run ads. Google called that authorial control. It also hosted the page and determined when Knol would stop displaying it. In 2011 the company set two dates: public viewing would end after 30 April 2012, while authors could still export until 1 October. The writer kept a way to take the words away. The room where readers found them had a different keyholder.

Google Buzz Turned Gmail Contacts into Followers. “No” Wasn’t a Clean Exit.

Google pitched Buzz as a social network with the setup already done: the people a Gmail user emailed and chatted with most would become the first people they followed. The shortcut moved a relationship built in private correspondence toward a public social product. The Federal Trade Commission later described what happened when users declined the invitation or switched Buzz off: some could still be followed or appear in other users’ social displays. Google accepted a settlement requiring a new consent rule and privacy checks that would outlive Buzz itself.

Mozilla Renamed Its Browser Firebird. Firebird Was Already Here.

Mozilla's small browser began as Phoenix. A company using that name objected, so Mozilla chose Firebird. Then the Firebird database project objected too. By February 2004 the browser was Firefox. The sequence sounds like a branding department losing three rounds of a word game. The record is sharper: one open-source project had to decide whether its own legal comfort outweighed another project's established name and the distributors both relied on.

Apache Refused Sender ID. The IETF Put Its Rival on Trial Too.

In 2004, the Apache Software Foundation told an IETF mail working group that its SpamAssassin and JAMES projects could not ship Sender ID under Microsoft's patent-license terms. Two years later, the IETF published Sender ID beside its rival SPF as simultaneous experiments, warning that a receiver might read the same DNS record through the wrong test and lose legitimate mail. The standards body could publish both designs. It could not make implementers accept a license or make operators deploy a protocol.

Google Put Comments Beside Any Webpage. Then It Closed the Sidebar.

A website owner could publish a page and leave comments switched off. In September 2009, a visitor with Google Toolbar could still open a separate sidebar and write beside that page. Google called it Sidewiki. Google chose which entries rose to the top and could carry an annotation to another page containing the same passage. Two years later it decided to discontinue the service and offered contributors time to download their words. The page remained where its owner put it. The conversation beside it had a different landlord.

Wikipedia Had One Summer to Change Its License

Wikipedia's authors were scattered across years, languages and usernames. By 2008, their encyclopedia had a licensing problem no editor could fix by clicking Save: its GNU Free Documentation License did not work neatly with the Creative Commons license used by other free-content projects. The Free Software Foundation offered a narrow door. It let an eligible mass collaboration's site operator republish the work under CC BY-SA, but only before August 2009. Wikimedia had to ask its contributors, make a board decision and change the site's terms while that door was open.

Library Took the Tweets’ Text. The Pictures Stayed Outside.

The Library Took the Tweets’ Text. The Pictures Stayed Outside.

In 2010, the Library of Congress said it would save the stream of public tweets. The small print mattered: it would receive text, not the pictures, video or linked pages that often carried the rest of the post. Seven years later the Library pointed to that gap while ending its attempt to collect every public tweet. It kept the twelve years already acquired and narrowed future intake. The archive had not lost its files. The meaning of a tweet had grown beyond the part it was taking.

Host That Never Took Mail Kept Everyone's Mail Waiting

The Host That Never Took Mail Kept Everyone's Mail Waiting

In 1995, a machine devoted to DNS or time service might never accept email. A person could still send a message to an address at that machine. If no mail program answered, the sender's system had to treat the failure as temporary and try again. Days could pass before a confusing bounce reached the person who had made the mistake. Two engineers proposed an odd cure: a computer that did not run a mail service should sometimes run just enough of one to say, decisively, that it did not run a mail service.

Google Sold the Download. Then It Told Buyers the Video Would Stop Playing.

In 2006, Google offered a video store with files people could buy and download. In 2007, it told those customers that purchases already on their computers would cease to play. The company reversed course after the objection landed: a card refund replaced store credit, and playback got six more months. The file had travelled home. Its useful life still ran through the seller.

Flickr Kept Your Photo Address. Yahoo Took the Key to the Door.

In 2005, Flickr told its photographers they could keep their screen names and public photo addresses. The thing changing was the key: new users would sign in with a Yahoo ID, while old Flickr users could keep their email-and-password login for a while. By 2007 that exception was closing. A photograph might remain at the address everyone knew, yet the person who made it now had to pass through a different company's account system to manage it. Public identity stayed put; entry changed hands.

SmugMug Bought Flickr. Yahoo Still Held the Login.

The photographs kept their Flickr addresses when the service changed hands in 2018. Members still entered with Yahoo credentials. It took a separate login migration in 2019 to begin handing them a new key. Flickr's own notices show how a public archive, a corporate owner and the private route into an account can move on three different schedules.

XO Laptops Could Talk. The School Server Still Had to Buy the Internet.

The XO Laptops Could Talk. The School Server Still Had to Buy the Internet.

One Laptop per Child put a radio in every child's machine and invited the machines to relay for one another. A classroom could become a network before a telecom carrier supplied a connection. Then the network reached the school gate. Internet access, shared storage, address management and updates accumulated around a separate server and a separately financed uplink. The hardware story was one laptop per child; the operating story had another computer in the room.

AOL Sold Bebo. The Advertisers Were Still in Its Accounts.

AOL bought Bebo as a way to gather users and sell advertising. Two years later it disposed of almost all the social network's assets. The filing for that year still expected money from Bebo's old ad customers on AOL's own sites—and kept Bebo in continuing operations. The website, the tax deduction and the sales relationship did not leave through the same door.

Red Hat Bought Two Netscape Security Systems. One Opened First.

Red Hat announced a deal for Netscape's Directory Server and Certificate Management System in September 2004. The purchase closed in December. By June 2005, Directory Server code was open under the GPL and the supported product was offered through an annual subscription, with purchases projected for mid-June; Red Hat was still promising to release more of the acquired technology. The contract had already split software, patents and trademarks into separate parcels. The word “acquired” concealed a long line of decisions about what buyers, developers and customers could actually use.