In a sense, isn the Internet today like the U.S. telephone system just after the turn of the century?
Yes. Think of the Internet protocol — the language computers speak across the Internet — as a common transfer mechanism for data much as copper wires were a common transfer mechanism for voice in 1911. Everyone knew how to string to wires and make a phone connection after Alexander Graham Bell. But then how did you link together all those wires in a seamless grid such as we have today? And especially, how did you bill for all those calls that went from local telco to local telco to local “telco”? In that era the answer was that the small companies first affiliated with the Bell System as franchisees and eventually were bought up and combined into AT&T. AT&T then developed a billing “standard” which by the 1960s made obsolete the need to have operators take billing information for a long-distance call. Ultimately AT&T was broken up, but the billing “standards” remain among AT&T, Sprint, MCI and the Baby Bells. Thus you can direct-dial a call across many networks and have the charges s
