Early Internet designers overwhelmingly opposed permitting advertising on the network

Evidence

The incident also prompted a philosophical discussion among early Internet designers as to whether advertising should be allowed on the network at all. The consensus was a clear “no.” Yet as Mark Crispin, another early scientist who detested the DEC message and saw no place for advertising, wrote: “I shudder to think about it, but I can envision junk mail being sent to [regular] people…and no way it could be prevented or stopped. I guess the ultimate solution is the command in your mail reading subsystem which deletes an unwanted message.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 662

Categorization

• SEED: The founding anti-advertising norm of the Internet, and how it collapsed — a ready essay on the gap between pioneers’ design intentions and the commercial reality that followed.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in attention industries: the norm-break story parallels how newspapers and radio were likewise founded around explicit no-advertising ideals, per earlier chapters. — connects to: Early internet programmers and even CEOs resisted advertising on principle as intrusive — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 728; The early internet was built as a non-capitalist, non-market commons — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 283; The precommercial web attracted people because it offered filter-free speech without advertising — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 906 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Early internet programmers and even CEOs resisted advertising on principle as intrusive #corroborates (0.95) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 728
• The early internet was built as a non-capitalist, non-market commons #expands (0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 283
• The precommercial web attracted people because it offered filter-free speech without advertising #expands (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 906
• The ‘you are the product’ critique predates the web by decades #responds-to (0.70) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1117