I mean, amateur radio was illegal to encrypt. That encryption ban could have theoretically also happened to the internet with just a few changes in legislation in a different timeline.
If, say the US and rest of North America, and the European Countries, along with Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, basically if most of the democratic world somehow in an alternate timeline just went batshit crazy and become authoritarian. What would the internet even look like. Would the internet even exist?
I mean, the US was supposedly a liberal democracy tried to ban PGP. A full fledged authoritarian US would’ve imprisoned many of those PGP and Free Software authors. HTTPS would’ve have a government root certificate on every computer, phone, tablet, smartwatch. Signal would’ve been illegal…
Is this alt-timeline too far fetched?
I mean its not even too late for this to happen starting like right now 2025, right?
Before the rise of liberal democracies there where no billionaires though. If they never had existed the world might look different now.
Yes there were … we just didn’t call them billionaires … we called them Kings, Queens, Supreme Rulers, Emperors, God Kings
The world looks exactly the same now as it did 2,000 years ago politically because the idea of supreme and infinite wealth never went away. We’ve always had men who believed they could rule or own the entire world … and we still do.