“…had only we made a better case for the less commercial, more “open source” reality we had envisioned.”

People did. Early users of the Internet were horrified whenever commercial use appeared. I remember. But there was no stopping it: too much money was at stake.

There are lots of people who had the vision to create a better Internet — Alan Kay for example. But instead, we got the “Web” by a programmer in a corner at CERN, who created abomination (HTML) after abomination (HTTP) after abomination (backwards domain names) after abomination (WSDL), and then was knighted for it, but the “Web” happened to fill at need at just the right time so it took off, like a cart in front of a horse that came along just when someone needed to haul something.

Today we have a digital highway that has no built in protections, no trust framework on which safe communication and interoperable e-commerce could have been built, and no ability to create safe enclaves. Everything is potentially permeable. The concept of rings of trust had been explained in detail in the 80s sci-fi book Ender’s Game, but it was lost on Berners Lee. We also have a core compute paradigm (von Neumann) that is deeply flawed and in which real time systems are subject to race conditions, when we could have had event-based or data flow-based architectures that would be far more robust for real time apps like phones, cars, and everything we use today.