For years, some foresightful people had looked forward to the day when computers could be linked together all over the world, in order to create a database which would propagate information to everybody who accessed it. The phenomenon of the Internet was far from a surprise, and in fact was commonly predicted. What they failed to predict was HOW it would be used.
When ARPA-Net was opened up to universities, it started to be viewed as a research and collaboration tool; it was seen as a digital library. And virtually everybody expected people to treat it like a library as well: one is to be respectful of the library's assets and of other patrons. If one wishes to retrieve information, it can be expected that they will go to reasonable lengths to ensure that they check out the material with the proper procedure, notifying those who need such notification for administrative purposes. And, obviously, one does not do something outright illegal in a library.
The problem with the early Internet lied in the facts that it was one of the only international forums of inter-personal interaction open to the general public at the time. Another, that real personal identification was either voluntary, or virtually non-existent. But most of all, it just sprung up too fast. There were almost no laws concerning the internet; and there were certainly no international laws. People were just expected to behave.
Clifford Stoll found that this was not to be. He tracked an international spy-hacker for months while he wasted staff time, resources, network connection time, and used unpaid for long-distance tolls. But much worse, he trespassed, invaded property and privacy, and conducted espionage. He even risked injuring a medical patient at one point.
The result? The trust of the network community was if not lost than changed forever. The open cooperative character of the research network had been violated.
And it would seem that, once again, a new technology meant to bring in a new dawn of cooperation and mutual benefit gets ruined by one guy.
References: Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg
Clifford Stoll, Stalking the Wily Hacker
I like your comparison of ARPA-Net to a library, with the same social implications. To talk about the current Internet as a public facility with societal rules of conduct seems ludicrous, but it wasn't always so. That was something I hadn't realized.
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