Humorously, in retrospect, it turns out we actually did need a much larger government project to realize the potential of the internet. Licklider’s visions of a new infrastructures for trade and collective intelligence were all totally realistic, those things could have been built, the internet would have been very different and much more useful if the standards had been designed, the distributed database design problems had been solved, but no one did that work! There was no way to turn it into a business! So now the internet is mostly just two or three entertainment/​advertising tubes.
Humorously, in retrospect, it turns out we actually did need a much larger government project to realize the potential of the internet. Licklider’s visions of a new infrastructures for trade and collective intelligence were all totally realistic, those things could have been built, the internet would have been very different and much more useful if the standards had been designed, the distributed database design problems had been solved, but no one did that work! There was no way to turn it into a business! So now the internet is mostly just two or three entertainment/​advertising tubes.