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?
The internet would probably not exist outside of government and military use. Without the consumer incentive there would be no profit incentive and technology as a whole would have stagnated and the majority of computers would be akin to institutionally owned datacenters and supercomputers but with vastly inferior capabilities to the ones we have now.
However, non-networking devices would still exist and be popular, so things like videogame consoles would still be seeing some development, and possibly so would personal computers which rely on physical media being traded person to person.
I am certain technology around electromagnetic waves and telecommunications would continue to develop, possibly much slower, and that people would utilize it to create networks even though illegally, but it would be very few and niche.