wyliecoyoteuk wrote:Yes, but it would have belonged to Microsoft and AOL .... it would not be the internet, just a series of corporate controlled intranets.
It's heading that way anyway, with Twitter, Google, Facbook etc. Some companies bumf now mentions their Facebook presence rather than a website ("Join us on Facebook at blah, blah").
I actually started with text-mode bulletin boards and then Compuserve, an early walled garden of content. Then I discovered the wider internet outside Compuserve, as did others, and Compuserve faded away, seen as parochial and restrictive (everything was indexed and catalogued). Yet now people are returning to that model with Facebook & co in a modified form (or dicovering that model for the first time).
Seems what comes around goes around. This would have happened with/without Linux/Windows (permutate to taste). Bear in mind that Microsoft have only been pushing content (as opposed to selling software) from quite recently.