This is the true value prop of the internet. Cumulative improvement with expert involvement needed to navigate the top-level terrain. Very Doctorow-an in spirit.
The walled gardens inevitably become choked by spam, as they easily classify where the spam targets are.
Of the half-dozen worldwide mirrors, none are still up. A shame.
One was hosted at TAFE Tasmania, which is a tertiary educational institute for adults (not sure how to express it in international terms: a polytechnic, perhaps. Practical skills-focused learning that people might do instead of university.) My father was a teacher there around that time; I'll ask him if he has any memory of mirroring this kind of content.
Q: How can I start an Internet Service Provider (ISP)?
A: Starting an Internet service provider - that can be a daunting undertaking.
My personal advice is - don't do it. I say this simply because I think the market is flooded right now. Internet service has become a commodity item. It is very difficult to distinguish yourself from the competition on anything but price. To compete at the $20/mo level now prevailing in the consumer industry, you'll need a user base of several hundred to run in the black, and who knows how long before you can pay off the initial investment in hardware, which could easily run over $10,000 - not to mention payroll, rent, headaches, etc, etc
You need to somehow find several hundred people who want to use the Internet. Daunting!
(The author was presumably right that the dial-up ISP market was saturated already in 1997, but it’s still neat to see how the Internet went from reaching millions to billions.)
I think the author was talking more about the difficulty in finding a few hundred people who want to buy Internet access from you, rather than finding a few hundred people who want Internet access in general.
The walled gardens inevitably become choked by spam, as they easily classify where the spam targets are.
Bring back the Federated Web!