The Road To War

The Road To War represents when things were just beginning and the struggle was not yet apparent to most, from when most of the internet remained unknown to the public to the days when the first criminalizations of copyright infringement began. This period of time can be defined by the years from 1985 to 1998.

Where it Began: America
The attempts to regulate the Internet, laudable though they may be, began pretty much as soon as the thing itself did. The first was AOL, America Online, they called it. A "walled-garden" online community for people unfamiliar witht he internet, they called it. They had regulated chat rooms for people to discuss things, a measure to protect people unfamiliar with the internet from the big bad wolves out there, they called it. Well, there were good reasons why from the very beginning the common user has been a prisoner inside his or her own computer, because this was AMERICA ONLINE. In other words, it was a government surveillance network, the "walled-garden" was, in a single shortened and less glorified term, "Alcatraz". True, it was FAR less monitored than Alcatraz, especially since computers did not have incorporated webcams back then (the authors of this Wiki covered up their incorporated webcams with a plastic film, then non-see-through tape, for safety) but it was still a carefully monitored enclosure.

In that enclosure, we were all sheep, all guinea pigs, for their tests of how far the Internet could grow. We were all sheeple, to be herded to the slaughter as they wished. Before mid-2005, we were monitored in our chat rooms, message boards, and digital libraries by AOL's "Community Leaders", dating back to the establishment of the "Quantum Link" serive by AOL in 1985, two years after the company's founding. Back then, the company was under a different name, it had begun as "Control Video Corporation" in 1983, hinting as to what it was meant to be, and was renamed/reorganized as Quantum Computer Services Inc in 1985., a far less ominous name that they hoped would attract more prey customers. After all, fresh on the minds of the people was Orwell's prediction of 1984... but they did not realize that even thoguh the up-and-coming service provider was in fact Big Brother behind a different mask, for it used thousands of volunteers across America to watch your internet access, to watch YOU.

The company "served" those unfamiliar with computers, the easiest prey best customers that existed, and few of those realized the trap they had fallen into. They were relieved that Orwell's 1984 didn't come to pass, and in their relief they let down their guard. They fell into the trap of constant monitoring, and it would be many years before the light of freedom would peek through the darkness once more.

We grew out of that enclosure, that animal farm, with good time, and here we are now. AOL's subscription rate is dropping by the day, despite their underhanded attempts to retain customers by refusing to cancel subscriptions and stop billing customers for their services. However, these newer developments will be covered in later sections of this grand struggle.

Out Of America
European and Australian internet access began in the mid to late 1980s and Asia began receiving service, filtered as it was by the various domineering governments of that continent, in the late 80s and early 90s. It is worth noting that in Asia, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and so on are all very controlling governments, and that even today most traffic that goes through them is filtered. This hapens for various reasons. For China, it is to dissaude unrest. See the Sinkiang riots and read up on the history of the region, without the filter applied by CNN, the rioting ethnic group arrived from Siberia almost 1000 years after China built its first settlements in Sinkiang, "get off our land" indeed... For Japan, it is to maintain the domestic market for Japanese media and electronic goods, Japan's main exports. For South Korea, it is to detect North Korean subliminal messaging and hackers, for obviosu reasons. North Korea we will not cover as it is obvious, and Vietnam filters its internet because of fear of social unrest.

Growth Accelerates
Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has seen a tremendous rise in E-mail, instant messaging, Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) phone calls, two-way video calls, and so on. Its crowning achievement is the rise of the World Wide Web, with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking and online shopping sites. By the late 1990s, traffic was estimated to double each year, with a mean annual user growth of 20 to 50%. This growth is attributed to the organic, relatively decentralized nature of the Internet, allowing rapid metastasis of this precious resource throughout the world. The non-prorietary, open nature of the network also allows the vendors to interconvert easily and prevents any one company from centralizing control over this resource.

Why We Fight Now
This lack of centalized control is what is feared most by governments, by men of power who feel their control and pwoer slipping away from them bit by bit, byte by byte. They were frightened by this great resource they could not exert absolute control over, and so they started the ball rolling down toward an inevitable clash of generations. The ball began rolling in the closing days of 1998, and the stage of the struggle known as The Gathering Storm began.

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