One rule can hold back infinite innovations
This entire conversation between Balaji Srinivasan and Tim Ferris is worth your time. The notes and links feel almost infinite.
There are too many sections to highlight, but this exchange regarding access to the Internet was my personal favorite. Invented in 1983, most of us 80s and 90s kids didn’t get to surf the web in our homes until the mid-90s.
The Internet, or something like it, has to have been inevitable at some point, right? (Right?!) You have to wonder what the world would look like had access to the Internet been enabled earlier.
Balaji Srinivasan: “So National Science Foundation had this thing called the Acceptable Use Policy in place for many years, and it prevented commercial traffic on the internet. How about that? Right? So the dotcoms —”
Tim Ferriss: “I did not know that.”
Balaji Srinivasan: “Yeah, the dotcoms that we know and love were actually not feasible until I think about 1991, plus or minus one or two years, but I think it was 1991, they repealed the AUP. And the reason people fought it, they said there was going to be spam, and porn, and malware on this commercial internet, and it was all going to be broken, because before that, it was an academic and military internet. Everybody was sort of a quasi-trusted user on it. You had to have a .mil or .edu domain. And then they were like, “Oh, my God, all these crazy people are going to get on. It’s going to be…” And you know what? They were right. All that stuff did happen. But the benefit was worth it. The downside was mitigated by I think the upside, and that was the birth of the commercial internet.
And that’s something which most people don’t even know how that came about. It really was something where one rule was holding back all this innovation. That’s something that’s made a deep impression on me. So stuff like that was the kind of stuff that I tried to convey in the course, alongside the nitty-gritty. And I think most of the time, that kind of stuff is not taught in the same place from the same person with one coloring the other. I think that’s part of why the course was popular.”