So what is this "internet" thing you are looking at? Well, it's only the worlds largest computer network, spanning the globe. When you say "internet" most people think you're just referring to the World Wide Web - aka, the "resource" you are seeing this website on. THey forget that the internet includes/included other resources such as: e-mail, various chat protocols (IRC, Yahoo, etc.), gopher, FTP (file servers), NTP (Time servers), newsgroups (like an early version of Reddit/Discord), social media (Meta/Twitter/etc.), streaming (YouTube, Hulu, Netflix et-al), and all of those resources, once owned by a handful of aspiring "tech bros" with actual tech skills, are now largely owned by major tech conglomorates such as Meta (Instagram, Facebook), Google (Google Search, Google Books, GMAIL, YouTube, Google Sites..etc), Microsoft (Office 365, Outlook, OneDrive, etc.), Apple (Apple Store, Apple Music), and so on. Even A.I. (OpenAI, ChatGPT, Suno, Udio) are an internet resource, though OpenAI is supposed to be not-for-profit.

The first thing, and I blame Al Gore and the 90's for this (like I blame a lot of things), is the idea this place is for the "Free Exchange of Information" - "free" meaning, once you've paid your internet bill, you can share whatever you like (But not really as your curated content can be struck down by these mega corps that run everything). I'm going to teach you a good lesson, it's always a good idea in life to be critical, and cynical about the term "Free" - because almost nothing, if anything, in life is actually "Free". There's always a cost or a catch somewhere.

The first catch is your ISP. It used to be, back in the 1990's, we had TONS of dial-up ISPs. What happened to them? Well, for starters, AOL - which was originally called "QuantumLInk" in the 1980's - did their huge campaign of giving everyone free FLoppies to get more people to join their new enterprise. AOL was one of the first big-name megacorp ISPs (along with Knology and some others), and these were what the mainstream gravitated to, because a messed up part of human existence, is the idea that if something is well known, and owned by a rich guy (Steven Case in this example), then it MUST be good. This is also where all of our internet problems really begin.

This was further exascerbated by the situation with cable line ownership. Cable internet is the basis upon which all modern "Broadband" internet is based. And it used to be, back in the 1990's and earlier, your cable provider that was local, owned all the lines in your town. You called that company - TeleCable in my case living in east- Alabama at the time - and they would sell you a package of accessible channels, and set you up in a little turquoise box that looked like a mailbox planted into the ground down at the end of the street. But then, once Broadband became a thing, companies - now the internet Oligarchy - took over the ownership of those lines, leaving you with little, to no choice to use their service in a lot of cases. That's why everyone in your neighborhood has the same ISP generally, because of who owns the lines. Somehow the laws and setup around keeping the market "competitive" were left out during that time.

Which is a big reason I'm writing this document, because some of you don't know how to act online. When I Started in the 1990's, Nettiquite was a thing. THen the Millennials, Trailer Hobos, Hot Topic Goth-wannabes, and future cult members all got access and that was the end of that.

First off, in my personal point of view, Social Media is not at all to be trusted to be either secure, safe, or a place to air your affairs. These platforms have turned from meeting hubs for the less technically astute, into pure nightmare dens of regular mainstreamers showing pictures of everything, and posting up their whereabouts online endlessly. This, for obvious reasons, should be very dangerous, and goes against "1990's internet Rules".