Joi Ito - Creative Commons: Enabling the next level of innovation
Here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine what it would have been like to create Google before the era of the Internet and open standards. You would probably have had to pay millions of dollars to create the necessary software on a proprietary operating system. The effort would have required a huge team of people taking many years. Since Google is a search engine, it most likely would have been given to the phone company to design and run. If you were using X.25, the international networking standard (the Internet equivalent of its time), you would have been charged for each packet of information that you sent or received, in a network in which each network operator had a bilateral agreement with every other network operator. This total project probably would have taken a decade, cost a billion dollars, and not have worked very well.
In fact, the actual cost of building and launching the first Google server was probably only thousands of dollars using standard PC components, mostly open-source software as the base, and connecting to the Stanford University network, which immediately made the service available, at no additional cost, to everyone else on the Internet.
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