Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Sunday marked the 30th anniversary of CERN releasing the WWW to the public! (Now) Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the concept of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to make it easier to share information within CERN among their scientists, running on a computer that Steve Jobs helped create after he was kicked out of Apple, The NeXT Step. It was an amazingly powerful computer and included an optical drive - not a CD - for storage!

The NeXT basically became the prototype for the later Mac operating systems when Jobs returned to Apple.

The Register article, though short, has some very good material in it.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/02/world_wide_web_30th_anniversary/

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/05/02/167232/cern-celebrates-30-years-since-releasing-the-web-to-the-public-domain

And just to be pedantic, the Internet and the World Wide Web are two different things! The internet is a communications network: the hardware and protocols for moving information between hosts (a host is any device that connects to the internet). WWW is the software, such as the web browser that you're using right now, that makes it a heck of a lot more easier for end users to benefit from it.

This is absolute insanity and stands little hope of winning in court, or appeal. From the article:

Four cities in Indiana are suing Netflix and other video companies, claiming that online video providers and satellite-TV operators should have to pay the same franchise fees that cable companies pay for using local rights of way.

The lawsuit was filed against Netflix, Disney, Hulu, DirecTV, and Dish Network on August 4 in Indiana Commercial Court in Marion County. The cities of Indianapolis, Evansville, Valparaiso, and Fishers want the companies to pay the cable-franchise fees established in Indiana's Video Service Franchises (VSF) Act, which requires payments of 5 percent of gross revenue in each city.

Ignoring DirecTV, whose parent, AT&T, is hemorrhaging money on that purchase, they're stupid enough to sue DISNEY?! And note one name conspicuously absent: Amazon. Their Prime TV service uses the same cables. Again, Amazon has huge amounts of money - as do all of these defendants - to represent themselves in court. Probably more than the cities do. This is also extremely bad precedent because if they somehow win, then they've just destroyed the internet because every municipality can charge franchise fees: no more YouTube, taxes on everything at every level.

Internet services already pay connection fees to be carried over ISP services. Those fees are already paid in to city coffers. They do not add to infrastructure load. The cities are trying to double-dip. I understand and appreciate that cities are under tremendous financial burden, especially under these plague times: I've worked in city/state government almost my entire working life. But this is a monumentally stupid idea that is going to go down in flames.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/cities-sue-netflix-hulu-disney-claim-they-owe-cable-franchise-fees/