Lawd, that would be amazing. I don't think the IETF or ICANN/IANA or any of those other bodies really ever had the power they needed (should have had) at the time. I fear the genie is out of the proverbial bottle.
Legal expropriation summons the genie back to their bottle to, if not return to it, then to hang around, maybe on the front porch of the bottle, drinking a lemonade.
I used to think it was cool that most things on the Internet were freely available, but I regret it: we are the product now.
That’s how MBAs conceived it and got v. capitalists to throw their windfalls at it. This too can also be strictly regulated by the public, were the democratic will be behind it.
And my goodness, this. The TikTok-ification and [insert prior and next platform iteration here] of the world needs to stop. This is what we as a species have done with free communication exchange? Ugh, I'll pass 🥲.
Maybe that's a part of why we're all in love with these "old" machines =)
I like these older machines because they work well and were exceptional value for the money (back at a time when shareholder dividends were indexed to Moore’s Law and components were not yet at a basic commodity level). These machines are emblematic of just making a good product, selling that good product, maintaining that good product, and being OK with a small, but long-lasting and steady profit and not aiming for infinite growth, which is delusional and, materially, impossible (and which is why I like to say capitalism is the ultimate/Ur Ponzi scheme).
In the absence of infinite growth sooner (not later), corporations expand to other realms, like financial services (yes, GE, GM, and Apple, you’re all bound and caught dead to rights here) and other soft services (like subscriptionware). And/or, they begin to hobble or confine access from using readily available commodity parts.
That value was pressed by impatient shareholders expecting never-ending returns, replaced by a paradigm we know all too well in Appleland — something
Linus Sebastian broke down recently far better than (I have the patience to do) myself. That paradigm is the wholly soldered system and, also, operating systems which disable complete operability when it detects components in hardware which have been replaced (say, after a repair). The case defence is “security”, but it’s a specious one, as best, when the system bogs down after you
swap a component from another unit of identical make and provenance.
Anyway, yah. These PowerPC and Early Intel Macs are remarkable because they brought together a solid value proposition and longevity of durable use,
by design — and not aggressively limiting parts interchangeability (heck, even soldered CPUs can be replaced with better CPUs from the same generation of processors, and the Mac won’t invoke an instant lockout).
