ekrYesterday I posted my thoughts on Chrome's Web Environment Integrity proposal https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/wei/, but I know some people would rather read a thread than 7000 words 1/N
There are two basic flavors of networked systems, "closed" in which all the elements are under the control of the operator and are assumed to be cooperating and "open" in which the individual elements are operated by different people (especially users) and work on their behalf. 2/N
The original Bell System phone monopoly is an example of the first kind of system. AT&T didn't even let you own your own phone; you had to rent one from them, and they looked like this: 3/N
The result was that although Bell Labs did a huge amount of amazing research (the transistor, UNIX, information theory, discovering the cosmic microwave background, etc.), the actual phone system evolved incredibly slowly.
This all changed with the 1968 Carterfone decision when the FCC required AT&T to allow people to connect their own equipment to the phone network, at which point they could use answering machines, modems, etc.
At roughly the same time, the first nodes in the Internet were being deployed. The Internet is designed along totally different lines, under the assumption that elements in the network were independently operated. This is a much more difficult design challenge, because you have to build a system that's stable even when node A is adversarial to node B.