Well, back in the day you’d have a series of different services, usenet, irc, email, and for articles (at the time usually scholarly articles) you could use Gopher or follow certain usenet groups to find FTP sites hosting the docs.
So if we didn’t have a unified web browser, and those technologies advanced at the pace of other similar services, here is how I see it:
Most services would be accessed by discrete apps, one for your email, one for your chat, one for your remote and local documents.
We wouldn’t see the proliferation of siloed services, platforms like Facebook that offer all of these services but only within their subscribers. They just simply wouldn’t be able to compete with the established services or add nuance or extra value.
Discord would also likely have come into existence a lot earlier and unified some of those services, but again if they chose to silo it as they are doing now, they wouldn’t gain market dominance over already existing wide communities.
Without the profit incentive, existing services have no reason to tie their users to their platform or inhibit cross platform interactions.
Streaming services would still come into existence and fragment and silo like they are now, but that’s only because of the cost of providing reliable HD video content isn’t easily dispersed across unsiloed userbases.
Web advertisements would be non-existant but you’d still get spots in podcasts and videos.
Frankly I think it would be a better internet than what we have now.
Good!
When I was a kid I loved hanging out in the library, reading books and newspapers and learning so many things.
But it was always empty, and the librarians always seemed surprised to see me as a regular.
Libraries are wonderful places that don’t demand you spend money to be there and everyone should get a card even if only for the extra ID.