A colleague wrote to me and reminded me that the telcos waaay back in the days before 1995 wanted a particular approach to networked communications to prosper -- managed communications, easily-controlled billing....X.500 was the shorthand he used.  AT&T had no fondness for NSFnet.  (We'll have to dig up the correspondence with Congress.)

We need the "It's a Wonderful Life" of the internet.  Not the happy ending -- the alternative middle.

What if the telcos had won at the outset?  What if they had managed the managed network?  Would we have had PCs in such profusion?  Low-cost online applications?  Many walled gardens? Would the internet have ended up at the center of things, as it has now? 

Probably not.  Bleak, very bleak.