Mini Hungarian language lesson: two towers.

I often wonder what it would've been like to be born into a culture and language that had already gone global: English, French, Spanish...incidentally there seems to be a link between these, for a bonus point can you guess what it is?

Anyway, let's not dwell on this too much, it isn't meant to be that kind of discussion. Let's reverse it instead: imagine that you were born into a highly localised and isolated language.

What would be different?

Well, you'd have your very own internet for a start.

In the early 1990s Hungarian internet was basically just academia.

This is not an exaggeration, the first domain under the .hu TLD (assigned in 1990) was http://sztaki.hu , which began operating in 1991 and the first Hungarian IP address was 192.84.225.1.

How quaint!

By the way, don't look for this IP now, it's been reassigned to Morris County in New Jersey since.

But back to Hungary.

It was remarkable that things moved this quickly because up until 1990 all the equipment that was needed to connect to the Internet would've been under COCOM export embargo, so a lot of the network hardware was developed in-house implementing open standards like X.25.

In the mid-90s very few businesses were seriously interested in this thing called the Internet, but two that definitely did were global publishing giants IDG and MATÁV, the then still monopolised phone/telecom provider. (Who'd later be bought by Deutsche Telekom.)

What they did was pretty similar too: they found a group of talented and enthusiastic youngsters and said "here's some money, go find out if you can do something internety with it". Which is a. amazing, b. very different to how things are going in Silicon Valley.

These experiments yielded two portals (again, how quaint): INteRNeTTo and http://origo.hu  respectively.

They both looked at examples of US portals like Yahoo or AOL, and so ended up not entirely dissimilar to each other: focused around the news but with so much more too.

INteRNeTTo got rid of its silly name and its association with IDG in the late 1990s in turbulent fashion, culminating in the entire staff walking out and simply starting a new portal: http://index.hu .

Everything was set for the (friendly) online media rivalry of the 2000s: http://origo.hu  vs http://index.hu .

While they were similar, their voices were slightly different: with Index being more irreverent; they were their own company, not a corporate sub-entity.

And while politicians fought over the battlegrounds of print and broadcast media, their influence largely bounced off the online domain: Origo were part of Deutsche Telekom and Index was an ad-driven media company, neither of them were set to gain from becoming a political tool.

That's not to say they weren't political, they very much were, but it was driven by the editorial team and attempts to influence them were strongly rejected.

Amidst the frivolous stuff and wire copies, real investigative journalism exposed some of the big scandals of the day.

But by the 2010s, the landscape of the internet was very different. Wonderfully amateuristic social networking site iWIW succumbed to an emerging Facebook, blogs and "user-generated content" were on the rise and Viktor Orbán was elected to power.

And with him came the doctrine of total control of the media landscape, this time with the realisation that the online sphere is crucial.

Origo fell first, in 2014. Out went the investigative journalism that exposed the corruption in government and in came outright propaganda.

That left Index as the last recognised bastion of independent journalism.

While it changed hands repeatedly and attempts were made to gain control of the editorial process but they were repelled one way or another.

Until this week. https://index.hu/english/2020/07/22/index_szabolcs_dull_termination_unacceptable_staff_statement/

The age of innocence is officially over, even though in practice it's been for a long time. While in the early 2000s with our circle of friends we lived our lives on the legendary open forum of Index, all our relationships playing out in public view, we stopped that a decade ago.

What next for Hungarian internet? I don't know but probably nothing good.

But maybe...the relative obscurity and isolation that had allowed the weird parallel evolution of content but was also very limiting and led to the financial vulnerability of online media is dissolving?

Maybe what the government has taken control of is nothing more than an empty shell of an obsolete idea?

Or maybe I'm just trying to put a positive spin on something objectively terrible.

I'll probably try to write about swearing again next time instead, at least that's fun.