QUOTE
I’d go with this, or something similar. While the internet existed, from my reading of the timeline history there really wasn’t anything to suggest that it became as pervasive or powerful as in our timeline. Which could be easily enough explained, given the corporate power we see in the SR timeline: instead of a wide open net, which made room for innovative start-up companies to grow rapidly, it became something that mostly kept subscribers captive to their providers (think AOL, but with even less access to the broader net).
A few points:
* AOL (under the name of UCASOL) exists in Shadowrun and is one of the largest Matrix service providers in the world. It also maintains the UCAS' national grid, called UCAS Online. It is a subsidiary of Renraku Americas.
* The Shadowrun internet
was wide open. that was its doom. The Matrix was designed specifically to prevent the Crash of 29 from reoccurring by being made of failsafes and a lot more restricted. See Mercurial, Virtual Realities, Matrix. The crash also took a lot of technological knowledge with it, and cut off a number of - mostly deserted and never really recovered - space habitats (Shadowplay, Lone Wolf, Matrix, Target: Wastelands).
* What about today's internet is wide open and gives a lot of room for innovation? If anything, the internet has developed exactly into the Shadowrun Matrix' structure - a few powerful corporations control (and censor, and use to brainwash) the publically accessible internet - Alphabet, Tencent, Facebook, Baidu, Amazon - while a hidden, shadowy second internet exists, more or less hidden from public view (and tolerated by the internet-controlling corporations) - and I don't think ShadowLand is any more corny than
dark web.