 Some people confuse videotex with the Internet.Although early videotex providers in the 1970s encountered many issues similar to those faced by Internet service providers 20 years later, it is important to emphasize that the two technologies evolved separately and reflect fundamentally different assumptions about how to computerize communications.The Internet in its mature form (after 1990) is highly decentralized in that it is essentially a federation of thousands of service providers whose mutual cooperation makes everything run, more or less.