The early Internet was a high-trust society created by high-IQ people. They didn't have to worry about deliberate attacks until the low-trust, low-IQ people turned up en masse.
DNS was a huge mistake though. The Internet was designed to be decentralized and then they put a centralized system for mapping names to addresses on top of it.
But they needed a quick hack which was better than manually updating hosts file and probably never imagined it would still be in use decades later.
Notes by Eddy | export