I have happy memories of enjoying using the internet with 33.6k and then “fast” 56k dial-up modems in the late 1990s. Pages took a short moment to load, especially if they were image-heavy. But as my interests were largely centred on science news, I was well prepared to wait a moment for the latest updates.
It was amazing that so much information was available for free, from experts who were willing to share their knowledge with anyone who was interested in their topics. The internet was like a vast, inclusive, knowledge-growing library… ready to answer any questions that I wanted to throw at it.
And then, at some point that I can’t quite put my finger on, the whole experience started to degrade.
The first online advert appeared in a webpage banner on Hotwired magazine in 1994. The click-through rate was great, and the flood gates had opened to the degrading effects of capitalism on the internet.
Today, it is very difficult to use the internet without being subjected to online advertising, often intrusive to your experience of using the internet, driven by degrees of tracking and categorisation of your “interests” that in the worst instances expose your intimate details to commerce, criminals and human rights abuses in less-democratic States.
The days of the all-including, global knowledge library are over… corrupted by tech oligarchs driven by profit, not social good.
Yet the internet has now become a necessity in developed nations, as organisations force their “customers” onto their digital technologies instead of paying staff to support them. In some cases these changes are transformative and bring real benefits to people. But too often the services are badly configured, on poor architecture, subject to the whims and headwinds of change in the tech oligarch’s centralised services, all the while creating massive data-breach risks that expose millions to criminal activity. And in the meantime, many organisations want us to pay a double-cost for that by sucking up online ads.
For me, online ads are capitalistic leeches on the modern miracle that is the internet. They consume power to be delivered to a user’s computer, more power to be rendered and (maybe) viewed, consuming bandwidth that would be better used for delivering real content. At times the delivery of ads is now making some online services unusable, like YouTube for example.
Many corporations seem to be using ads to funnel us towards an ad-free, “better” experience that is waiting behind their paywalls. But we all know how that ends – you pay the money, then the corporation degrades the service or demands unreasonable cost increases to stay behind the paywall. They want the profits; so they’ll either grab them via advertising, reduce the quality of the service, or milk their paywall for what they can get.
My suggestion is to split the internet.
Keep the current “Internet v1” so that companies can continue to operate the digital businesses they have built. Let the oligarchs have that, if they wish.
Build an “Internet v2” where commercialised practices are not allowed. The services hosted on this new global platform should be just those that enhance the provision of social goods, including education, public healthcare and so on. We could drive and protect this new internet v2 with tools produced and hardened via international agreements, to ensure a robust and safe experience for the populations using it, leveraging all the protections that the nation states’s security services can help with.
Without change, how are we going to ensure that the internet remains a life-enhancing tool for generations to come?
Lee J. Russell, creative 