{"id":45703,"date":"2023-10-20T15:45:49","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/whats-wrong-with-the-internet-and-do-we-need-to-fix-it-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:45:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:45:49","slug":"whats-wrong-with-the-internet-and-do-we-need-to-fix-it-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/whats-wrong-with-the-internet-and-do-we-need-to-fix-it-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s wrong with the internet and do we need to fix it? – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Sam Hinton<\/em><\/p>\n

More than 20 years after the first web server started bringing the internet into our lives, a recent conference in San Francisco brought together some of its creators to discuss its future.<\/p>\n

The general tone of the conference is probably best summed up by the Electronic Frontiers Foundation\u2019s Cory Doctorow:<\/p>\n

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In the last twenty years, we\u2019ve managed to nearly ruin one of the most functional distributed systems ever created: today\u2019s Web.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This might seem like a surprising statement. To many of us, the web has become an indispensable part of modern life. It\u2019s the portal through which we get news and entertainment, stay in touch with family and friends, and gain ready access to more information than any human being has ever had. The web today is probably more useful and accessible to more people than it has ever been.<\/p>\n

Yet for people such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, and Vinton Cerf who is often referred to as one of the \u201cfathers of the internet\u201d, Doctorow\u2019s comment cuts right to the heart of the problem. The internet has not evolved in the way they had envisioned.<\/p>\n

The centralised web<\/h3>\n

Their main concern is that the internet \u2013 and the information on it \u2013 has become increasingly centralised and controlled.<\/p>\n

In the early days of the web, people who wanted to publish online would run their own web servers on their own computers. This required a reasonably good understanding of the technology, but meant that information was distributed across the internet.<\/p>\n

As the web grew, companies that took the technical hurdles out of web publishing were established. With Flickr, for example, a photographer can easily upload his or her photos to the internet and share them with other people.<\/p>\n

YouTube did the same thing for video, while tools such as WordPress made it easy for anyone to write blogs.<\/p>\n

Social media in particular has made it easy for everyone to get online. The period in which these services really took off is generally referred to as web 2.0.<\/p>\n

But along with this development of easy-to-use publishing technologies came a centralisation of the internet, and with that, the loss of some of the internet\u2019s potential.<\/p>\n

The decentralised web<\/h3>\n

Proponents of the decentralised web argue that there are three main problems with the web today: openness and accessibility; censorship and privacy; and archiving of information.<\/p>\n

Openness and accessibility refers to the tendency of centralisation to lock people into a particular service. So, for example, if you use Apple\u2019s iCloud to store your photos, it\u2019s difficult to give someone access to those photos if they have a Microsoft OneDrive account, because the accounts don\u2019t talk to each other.<\/p>\n

The second issue \u2013 censorship and privacy \u2013 is a deep concern for people like Doctorow and Berners-Lee. Centralised web services make it relatively easy for internet use to be monitored by governments or companies. For example, social media companies make money by trading on the value of personal information.<\/p>\n

As we use social media, fitness trackers and health apps to document our lives, we generate a lot of personal data. We freely give this personal data to social media companies by agreeing to their terms of service when we create our accounts.<\/p>\n

The third issue with today\u2019s web is that it is ephemeral; information changes and websites go offline all the time, and very little is retained or archived. Vinton Cerf has referred to this as the \u201cdigital dark age\u201d because when historians look back at this point in history, much of the material on the internet won\u2019t exist anymore \u2013 there will be no historical record.<\/p>\n

A good example of this loss of history occurred when GeoCities, which hosted millions of web pages created by individuals, was first bought out by Yahoo and then discontinued.<\/p>\n