The Internet is (not) broken

You will find no shortage of "tweet storms" or articles decrying the current state of the Internet using adjectives like "doomed", "broken", "ruined", &c. While I tend to agree with many of the points shared in such posts, I stop short of feeling defeated. Maybe it is because I am an optimist and I recognize my own power to create what I wish to see. Maybe it is my decade-plus experience and work within the tech industry and absorbing stories of those older than I who saw success/failure in the dotcom boom. Whatever it is, a few things are made clear to me:

People are not going down without a fight. The work happening in the decentralization and cryptocurrency fields are proof of this. Will these avenues catch on? Certainly not immediately, maybe even ever. However, the exercise of creating/discovering solutions is worthwhile regardless, IMHO (failures lead to advancement of new, potentially better ideas).

These big evil tech companies? They did not start out that way. "Mo' money mo' problems," shout-out to Biggie Smalls. If money really is the root of all/most evil, maybe every company should have an in-house ethics committee that is actually empowered to DO THEIR JOB (Dr Timnit Gebru and countless other people of color in the ethics space know this all too well).

Baseline technical IQ is rising — this means our bumbling politicians who have immense difficulty deciphering non-answers from facetious tech CEOs wearing shit-eating grins will finally see what we see and shut that shit down. Well, AOC does not seem to have a problem grasping technical concepts…she is also not 70+ years old so there is that.

Before continuing, it would be useful to recap what ails the Internet as seen by enthusiasts of this wonderous platform. Rather than enumerate, I will share a list off the top of my head:

Too much of today's Internet is dependent upon a handful of tech companies.

Most of "FAANG": Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google

All these companies are based in the United States, and various law enforcement agencies routinely subpoena (order) said companies to hand over data in the interest of "national security." Half-truths are technically the truth, right?

The data brokerage economy, which is a fancy way to say your personal data is sold and traded around the world for cheap, was enabled by Facebook, Google, and a LOT of smaller companies you have never heard the name of (but the investors you follow on Twitter? Oh, they know).

In all fairness you did agree to the terms and conditions of these services you use so they can legally do whatever they want with the data you give them…but does that make it right? Ethics apparently has no place in law.

For fans of capitalism (like myself), this seems like not-that-big-a-deal in the grand scheme of things. The best companies became successful and just pivoted to what makes the most money. Maximizing profits while keeping margins low? That's Business 101, babeee! Pull yourself up by the bootstraps! No pain no gain! Working hard or hardly working? ARE YA WINNIN' SON?!

But I digress.

Any time a major service like Google Analytics, YouTube, or Amazon Web Services (AWS) is down, a couple technical people get on Twitter and say "SEEEEE?! We shouldn't rely on them!" but the fact of the matter is, software is created by humans, humans are fallible, and shit happens. And, servers falling over? Nobody wants to deal with that, it's annoying! For those of us who aren't technical enough to perform DevOps, the idea of managing a server (let alone setting one up) is intimidating at best. So…the alternative is to quit using/paying for one service in favor of a less "evil" or problematic one. For example, the people who leave their grandparents behind on Facebook in favor of Twitter. It is alarming that Twitter only started to reign in the President's fear-/hate-mongering and lies in the weeks leading up to the election…not one time prior to 2020. 10 days left of the presidency he's managed to hold onto and that's when Twitter FINALLY finds the guts to boot him off their platform. Anyhoo…

Where do we go from here?

The pessimists of the tech crowd will say there's no point in creating alternatives.

"No one will sign up for your service, what makes it better than ?"

" has existed for years, you're not just gonna eat their lunch."

"Normies want free, they won't pay for your dumb idea"

"How are you gonna handle moderation, if can't do it?"

I'm old enough to remember what is commonly referred to as the "Wild West" of the Internet. Internet access speeds were excruciatingly slow by today's standards and web browsers were not capable of what we take for granted now. Developers favored XML over HTML! Because the Internet was still fairly new, there were no established norms nor preconceptions. "Data harvesting" sounded more like a malicious act some corporation in a cyberpunk novel would engage in. But, when people wish the Internet was back to how it used to be, I believe they are (usually) talking about the feeling of it, rather than the limited functionality (interestingly, Gopher has seen a resurgence lately along with Gemini).

When I was in middle school in the year 2000 I got an account on homestead.com and was able to play around with the free website space they gave me. I downloaded a website theme from some place and learned CSS and HTML by tweaking parameters in Notepad and re-uploading the changed files. As archaic as that process was, it blew my mind that I could create a Megaman Battle Network fan-site and have it reachable by a URL to show my friends at school in the computer lab. As I got older I wanted a site without ads and more storage space so I moved onto mediatemple and continued my web development explorations there.

This level of access seems to be gone these days. Services are still free, of course, but mostly services where you can be siloed in. This is how brand recognition/loyalty occurs. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are not giving schools free laptops and tablets out of (just) kindness, it is a long-term play that usually pans out. Bah, I feel pessimism settling in so onto solutions, as I see them.

YOU CANNOT PUT THE GENIE BACK IN THE BOTTLE

Tech companies have tasted the delicious nectar of wealth that is user data and it is the gift that keeps on giving. Well, maybe it should not be called a gift. The companies are spending investor dollars to pay their employees to build features that will get you to sign up and use their product in exchange for your usage habits and keywords within your memes and online rants. You…well, they get what they pay for. You get a nice park to play in and garden to eat from while the wolves watch from behind that tree over there. To reduce our reliance on said companies, we need new ones with our best interests at heart to tackle:

analytics

blogs and free websites

collaborative documents

DNS and domains

email

search

social

The easiest way to handle free services is to offer a more capable paid service alongside it. Google currently has a monopoly over most of this list and best believe, they want more. Poor Facebook just cannot stop being creepy long enough for people to foolishly trust them again and that is crushing their dreams of becoming American WeChat.

As for me? Well, I am just one guy on the Internet with a voice and a plan for every item on this list. I am also not afraid of not knowing what I do not know so 2021 should be an informative year for me (us, if you want to follow along). Watch this space. 🕸