Is this the world we created?
A short reflection on how the Internet and World Wide Web have evolved over the past twenty years and what might come next.
The World turned flat (for a moment)
I am old enough to remember the Internet Bubble 1.0 and the euphoria which preceded it. Back in the day, we were all excited about the promise of the new open world interconnected by the Internet built on open standards governed by IETF and W3C.
While the Internet and the World Wide Web which were open, global, and lightly regulated were representatives of the bright idealistic future, things like regions-locked DVDs (see How to Fix Cars* By Breaking “Felony Contempt of Business Model” by Cory Doctorow) were representatives of the soon-to-be-gone era full of artificial barriers raised by vested interests.
I recall, when working for IBM Research, we procured our ThinkPad 770 Series straight from the U.S., so these machines were precious as their DVD players were region-locked to the U.S. and we could use them to play DVDs we bought overseas. (DVD selection used to be much richer in the U.S. and the prices were significantly lower than back home in the Czech Republic.) We hated this artificial barrier and were looking forward to the Internet-based future, where if you are in possession of a credit card, you can buy any goods and consume any services, regardless of your physical location.
Where did we end up?
Well, it turns out we were naive. Once the Internet Bubble burst and we entered the “Web 2.0" era, we could observe two dominant currents reshaping the Internet into what we experience today.
On one hand, the World Wide Web and the Internet became much more centralized, de facto controlled by a handful of big tech companies. On other hand, the national governments woke up to the challenge and started regulating the Internet and erecting barriers between their local jurisdictions and their distinct regulatory frameworks.
Regarding the local regulation, that’s a two-edged sword. Governments claim to protect their citizens from big tech, citing privacy concerns, and consumer protection, yet obviously, the regulation is subject to the influence of political objectives and lobbying. The outcomes are sometimes of questionable value, sometimes clearly meaningless and annoying — European Cookie/GDPR consent banner anyone? (See The Economic Costs of the European Union’s Cookie Notification Policy by Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn or Most EU cookie ‘consent’ notices are meaningless or manipulative, study finds by Natasha Lomas)
Thus, over the last twenty years, the Internet and the World Wide Web evolved into a crippled-yet-dangerous monster. The concentration of most of the traffic in the hands of the big tech means that the freedom of speech became limited and easy to control. Governments no longer need to deal with “the Internet”, they only need to deal with a handful of companies whose primary concern is to make money, so they are easy to coerce.
Also, the old media moguls woke up and learned to play the game. Region-locked DVDs you say? That was simple and straightforward. Today, you start watching a series on Netflix, and can’t continue during your vacation or a business trip, because you traveled outside of your home country and the series might not be licensed in your new temporary location. Who cares that you paid your monthly subscription anyway? VPN to the rescue? — Why is that hassle needed?
Some companies got lost in this “balkanization” of the world themselves for no good reason. For example, I can use the Amazon Alexa app on my cell phone and the Alexa integration on my Denon Home speaker, but I can’t use Alexa features in the Amazon Music app on the very same cell phone. Alexa speech recognition just does not work in Amazon Music app, which is most annoying in Auto Mode during driving.
At times we are getting the worst of both trends. The world wide web has turned into an alley of walled gardens (see The Rise of Monolithic Software by Erik Engheim) to maximize big-tech's profits while fragmented local regulation is increasing compliance costs and slowing down regional expansion of internet businesses. And once again, the costs of fragmented regulation happen to impact the smaller companies and startups disproportionately more than big tech due to the economies of scale, thus cementing the status quo.
Next Stop: Artificial Intelligence
It remains to be seen whether the Internet and World Wide Web can come back closer to their roots in their next iterations. The pain of centralization has been called out and recognized. There are ongoing attempts to create new, decentralized alternatives for popular services. On the other hand, the pain of local regulation is likely to get worse before it gets better since the pendulum has been swinging from the side of globalization to the side of protectionism lately.
The main question for me is whether we can learn from the Internet and World Wide Web lessons while tackling the next seismic shift: the inevitable rise of artificial intelligence (AI). We are not there yet, but with each iteration we are getting closer and closer to making AI real. The same forces which (de)formed the Internet technology stack and World Wide Web will be shaping the AI industry and in case of AI the stakes for humanity are huge. We can’t afford to mess this one up. Are we capable of learning from our past mistakes?
The title of this article was inspired by “Is This the World We Created…?” song by Queen.