What is the internet?
The past, present and the future in a nutshell
This was the question asked of some internet insiders at the Internet Society Netherlands Chapter’s (ISOC.nl) new years party this year. I’m not sure if I would have had a decent answer ready, but after watching a panel of internet insiders struggle with this question I thought about why it’s such a difficult question and yet also important.
The answers the panel gave, ranged from a variant of describing the underlying technology, wires, and switches connecting the world, to a comparison with utilities like the municipal water supply. And while all true, I don’t think they come close to a true answer.
The impact
Maybe Wired got close when they asked one of their writers to write about the internet for their, for their 25th anniversary. A story written from the viewpoint of, and using only technology available in 1993.
The writer, who incidentally was younger than 25, had to learn how to navigate the world without any modern — post-1993 — technology. In the afterword, she presents the technology equivalents to a single internet connected smartphone, and it’s a desk filled to the brim with stuff. Computers, a Rolodex, phonebook, paper maps, etc. Most of us don’t often think about just how much we rely on this new technology, almost all of which is somehow tied to the internet.
However, even that answers the question only on a utilitarian base. The impact of the internet in 2019 is much bigger than this. The presidential election in the USA, Brexit, fake news… all these subjects owe much to how and for what we’re using the internet today. The extent to which a few big organizations control so much of our data and our attention was certainly not something foreseen in 1993. On the contrary, even then the internet, and more importantly the web was seen as a free space with no barriers or controls, where everyone had the same power and access.
Three pioneers of the internet
Today, that vision seems gone and not likely to return. But somewhere between these views we can get a glimpse of what the internet might have been and might still become. To get at it, we have to go back, way back and take a look at what the trailblazers whose shoulders we’re standing on had in mind.
The first one to articulate a vision close to the internet or even the web is no doubt Vannevar Bush, who wrote the prescient article ‘As we may think’ in 1945. Long before the concept of the modern computer was invented or even thought of. In the article he describes a machine that can retrieve any of a multitude of files for viewing, one or two side by side, searching and computation. He called this machine the Memex and as imagined used technology extrapolated from 1945, like microfiches and mechanical calculation. However, you can fairly easily transform the 1945 tech jargon to more modern 2019 technologies, without changing the overall vision. And the vision was astoundingly optimistic, it was about augmenting the human intellect and creativity and letting a machine do the more mundane and repetitive thinking.
In fact, our second trailblazer, Theodore Nelson, cited this article in his foundational hypertext articles. As he said, “it became the semi-official Beginning of the Hypertext field.” Ted Nelson went on to design the Xanadu system, the best hypertext system that never was. But one of the important results from Xanadu is his list of 17 core requirements of a robust worldwide hypertext system. Central to this vision was the idea that it would provide access to all human knowledge and that nothing of value would ever be lost. In addition, it had access controls, a search index, unlimited robust storage, micropayments, DRM and two-way links and transclusions. Unfortunately, the sheer scope of his vision was too much for the state of technology then, and perhaps even now.
So in 1989, when after more than 20 years of Xanadu not being released, third trailblazer Tim Berners-Lee needed a simple way to share scientific data and journals, he decided to build his own Hypertext system with an approach we might today call a Minimal Viable Product (MVP). This he called the World-Wide Web and the first website on it was published in August 1991, only just over 2 years after his proposal was green-lit at CERN. And the rest is history, the web and with it, the internet took off like nothing we’ve seen before.
The web nowadays
In 2019 we’re well into the information age. Yet when you look closer at the visions of these pioneers, it seems to me we are still a long way from achieving what they imagined. The web as we know it today doesn’t come close to implementing all 17 of the rules of Xanadu, although some of these gaps have been filled by some of the largest internet companies today (like: Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc).
Yet in doing so, the web has lost a lot of its liberty. Large parts, that we use daily, are governed by single organizations that answer only to their shareholders. And some rules aren’t implemented at all, more than 25 years after the initial release.
Who still uses bookmarks as a fundamental way to keep links to information we use. Hyperlinks rot. After an average of 100 days (some say slightly more), a link is gone or changed into something unrecognizable. So today we Google almost everything. And if Google doesn’t have the link in the first page, it might as well be gone. Which it often is, although the good people at the Internet Archive try to preserve it. This is a shame for most content, but it really becomes a problem for science. Articles published only on the internet, in online scientific journals suffer the same fate. Attempts to prevent this exist, but rely on manual updates from the authors. This obviously fails.
Future-proofing the web
By avoiding the technical complexities inherent in the rules laid out by Xanadu, we got a world-wide-web. But we also got a lot of the problems we have today. Tim Berners-Lee calls for a contract for the web, which I support and signed. But it’s not going to fix the technical issues at the core of these problems. We will need to design a better web, one that keeps the original goals of the web in mind, the vision of a robust hyperlinked web of information. A web meant to augment our human intellect.
So if you care about the internet, about this vision of a universal tool for all humans, help us make it happen. Take a look at the projects working on the decentralized web, which hopes to fix many of the shortcomings we have today. Or take a look at Indieweb.org for a more pragmatic approach.
Let’s take back the internet for all of us.
This blog is written by Auke van Slooten, our senior developer.
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