Take Over the Internet and RULE THE WORLD !!! - A thumbnail history

1. WHAT DIDN'T HAPPEN: THE PICAYUNE-TRIBUNE
AS INTERNET PROVIDER

In the early 1990s established media companies (the newspapers, for instance) could have moved to take shares in Internet ISPs, and history might have worked out differently. Imagine your local newspaper had the foresight to convert itself into your local ISP. This was at a time when they would have had the high ground in promoting their own new ISP services. Rather than speculating breathlessly about what the new medium would bring, they could have merged with it and driven its growth.

If it worked, as the Web grew the papers would have remained in control of distribution, not just of their own but everyone else's content (or editorial, as they called the stuff between the advertisements). They could have monetized their journalistic operations for the new media model, and perhaps there would not have been the same crisis of paid journalism we are now having. Of course, this would have depended also on what strategy the greedy corporate owners followed. (Many newspaper owners in the 1990s were out to strip and sell for immediate return, in the spirit of that decades' capitalism. Which of course has only grown worse in the present decade.)

Or imagine if the newspapers had got together to create a nationwide alliance of ISP services, based on the model by which 1500 papers own and maintain the AP wire service. Unfortunately, that thought occurred to no one - not even to any of the early electronic visionaries, let alone the print dinosaurs in the making. Just thought of it myself, the other day. And so the traditional print media are reduced to utterly reactionary moves, pretending they might charge subscription fees for viewing their page when they no longer have control of the distribution, whining like the RIAA or MPAA and dreaming Congress will impose a death penalty or other nasty penalties on cut and paste text, as it might on songs and clips.

And so the telcoms and cable companies took over the vast majority of the ISP action, as the path of least resistance would have had us predict, and they have come to control distribution and the lion's share of Internet profits at an excellent operating margin, without needing to bother much with content themselves. On the current Internet, all content and service providers combined, even the big corporate successes, in fact even the porn shops, make some tiny fraction of what the distributors (ISPs) pull in on a steady, predictable basis. (I refer here to provision of Internet content for immediate reading or consumption, rather than online retail operations like Amazon.)

2. TAKEOVER PLANS THAT FAILED

In the mid to late 1990s Yahoo, AOL and others tried to eat the Internet by creating the illusion that you need a portal or a homepage as a front door to every Internet session. I sometimes think these companies would have never gotten anywhere if no one had thought of including the unnecessary "homepage" feature in browsers and people had just learned to input URLs or find sites by search engines and bookmark their favorites (which is of course what most people do in the meantime).

This myth that you need a portal still works with part of the less-skilled portion of the Internet user population, or else these heuristic organizing devices might have disappeared altogether. Anyway, their reach and earnings from the mere fact of being front pages have declined precipitously.

In the late 1990s Microsoft tried strategies to leverage its monopoly over PC operating systems in ways that would allow it to eat the Internet by pushing all users into MS-owned sites, and by establishing their encyclopedia as the authority on world knowledge. This revealed itself as an act of clueless hubris, like trying to move earth with a teaspoon they thought was a bulldozer. After a few billion dollars they figured out their folly, and so MSN is now a backwater known for chat engines and Encarta recently went belly-up. (In this at least Wikipedia is far superior: for all its drawbacks a user-annotated model is going to map knowledge better than some inoffensive "easy-reading" written by corporate nerds).

The telcoms and cable companies until now were happy to see content run riot, because it only meant more and more subscribers going online. By now the US ISP market is saturated and possibly in decline, however, and with the infrastructure fully developed the services can be delivered more cheaply than ever, even with ever-higher volumes of data streaming.


3. WHERE WE ARE NOW - SOME THOUGHTS

It's very important for the ISPs to hide the fact that running an established infrastructure is actually cheaper than building it in the first place. So they've taken to whining about their supposedly staggering higher expenses due to increased bandwidth use. Their new hope for growth is to leverage their effective cartel position in service distribution to add parasitic revenue streams (i.e., without necessarily needing to invest anything more) by way of bandwidth charges. Thus their discovery in recent years that Internet neutrality is a sin against private enterprise and free market religion.

I'd love to see free universal public wireless access put an end to that particular potential nightmare. (Isn't that what they're doing in San Francisco?)

Otherwise, the king for now of the Internet is obviously Google. Everyone finally figured out that a good search engine provides the best map of the real-existing Internet, or at least the most effective one, for free. Rather than trying to force existing content into its own architecture (like the portals) or trying to leverage some position in the communication chain (like MS and the ISPs) into dominance over content, Google has found a position where it can let Internet growth drive its own.

This doesn't mean they aren't thinking up ways to leverage their present position into greater dominance or monopolies.

One thing that is happening is that machine-generated content is gradually coming to overwhelm anything humans write, at least in volume, though presumably not in readership! This replication of the same bullshit in 50 or 5000 different dummy sites threatens to take over all possible search queries.

The biggest factor I've left out of this random summary is the Government: the irony of Internet history as a government project; the rock-bottom reality that everything goes through a few trunks that the Commerce Dept. and a few counterparts abroad control, and that there is only one root server in Spook Central at Herndon, Virginia; Internet surveillance and use of Internet for surveillance, control and sting functions; potentials for prohibitions and use of Internet "crime" to feed the prisons; NSA, "GOVNET" and other nightmare scenarios. Much to talk about there, but I won't start or I'll have to add another 10 paragraphs.

Or perhaps the biggest factor I've left out is the users, and how they've shaped the Web for better or worse independently of what the big corporations try or like.

Anyone care to correct, object to or add anything to this pocket history? Where do you see it heading?

Any out there?

I know a community that would find this particularly interesting, but won't pay any attention to a DU link because they're not into politics.

I'd like to know why "free universal wi-fi" seems to keep failing, in so many places. Milwaukee tried to get something up and running and it "didn't work." St. Louis Park, MN, is still chock full of metal posts in the ground with wierd stuff on top, that connect or do anything except provide a perch for birds.

Is there a metropolitan system, anywhere, that's up and running?

Universal wifi would sort of be the final stage of the Internet as black hole that, contrary to the hype, sucks the profit OUT of the economy as a whole. Because how could anyone make money off the Internet then? It would be all right if we were oriented accordingly, or even able to conceive of an economy that strives to maximize productivity while MINIMIZING the total labor hours necessary to produce the same standard of living and spreading the gains equitably as we move to slackers' paradise but with good service. But we're not geared for that, so in practice the Internet has been one continuous disaster for capitalism, which almost no one wants to say in so many words. It shrinks everything it touches. Giant retail operations turn into a smaller staff of qualified code writers. It's ironic given all the capitalist salvation rhetoric that has accompanied its development.

...who's to say wifi-everywhere would have to be free?

When passengers board a municipal bus, someone has to offset the cost of fuel, maintenance, the driver's salary, etc. Hence, bus passes and fares, even if some part of the transit system also gets -- more or less, depends on the city -- tax support. Where I live there is ZERO support from tax subsidies, to offset costs. Riders pay the whole freight -- which is why they keep cutting routes and raising prices.

Maybe that's a poor analogy, I don't know.

:kick:

some switches could be thrown -- and there we'll be, staring at our blackened screens

It's a great tool, but it's no political substitute for actually wearing out shoe-leather door-to-door or talking to people face-to-face, shaking real hands, handing people real leaflets, asking real people to make real phone calls

it would better than carrying around 2 pounds of paper

It wasn't bad either. After logging in it took me directly to their main page. This was the early 90s.

how our browsers respond to our queries, how results are prioritized; they even censor content. This has been, is happening NOW; and likely to get worse unless strongly smacked down -- something our gummint seems far from.

I don't understand why more people aren't more concerned about media issues in general. And the most common placation is that the internet will somehow compensate. People seem not to want to recognize that the internet is already being controlled to some degree, and worse, with our complicity, is being transformed into a top-down surveillance system.

Knowledge is power. A balance of power (between us and our feudal lords) requires a balance of knowledge. For decades, the knowledge has been flowing one way, and not to my personal advantage.

No one controls the Net, though many groups are capable of causing severe disruption to it operation. The entire system is so fragile and interdependent that a single event can quickly cascade into a widespread failure. Many of these are accidents, "small" human errors in some configuration, program bugs, etc. but a growing number are deliberate attacks, most often by criminal gangs in Eastern Europe who control enormous botnets.

Several weeks ago, Earthlink was down for most of a day; this week, much of the Google empire is failing -- gmail, news, even web search have been out for long periods in various parts of the world.

This vulnerability is a huge problem for all of us. But the people really "in charge" of the Net are dedicated professionals concerned with making it work, technically, for everyone. Those who think they can control the Net and information in general are delusional; at most, they win short-term battles while unaware that they long ago lost that "war".

I hope to finish a large journal article this weekend about getting society from winner-take-all to winners-all.

so maybe we have a misunderstanding.

Well, I did say that the government can, instantly, shut any part of it down in a minute, and uses the Net as a means of surveillance. And there are elements of "law enforcement" or "national security" who no doubt would like to control the Net utterly.

But that's not what my post is about. I'm mainly describing attempts by corporations to

a) suck the profits out of the Net - some have succeeded better than others, but the big winners so far are the ISPs and the retailers of delivered goods and services (like Amazon), not the actual millions of Web content providers who get the majority of reads/views and log time.

b) control the Net and enforce windfalls by monopolizing access, directing traffic or dictating content. Attempts at which have so far failed, with less and less chance that anyone can succeed at this (which is a good thing!) unless the government helps (which is a real danger - see net neutrality).

Thanks for your comment.

In the OP, you used "control" wrt to newspapers/isp controling distribution of their content and that of others and profiting from this effort. Later posts had shifted into more of the "Big Brother" type control, censorship, and spying.

Your idea of online newspaper combining content, advertising, portal, and ISP was attempted with some success in the early 1990s by NandO.net, the innovative online system from "The News & Observer"based in Raleigh NC. It began before the Web, starting in the bulletin-board, dialup world pre-browser inhabited by gophers, usenet groups, and such. NandO lost their separate identify following the sale of the N&O.

I already discussed the limits on controlling the Net by anyone and spying is so widespread by so many different groups at some many points within the system that we should all use the postcard rule and assume that everything is being examined or archived by many groups along the way.

Censorship is a different matter, but it is much more subtle and thus a much greater threat to society. I have posted a lot about this over the years and I expect to finish a journal-length article within a few more days. For now, just a quick summary of what I see and most fear.

We have allowed a few large dominant sites to essentially determine what information can be found on the Web by all but a few users. If Google doesn't find it, it doesn't exist for most users. (Include Yahoo! and a few more in the generic "google" world, then it becomes "nearly all users"). We know that Google censors content returned based on country -- China, Germany, Muslim, etc. That actually go far beyond such restrictions, doing things like using ones previous search history, sites previously visited, and more to "tailor" the results returned to any one of us. You and I might Google the exact same terms and get vastly different results!

Now, look at what defines todays news. DUers are very sensitive to the way MSM restrict which items are considered newsworthy and how those selected will be framed. Google News, particularly on its various frontpages, reflects those stories (Miss CA USA) deemed most important by virtue(?) of being most-widely reported/reprinted. Thus, Google News is easily manipulated by a few news services, particularly AP, that automatically become content on affiliate sites. Recently, Blogger and friends now allow easy manipulation of search rankings by almost anyone.

Finally, there are various ways to hack search engines to make web sites invisible to those searching. A related problem is that online newspapers and such often have a different version of a story than did their print version, and the online version is often "revised" long after its original publication date, may disappear from the news site entirely and then from the Google caches, and even if still available at the site will rarely have the followup posts and discussions we depend on. Think of the DU archive being limited to just the OP.

Much more in a few days.

I got about that far with the OP and left it, you sum up the issues very well. Will look forward to your next posts!