The internet is in decline – it needs rewilding

last week, I came across a magical photograph from 1989 or 1990. It shows the world’s first web server. It was Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT workstation in Cern, the international physics research lab, where he worked at the time. On the case is a tattered sticky label, on which is scribbled, in red ink, “This machine is a server DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”

He was able to do this because the internet, which had been publicly available since January 1983, enabled it. The network had no central ownership or controller; and it did only one thing – transfer data packets from one edge of the network to their destination at another edge. If you were smart enough to build an application that used data packets, then the internet would do it for you, no questions asked.

However, the next generation of innovators to benefit from this freedom – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple et al – saw no reason to extend it to anyone else. They built fabulously profitable enterprises on the platform that Berners-Lee had created. The creative commons of the internet has been gradually and inexorably enclosed, much as agricultural land was by parliamentary acts from 1600 onwards in England., is that our online spaces are no longer open ecosystems.

“The internet”, Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Google, famously observed, “is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” Since Dr Schmidt once ran the Google plantation, what he regards as anarchy is doubtless what ecologists would call diversity.

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