Putting the internet in the hands of corporations was the worst thing that ever happened to technology
The Internet is supposed to be distributed. We've gotten so used to consolidated services that we have forgotten this lesson.
Sounds like the issues we currently have with democracy.
Centralizing control of something that was designed to be distributed
It’s also not a very interesting problem to solve because of the type of cliffs you will run into due to precisely how the “internet works”
What is relevant is governance. We allow billionaires and venture capitalists to govern a commons that we all rely on. Surprise surprise, it isn't going well.
The solution is not to have (difficult to scale) federated alternatives. The solution is collective ownership.
Imagine for a moment that the multinationals that are increasingly in charge of our lives were owned by their customers. Imagine they had a fair electoral system, reflecting the variety of those users, limiting them to one person, one vote, and that their constitutions were designed to guarantee the rights of minorities.
The journey that most countries went on through the 20th and 21st centuries, in other words.
Tech giants and other multinationals are a different kind of beast, because they govern a little slice of our lives instead of having carte blanche. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility for democratically operated multinationals to exist. It will be hard to do, but IMO, that approach has a bright future because non-techies can grasp it and participate in it more easily, and that is one less barrier to a runaway network effect than the fediverse has.
FOSS, fediverse, IPFS all had their chance, and they blew it. Corporations were the ones who opened up the internet to the 99% of people who would otherwise never have been there at all, and now they want to collect their cut.
Even now, these federated sites on the rise have technicial growing pains. And those will probably take years to get through until it's to a point where everyone can use it with little friction.
Twitter made a convenient, easy to use, centralized (which is an absolute positive for user experience), social media product that attracted people, by their own free will. The number of people using a social media service amplifies its "usefulness", so the more people, the stronger it attracts new users.
We didn't put the internet in the hands of these corporations. We walked over and sat in their, easy to use, hands.
A dynamic, user-driven community still thrives in the vast expanse of the digital world, yet it lies hidden beyond the towering edifices of corporate-controlled structures. Discovering these spaces has become an increasingly formidable task, as the infusion of corporate social content into journalistic and blogging platforms perpetuates the mirage that such networks are all that exist.
Each colossal tech corporation we see today began its journey as a modest, affable endeavor. As these projects expanded with their burgeoning popularity, users neglected to challenge the escalating influence and control these companies wielded.
Nitter was merely an alternative facade to Twitter. Despite offering an ad-free environment, it lacked substantial advantages as the underlying platform remained the same - Twitter.
However, the digital realm is not void of choices. Federated social media is emerging as a profound alternative. Yet, a majority of those voicing concerns about corporate social media seem to dismiss options like Mastodon. This is primarily due to their increased technological demands and people's comfort in having a corporation guide their online journey.
The power to reshape your digital footprint rests in your hands. You can sever ties with your corporate social media accounts. You can choose to eschew media that incessantly embeds corporate social media content. You can advocate for an internet not ruled by corporate influence. All it requires is the willingness to venture beyond the realm of comfort.
I have a hard time reconciling this perspective with history. Were any of these ideals present among the people/organizations responsible for the internet and the Web at the time that they were being developed? Or is sentiment like yours something that people adopted later on?
The internet was conceived as a DARPA concept of reliable government communications in the face of unreliable transport, among many other research interests. For most of its early existence (through at least the NSFnet incarnation in the US), it was the private preserve of academic, government and military users, along with some of the corporations that supported them and commercial use beyond supporting projects was prohibited (e.g. you couldn't use it for advertising). It was far from a 'Democratic haven'. There were epic flamewars over 'do we let any more commercial content in our private backyard?' and 'why would we let regular people in?'.
However, a pervasive dip in technological literacy...
Right...it's bad we let the proles into utopia. So much for 'democratic havens'.
If you can't get the basic background right, it really damages the credibility of the rest of the screed (which I mostly agree with).
We the people were inactive & didn't figure out how to weave together our individual & community sites to create a compelling multi-party space.
Or we could try to create alternative centralized but non-corporate systems. Not sure what other options there are.
I don't like where we are either. But new power has to be created. Hard work of figuring out protocols to converse across & usefully home our content/words on is sort of just beginning.
I don't think they'd have ever bothered inventing privacy violating trackers A/B testing (though if I'm wrong this is the best place to assert wildly and be quickly corrected).
Without tech companies, it was still immensely useful.
Apps on iPhones? Great, but the internet doesn't need them to be hugely culturally and socially important — and I'm saying that as an iPhone app developer since before the first iPad came out.
Putting the internet in the hands of the Government wouldn't fair much better.