I'm at a tech conference this week and I was talking to some coders last night about how the internet has changed. Remember back when people would live-stream their entire lives? Not necessarily to be a eyeball-grabber, but just because they wanted to live in the open. That lasted for a little while, but then people realized that by inviting ten thousand people into their lives, it wasn't just sharing -- it was something else entirely. People started making demands.

This is not the internet we were promised.

Back in the day, the internet had a Utopian feel to it. We would hook up our computers to each other, open up the pipes, and the free exchange of honest information would result in Good Things Happening (tm). We never were really told what all these good things would be. I suppose it meant more free people in the world, or rapid advancement of the sciences, or more folks becoming friends.

Instead it's countries building great firewalls, science publishers holding on to their data and using the legal system to enforce it -- and more little niches where like-minded people talk to each other in an echo room.

Web pages, which were just one way of many to go see printed content that somebody had stored, have turned into some weird kind of real-estate. Long gone from most toolkits are Gopher, Telnet, FTP, and the rest. Instead, everything is a web page. Long gone are people owning their own computers, which amazes me to no end. Instead, somehow in many cases we're ending up licensing our own stuff. Walled garden providers "help" us by deciding who can speak to whom. Everybody wants to "help" us now -- and it's all with trade-offs that most consumers fail to fully fathom.

I miss the old internet.