The underlying architecture of the internet needs to be redesigned from the ground up.
Do we have the Internet we deserve? There’s an argument to say that yes, we absolutely do. Given web users’ general reluctance to pay for content. We are of course, paying. Just not with cold hard cash, but with our privacy — as digital business models rely on gathering and selling intel on their users to make the money to pay (the investors who paid) for the free service.
Users are also increasingly paying with time and attention, as more ad content — and more adverts masquerading as, infiltrating and degrading content — thrusts its way in front of our eyeballs in ever more insidious ways. Whether it’s repurposing our friends’ photos and endorsements to socially engineer selling us stuff, or resorting to other background tracking and targeting tricks to divert our attention from whatever it was we were actually trying to do online.
The commercialization of the web is the ugly reality of the hidden cost of all the datacenters and servers required to power the Internet. And that commercialization is compounded by the power of the big digital platforms that dominate the web we have today: Google, Facebook, Amazon. Increasingly we’re forced to play by their rules if we want to participate in the digital space where most of our friends are.