Bardzo dobry artykuł opisujący śmierć internetu – (The Death of the Internet )

Poniżej główne wnioski.

Internet był zdecentralizowany:

Years later, Cerf said, “The beauty of the internet is that it’s not controlled by any one group.” In his view, “this model has not only made the internet very open—a testbed for innovation by anyone, anywhere—it’s also prevented vested interests from taking control.”

łamał monopole  gigantów:

The principle of decentralization went directly against the business models of technology giants like AT&T and IBM. Until AT&T’s monopoly was broken up in the early 1980s, communications were extremely centralized and traveled through dedicated, point-to-point channels. The use of third-party devices on the network was prohibited.

Wynalazca www publikował kod za darmo:

Tim Berners-Lee, in the late 1980s, he created a way for information to be shared easily using hypertext via the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee could have become fabulously wealthy, but instead he released the source code for free, embodying the democratic spirit of the internet. Berners-Lee wanted “an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries.”

Według twórcy www, internet dzisiaj jest zepsuty i zmonopolizowany, jak kiedyś sieci w latach 70 ubiegłego wieku

Today, Berners-Lee thinks the internet is broken. In a 2018 interview with Vanity Fair, he recalled its early days. “The spirit there was very decentralized,” Berners-Lee said. “The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to to ask permission. That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we’ve lost.”

Kluczowy dla utraty decentralizacji był rok 2014, kied to połowa światowego ruchu pochodziła z dwóch źródeł: Facebooka i Google. Obecnie Facebook i Google generuje ponad 70% ruchu w internecie.

Facebook has since become AOL 2.0, a centrally designed internet for its users. You discover only what the company wants you to. It is about as uncool as AOL, but it won’t die the same death because personal Facebook accounts contain so much of a user’s life history, photos, and friend and family connections. Many articles and videos only appear behind Facebook’s walled garden, and many apps and sites will not even let a user join without a Facebook account.

Google zmonopolizował rynki i stosuje niedozwolone monopolistyczne praktyki:

Google started out as a search engine that helped users quickly find the information they needed. It’s since gone from directing people to content to directing traffic inwards to itself, according to Rand Fishkin, the world expert on search engine optimization.

Even though competitors like Yelp might have superior local reviews, Google Reviews are given preferential placement in search results. Even though shopping comparison websites like Foundem in Europe might offer better results, Google can effectively blacklist them. Increasingly, Google offers snippets and previews of Wikipedia and Getty Images. Traffic to these websites has subsequently collapsed. Far from directing users to other sites, Google today starves content creators of traffic.

As Fishkin notes, “Google’s behavior over the last few years away from an engine that drives searchers to other websites for the answers to their problems and toward self-hosted answers and solutions. That’s made SEO much more difficult, as Google, for the first time in its history, is sending less outbound traffic.”

Google is eating the web through its new technologies. Pages load faster with tools like Accelerated Mobile Pages or Firebase. Both are like Facebook’s Instant Articles. They sound great, until you realize that the faster pages run on Google’s and Facebook’s servers, displacing third-party advertising networks and further centralizing the web into their ecosystem where they exercise control.

Google also kills off technologies that would reduce the need to search using Google. In 2013, the company announced they were discontinuing Google Reader, which relied on RSS. An RSS feed was a way for publishers to reach their readers directly without using Google Search. But the death of Google Reader in 2013 marked the end of interoperable web services like RSS from large organizations like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

The current configuration of the web’s ecosystem advances Google’s business model. Google’s Android mobile operating system powers most smartphones in the world with a whopping 85 percent market share. It has integrated the Android OS into its own search engine, and has integrated Android into its own app store, effectively becoming the gatekeeper to what websites, apps, and companies consumers can access.

It uses its dominance in browsers to its own advantage as well. Its Chrome browser has a 60 percent market share globally, and comes with a new ad-blocking feature, which it claims is the work of a collective, industry-wide effort to get rid of annoying ads. Yet the software only blocks certain types of online advertisements. Mysteriously, the ads that are blocked are ones its competitors use, not its own.

Zachęcony? Przeczytaj całość: The Death of the Internet