They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and when you look at how bits of the internet are turning out we see evidence galore to support that proposition.

In keeping with the prevailing culture and tradition of the time, without a thought for earning money from it, when Tim Berners Lee and his colleagues developed and released the code which led to the creation of the world wide web, the aim was entirely laudable and uncomplicated.

The primary objective was to make it easier for researchers all over the world to stay in touch, get access to published papers more easily, faster and so on. However, other more worldly types soon worked out different and additional ways of exploiting this new medium. True enough, Berners Lee et al were “only”  building on an already established layer which itself is a source of ongoing concerns, but what has happened with the web, not unreasonably, has come to symbolise or become shorthand for a larger set of challenges connected with cyberspace and digital technologies generally.

In those early days an altruistic spirit infused much of the marketing and positioning of the internet. For a start everything appeared to be “free”. That’s not very capitalist, imperialist or oppressive is it? This new-fangled thing out of California carried a hint of radical rebellion against “The Man” .

A big part of the message was it’s all about making Governments more accountable, ending tyranny everywhere, collecting together all the knowledge in the world, making it available, still free, to anyone with an internet connection, while uniting everyone in one big Pete Seeger-esque Kumbya moment. A cure for all forms of cancer would soon and inevitably follow. Wars and famine would become unthinkable. What’s not to like? All we needed to do was get behind the project and keep Governments out of it.

I remember many years ago talking to  some people who worked for the company now known at Meta. There was a messianic glint in their eyes. I think it is entirely possible they sincerely believed their sole purpose as employees of Meta was to improve the human condition.  Profit schmoffit.  Yes, other people in the company, people who did not attend the same conferences we did, sold ads to keep the project afloat but that was entirely secondary, a minor,  beneath-the-surface affair. It wasn’t what mattered or what we needed to talk about at the conferences we attended.

My guys were in the business of “empowering” people. Nothing else was important and anyone who didn’t see things this way was a dinosaur stuck in old ways of thinking, finding it hard to deal with change. Since none of the individuals I have in mind are stupid I wonder at what point the penny dropped and why, unlike some of their erstwhile colleagues, they appear to have chosen to do nothing about it.

Strangling baby seals

We all remember those terrible  jokes from years back, say around 2008. A child is asked what their parents do for a living and straight away the child gives an obviously well-rehearsed answer

“They both strangle baby seals and sell the meat to manufacturers of low-cost dog food”.

This was preferable to risking telling the truth, namely that they were bankers.

When you look at the multitude of problems those geniuses who work in high tech have created in the world, problems they could have and should have anticipated and dealt with, I fear something similar may lie ahead for their children.

We shouldn’t tar the whole of the tech community with the same brush – not every banker was a reckless gambler with other people’s money – but it is undeniably the case that products and tools have been created and “put out there” into a world where anyone with two brain cells should have known entities with evil intent could and very likely would manipulate them to further their own evil ends.

“Once the rocket goes up who cares where it came down? That’s not my department”.

The spirit of the earlier age has been completely befouled.  It should not have taken national legislation to force companies to up their game and make the internet better and safer, but that is where we are today.

An end to an excessive concentration of power? Not quite

Another part of the early aspirations behind the emergence of the internet as a mass consumer product was a desire to break up long-established monopolies . So how’s that working out?

Not brilliantly according to  Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon in a recent article in Noema

Seemingly 85% of us use a browser supplied by Apple or Google.  80% of us use an operating system supplied by Microsoft or Apple. Google has 84% of global search, Microsoft 3%.  99% of all new mobile phones are manufactured either by Apple or Samsung. Microsoft and Amazon Web Services have 50% of cloud computing, Apple and Google’s email clients handle 90% of global email, and Google and Cloudflare route 50% of global domain name system requests.

To quote Berjon and Farrell directly

“Two kinds of everything may be enough to fill a fictional ark and repopulate a ruined world, but can’t run an open, global “network of networks” where everyone has the same chance to innovate and compete”.

Quite.

And catch this  brilliant encapsulation of the high level history and some of the future challenges associated with the internet.