A Facebook logo on an iPhone, November 20, 2017. Jaap Arriens/ Press Association. All rights reserved.The spirit of openness and collaboration that characterized the web's inception and growth are at risk. The feeling that the web is a catalyst of much needed social change seems demodé, at least in Europe and the US. Why were the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Spanish 15M movement hailed as the internet delivering on its promise, and the recent US election and Brexit seen as the internet delivering nightmares? What, if anything, has changed?
This three-parts piece strives to provide a rough compass for those seeking to understand the underlying causes of much of what is problematic with the internet and the web today. I propose a framework to help us understand how best to tackle current issues often understood as unrelated (eg. net neutrality and fake news), as well as to anticipate issues yet to emerge. This piece calls for policy-makers, journalists and users to care and pay attention to the architecture of the internet and the web, and suggests this lens may offer a good way to understand many of the troubles public opinion seems to be concerned about today.
When the inter-net (network of networks) was designed, its decentralized architecture meant it didn’t have a single point of failure. If in 1969 the Stanford node collapsed, UCLA could still send a message to the University of California at Santa Barbara. None of the nodes was central. The bigger the internet grew, the more robust the network, and the greater the chances of getting a message successfully from one point to another. There was no central operating room, as with the telephone, with dozens of people connecting cables to enable a conversation. On the internet, each node helped route the pieces of the message to its destination.
