But This Internet Had Such Promise!
I remember paradise well. I stumbled into it in 1980, when I entered computer science graduate school at Carnegie Mellon.
No, CMU wasn't paradise, nor was the excellent graduate program, nor even Pittsburgh, though it came close. I found paradise the day I joined the youngest cohort on the fledgling Internet, which had grown from humble beginnings to over a hundred computers worldwide.
It wasn't the astonishing and radical new technology that transformed my life and defined my career. It was the possibilities. To a callow youth with a vivid imagination, the next 50 years seemed instantly (though vaguely) visible. So I joined the growing army of people making it happen.
That army was based in research labs, universities, and the military. Instead of pursuit of profit, it was driven by a mix of differing visions of what the world of the future should look like -- more an Internet of dreams than of reality.
Today, these people are an aging, microscopic fragment of the net. We call their succesors the digerati, or technoscenti. But today's technoscenti have little power to guide the evolution of the net. Their influence is more likely to be political than technical. They can occasionally (as in the SOPA campaign) rouse the masses of user plebes to action, but that's pretty much the limit of their power.
Power today has passed firmly into the hands of corporations, with occasional intervention from governments. Neither the corporations nor the governments are inherently ill-intentioned, but their motivations are less human-centric. As a human, I regret that.
So, we still have smart people working on the Internet, but the priorities and decisions are based on profitability, not on human needs. In the old days, it would have been scandalous to imagine that something as important as Internet telephony, videoconferencing, or chat might use competing non-interoperable protocols. Why can't a Skype user call a Google Voice user, or a VoxOx user? It's outrageous -- but open standards aren't always in the corporate interest, especially for the market leader.
Today, the Internet standards process continues to function pretty well in most areas. Unfortunately, the most innovative areas of work are the ones most likely to attract corporate interest, which means they are most likely to get stalled or stymied in the standards process. It's illuminating to compare some old and new technologies:
Email vs. instant messaging: Email was designed back in Olden Times, without any thought of anyone dominating the market for email, or even that such a market might exist. Naturally the idea of "anyone should be able to send to anyone" became a bedrock principle. After a brief period of resistance in the 1980's by the likes of AOL and CompuServe, it became hard to imagine anything but the one globally interconnected email network we know today.
Instant messaging, on the other hand, had strong corporate roots from the birth of the SMS (phone texting) service. Moreover, the absence of early open standards facilitated the growth of proprietary services such as AOL's AIM well into the commercial era. The world of text messaging, from its birth, has been a set of separate networks, linked by neither service nor addressing.
Moreover, instant messaging is just one application of real-time communication. It could share a mechanism for universal addressing and interoperation with audio conferencing, video conferencing, and more.
The Web vs Social Networks
The web was born in a world where the Internet had achieved a kind of critical mass socially, within a global community of academics, scientists, and intellectuals. There were several similar alternatives to the web that lost out to it, but none were commercial entities. All would agree that the same address and data should work with all software. This made it easy for people to write multiple, independent browsers and servers, driving the web's rapid growth.
The web was the last massively popular Internet application to be based on an open standard. It made the Internet so wildly profitable that few if any subsequent successful applications have been built so openly.
Social networks, on the other hand, are a mess. The last thing they want is to make it easy for you to see things from other social networks. Instead, they do everything they can to make sure you never leave. If you use more than one social network, you have to make the effort of posting and reading in both places. It's hard to overstate how much time is being wasted in this process. An open standard would allow people to waste all that time on the social networks themselves.
iCal vs iCal The calendaring protocol, iCal, is an interesting intermediate example. It was designed in the 90's, when the influence of open standard philosophy was waning but still important. The protocol was pushed through the standards process, and multiple vendors use it to claim support for interoperable calendaring.
But the truth is, it has problems, yet as the role of open standards has changed, it has become much harder to fix them. Most standards need several rounds of revision and adoption, but with the waning influence of open standards, iCal has been left almost frozen in place, just good enough to use, but still bad enough to make you miss occasional meetings, or to get sorely confused about time zones.
Of course, there's no going back, and I'm really glad that the Internet is now big enough to supply endless videos of cats. But I think we can still get the Internet we deserve, if only more people understood what was possible and demanded it.
I still have Internet dreams. I dream of an Internet where my email address is the same as my Skype ID and my telephone number. And I believe that if enough people shared my dream, it would come true.