Suppose the internet was still a major success and was sustainable without compromising for commercial interests. How do you think societies around the world may have changed, or not?
Consider the optimistic angles of such an unencumbered space extended out from the internet’s earlier days to the present. What if some of those possibilities had been realized?
That’s hard to answer without qualifying “commercial interests”. I think of banking and other financial institutions as commercial interests, and I like having control of my finances online. I don’t have to wait until the end of the month to see credit card charges (charge notifications that pop up on my phone are nearly instantaneous). I don’t have to make a phone call to my broker to place a stock order.
A lot of people disparage Amazon, but I like the convenience. No more driving to two or three stores to find what I need.
Other commercial interests like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X—yeah, they can disappear and I wouldn’t miss them.
That’s fair, I was aiming to keep it open-ended, but may have been a little too open in this regard. To try to clarify while maintaining that spirit, I’d note that I phrased it as “compromise for commercial interests”, so I don’t mean to ask as if nothing commercial would be done on the internet, only that it wouldn’t have been fashioned around commercial interests as much.
A basic example would be visiting a news site today that doesn’t require a subscription to read articles on it, and how littered it is with ads, or how commercial social media sites actively push you to their algorithmic feed rather than giving you filters and controls to adjust your experience, both to keep you there and in turn viewing more ads.
Not sure how much that may help, but I’m not looking for any particular answers/responses other than more imaginative/speculative ideas surrounding the idea of a less commercially driven internet & its possible influence on things.
Ah, so what would the Internet look like if it were built by altruistic, honest people. Sadly, I must be really jaded an cynical because that’s so hard for me to envision.
Commercial interests were always exploiting resources within their spheres of influence, even before the Internet. As technology improved and new pathways emerged, they ran full speed ahead.
Your example of a news site that didn’t push their algorithms never existed. Even pre-Internet, when news was printed, every newspaper had a certain slant. In New York City—back in the 70s—there were four major papers, NY Times, Wall St Journal, NY Post, Daily News. They all had their biases.
But the one thing they couldn’t do was collect user data. Ads were static and we had a choice to either read or ignore it.
As I’m typing and doing this brain dump—it’s 1:18am, why am I not asleep—I’ve come to realize that the thing I hate most about the current state of the Internet is the vast collection of user data how companies are mining and exploiting it. If we could stop it, I would be fine with most everything else.