The internet is available to more people in more countries than ever before. There's more content on the internet than ever before. It's a part of every day life for nearly everyone in the world.
That's what's happening to the internet. It's no longer a corner where quirky tinkerers were the only ones who could access it.
And the promise of the internet was never to be just that.
It was meant to be a vehicle for humanity (along with all it's warts). That's what you're seeing. The rest of humanity coming on-line.
The attitude of "this isn't what it was meant to be" presumes that it was meant to be anything at all. Similar to a kid that doesn't want to share their legos with the rest of the class.
I think the sentiment was regarding the democratization of knowledge and access, which is shifting more toward an oligarchy. True, more of humanity is coming online. However, they can only participate if they can be monetized and controlled by those with all the wealth and power.
The internet was and remains the most democratic knowledge dissemination engine in several thousand years of recorded history. It is substantially more democratic than it was in the 90s and 2000s because there are more people accessing it now.
It isn't shifting towards an oligopoly unless you count things like Wikipedia as a monopoly. Which it isn't, Wikipedia is probably about as close to an ideal democracy as any human project ever attempted.
Wikipedia is a great example of a web site that has resisted the trend! It is a pretty ideal democracy for those of us whose ISP or nation-state[0] doesn't prohibit us from viewing it.
There was a project similar to Wikipedia, but for semantic data. It lasted for a little while before being swallowed up by Google and shut down[1]. Granted there are some alternatives, but after investing some time working with freebase data, I should be allowed to hold a grudge.
Google played a key role in muzzling more widespread usage of RSS[2], along with Twitter and Facebook discontinuing support for it. Similarly, jabber[3], XMPP[4].
These days it's risky to even host your own mail server, since most people you correspond with are likely to use one particular email service that may arbitrarily block messages from lesser-known mail services[5].
Im saddened by the death of rss too, but i think its a lot to blame that soley on google. If the rss ecosystem was so weak, that shutting down a single rss client killed it, it couldn't have been long for this world anyways.
Imagine if google said tomorrow that email is dead and that they are closing down Gmail... This is basically what google did to RSS. They promoted it, adopted it.
Google made it impossible for existing solutions or upstarts to compete with their free tools, then slowly killed off marketing it and supporting it. The final straw was when they killed their reader.
Google killed RSS and they are actively killing other vital parts of the Internet in favor of their tech (forcing the use of their AMP tech for the best spots on their search engine results is anti competitive, Their web browser Chrome has saturated the market and is also making decisions which will undermine the Internets open protocols, but literally hiding the protocol in URLs, hiding the path in URLs, thus forcing people to search more).
Google is not alone in using it's capital as a destructive force on open protocols and standards. Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter are the same way.
> Wikipedia is probably about as close to an ideal democracy as any human project ever attempted.
wikipedia has their own drama. it has contributors who shape the content into what they want the world to see instead of staying objective on certain topics. often articles on simple topics are so complex because they are written by enthusiasts and aren't trying to inform beginners or curious.
> Similar to a kid that doesn't want to share their legos with the rest of the class.
You're being disingenuous and needlessly insulting.
We wanted to bring the freedom and egalitarianism of the early internet to everyone. Instead we got the jaded, corporate internet, but at least it's available to everyone. The GP is obviously mourning the quality, not the exclusivity.
Who is "us"?
The internet is available to more people in more countries than ever before. There's more content on the internet than ever before. It's a part of every day life for nearly everyone in the world.
That's what's happening to the internet. It's no longer a corner where quirky tinkerers were the only ones who could access it.
And the promise of the internet was never to be just that.
It was meant to be a vehicle for humanity (along with all it's warts). That's what you're seeing. The rest of humanity coming on-line.
The attitude of "this isn't what it was meant to be" presumes that it was meant to be anything at all. Similar to a kid that doesn't want to share their legos with the rest of the class.