Why the internet is broken?

First, it is important to slightly understand how the internet works as it has opened up ways for computers to be able to communicate to other computers. Each computer connected to the internet has an IP address similar to a home address. The IP address is how other computers find that computer to allow for an exchange of messages or assets.

The messages or assets on one computer are converted from graphics, videos, or text to an electronic signal and then back to a graphic, video or text to the other computer. This exchange takes place through a computers protocol stack, phone lines, cable wires or wireless connections.

There are several phases that the electronic signal passes through before it reaches its end destination, but for this purpose the internet is best explained as that process of going from one computer to another computer. It is important to mention that most computers are connected to the internet through an Internet Service Provider or ISP, who are connected to the Network Service Providers (NSP), who are connected to Network Access Points (NAP’s) and Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAE’s) or commonly known as Internet exchange points.

The internet was built for individual computers to be able to communicate to other computers in a decentralized manner. In 1979 two founders by the name of Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis created a system called Usenet which was one of the first online sharing communities. The concept was anyone would be able to run their own server and connect to other computers and start sending and receiving messages. Usenet was very slow due to the technology at that time, but a user would post a message on their server and then slowly it would get copied from one server to another until the entire network had the message.

For this paper the most notable aspect of Usenet was that it lacked a central server and dedicated administrator. Anyone could access Usenet if they had a server and no one person controlled it. It was the first internet and it was decentralized.

By 1989; 10 years later, the internet was connecting millions of computers together, but in a very slow and inefficient way. Sir Tim Berners-Lee a British computer scientist had a vision to be able to connect computers together more efficiently through an up-and-coming technology called hypertext. Hypertext connects web pages together with textual links to allow web pages that are written in HyperText Markup Language or HTML to be linked and cross referenced throughout the entire web. This was the emergence of The World Wide Web.

The invention of the World Wide Web offers some very important breakthroughs that Vocit sees necessary to continue the development of the internet. These 5 points that the world wide web offered to the public for free were taken from the World Wide Web Foundation

“https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/”

“Decentralisation: No permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on the web, there is no central controlling node, and so no single point of failure … and no “kill switch”! This also implies freedom from indiscriminate censorship and surveillance”

“Non-discrimination: If I pay to connect to the internet with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or a greater quality of service, then we can both communicate at the same level. This principle of equity is also known as Net Neutrality.”

“Bottom-up design: Instead of code being written and controlled by a small group of experts, it was developed in full view of everyone, encouraging maximum participation and experimentation.”

“Universality: For anyone to be able to publish anything on the web, all the computers involved have to speak the same languages to each other, no matter what different hardware people are using; where they live; or what cultural and political beliefs they have. In this way, the web breaks down silos while still allowing diversity to flourish.”

“Consensus: For universal standards to work, everyone had to agree to use them. Tim and others achieved this consensus by giving everyone a say in creating the standards, through a transparent, participatory process at W3C.”

It is critical to note that the internet as we know it today has gone far away from this decentralized system. During the dot-com bubble businesses were inspired to bring the power of the internet to the world. Over time the internet became easier to use and moved from a decentralized small entity ownership to large centralized corporations controlling the internet in exchange for users’ data. This happened as it was easier to manage and make profits for the large corporations like Facebook, google, dropbox, whatsup, and twitter to name just a few.

The basics of this is that of cloud computing. The large platforms of today have cloud computing and storage capabilities. As a user does something on these large platforms the message that is sent is sent to their cloud (stored) and then communicated to the location that it needs to go. This is the reason it is centralized as the messages and communications that are being sent are controlled by the platforms cloud.

As this cloud computing made the internet faster and more efficient in exchange users gave up ownership and privacy of their information.

Vocit’s vision is to allow for the fast and efficient computing, but on a individual ownership level that allows for full privacy of content and digital assets.

The next article will be on Websites and the importance of Vocit designing Social Websites.