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The internet is in decline – it needs rewilding
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
Posted: May 13th, 2024
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/0...
[Tim] Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, [came] up with the idea for a “world wide web” as a way of locating and accessing documents that were scattered all over the internet. He was able to do this because the internet, which had been publicly available since January 1983, enabled it. The network had no central ownership or controller. The result was an extraordinary explosion of creativity, and the emergence of ... a kind of global commons. However, the next generation of innovators to benefit from this freedom – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple et al – saw no reason to extend it to anyone else. The creative commons of the internet has been gradually and inexorably enclosed. Google and Apple’s browsers have nearly 85% of the world market share. Microsoft and Apple’s two desktop operating systems have almost 90%. Google runs about 90% of global search. More than half of all phones come from Apple and Samsung, while 99% of mobile operating systems are from Google or Apple. Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. GoDaddy and Cloudflare serve about 50% of global domain name system requests. And so on. One of the consequences of this concentration, say Farrell and Berjon, is that the creative possibilities of permissionless innovation have become increasingly constrained. The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. We can revitalise it, but only by “rewilding” it.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.
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