login/register

Snip!t from collection of Alan Dix

see all channels for Alan Dix

Snip
summary

internet-290.jpg
In the nineteen-seventies, the Internet was a small, dec ...
This is not the Internet we know today. Nearly two decad ...

The Mission to De-Centralize the Internet : The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/online.../the-mission-to-decentralize-the-internet.html

Categories

/Channels/digital economy

[ go to category ]

For Snip

loading snip actions ...

For Page

loading url actions ...

internet-290.jpg

In the nineteen-seventies, the Internet was a small, decentralized collective of computers. The personal-computer revolution that followed built upon that foundation, stoking optimism encapsulated by John Perry Barlow’s 1996 manifesto “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow described a chaotic digital utopia, where “netizens” self-govern and the institutions of old hold no sway. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone,” he writes. “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

This is not the Internet we know today. Nearly two decades later, a staggering percentage of communications flow through a small set of corporations—and thus, under the profound influence of those companies and other institutions. Google, for instance, now comprises twenty-five per cent of all North American Internet traffic; an outage last August caused worldwide traffic to plummet by around forty per cent.

HTML

<div class="entry-content"> <article> <p><img alt="internet-290.jpg" src="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/internet-290.jpg" class="mt-image-right" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 20px 20px;" height="290" width="290"></p> <p>In the nineteen-seventies, the Internet was a small, decentralized collective of computers. The personal-computer revolution that followed built upon that foundation, stoking optimism encapsulated by John Perry Barlow&#x2019;s 1996 manifesto &#x201c;<a onclick="s_objectID=&quot;https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html_1&quot;;return this.s_oc?this.s_oc(e):true" href="https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html" target="_blank">A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.</a>&#x201d; Barlow described a chaotic digital utopia, where &#x201c;netizens&#x201d; self-govern and the institutions of old hold no sway. &#x201c;On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone,&#x201d; he writes. &#x201c;You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.&#x201d; </p> <div id="entry-more"><p>This is not the Internet we know today. Nearly two decades later, a staggering percentage of communications flow through a small set of corporations&#x2014;and thus, under the profound influence of those companies and other institutions. Google, for instance, now comprises twenty-five per cent of all North American Internet traffic; an <a onclick="s_objectID=&quot;http://news.sky.com/story/1129847/google-outage-internet-traffic-plunges-40-percent_1&quot;;return this.s_oc?this.s_oc(e):true" href="http://news.sky.com/story/1129847/google-outage-internet-traffic-plunges-40-percent" target="_blank">outage</a> last August caused worldwide traffic to plummet by around forty per cent.</p></div></article></div>