In the past few decades, the internet has changed massively. It once was just a place for some nerds, maybe for some scientists, for coders, and other geeks. But I would say with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, the internet has become a mass phenomenon. The internet became mobile and ubiquitous. Everyone started using their phones all the time and therefore was online all the time. Thousands, if not millions of new apps for almost any use case were invented and started to become the daily drivers of all our lives. From teenagers to best agers, from cars to fridges, from satellites to 5G hotspots, from the US to Ghana, today the internet is everywhere.
And to be honest, this sheer, unbelievable fact is enormous and wonderful, unimaginable just 20 years ago. The internet is a real winner. Another remarkable fact is that this massive worldwide web has remained pretty consistent and robust all across the world. Sure, there are limitations in certain regions, even severe limitations and compromising behaviors in some authoritarian countries. But the overall message is still true and is still the same. The internet is free.
Nonetheless, there are some developments that are causing concerns. And it's not so much on the user side, nor on the side of some governments and their legislations. It's something that evolves from the core up the periphery. It's the global growth engines, the gatekeepers, companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and all the others that try to funnel as much traffic over their own backbones and infrastructures to control it, to tax it, to regulate it, to make it their own.
It's these huge datacenters, these huge organizations that I'm worried about. They attract and bundle so much power, so much knowledge, so much technology, and so much vital infrastructure in their own private hands, and no one can do anything any longer. They've become the real superspowers. There's no East against West anymore, no Russia against the US, no Putin vs Trump. We are instead in the midst of an information war. It's a clash of infrastructure vs infrastructure, of datacenter against datacenter, of billionaire vs billionaire.
How did we as "end users" end up in this miserable, completely powerless situation? The sheer truth is that the internet is hard. It's hard to make. It's hard to navigate. It's hard to operate. And it's even harder to operate it in a way so that everyone can use it. That's where all the efforts of the past decades went into. To make this place accessible to everyone. Everyone can now comfortably and skillfully operate the tiny candy shaped circles and squares on their touchscreens. The world at the touch of a button.
This prospect of the future created the environment why we all, why we as a society, stopped or neglected questioning the fact of how this is all done and who does it all for us. That's why all these closed and gated ecosystems evolved: the shopping world of Amazon, the convenience world of Apple, the low hanging fruit world of Google, the productivity world of Microsoft. And with their growing powers, their growing influences, and with our growing dependency on them, the internet became what it is today.
The internet today is just become a shitty place. A dump station and we are the rats cobbling through it. It's full of gates and doors, walled gardens, and paywalls. It's full of ads, targeted ads, stalking ads, and cookies. It's full of always rising subscriptions. It's full of weird "social" networks with fine tuned algorithms that are created to manipulate us, to lock us in. "Social" becomes synonymous for "ad revenue".
The miraculous, dreamy, fulfilling, idealistic internet based on human interaction, on human kindness and generosity, the idea of a free internet for everyone are long gone. And I think it's time to take it back. So insist that your governments push against those global gatekeepers. Act together. Avoid the candy traps all along the way, don't tab those colorful buttons anymore. Compared to the real fights in Ukraine or in Gaza, these fights are so much easier. The keyword here is: neglect, don't care, don't feed the machines. Be smart because you are. You are so much more than an algorithm might throw at you. Escape the bubble. Let terms like "free", "open source" and "decentralized" sing again.
In the end, this is all not so hard. There's still a world without the internet. With another press of a button, you're offline and can pick a free bench in the next park and enjoy the sun. Airplane mode.
That said, this text is proofread by an AI of one of these gatekeepers with paid software on a "convenient" machine. We still have a long way to go.