1. WHAT DIDN'T HAPPEN: THE PICAYUNE-TRIBUNE
AS INTERNET PROVIDER
In the early 1990s established media companies (the newspapers, for instance) could have moved to take shares in Internet ISPs, and history might have worked out differently. Imagine your local newspaper had the foresight to convert itself into your local ISP. This was at a time when they would have had the high ground in promoting their own new ISP services. Rather than speculating breathlessly about what the new medium would bring, they could have merged with it and driven its growth.
If it worked, then as the Web grew the papers would have remained in control of distribution, not just of their own but everyone else's content (or editorial, as they called the stuff between the advertisements). They could have monetized their journalistic operations under the new media model, and perhaps there would not have been the same crisis of paid journalism we are now having. Of course, this would have depended also on what strategy the greedy corporate owners followed. (Many newspaper owners in the 1990s were out to strip and sell for immediate return, in the spirit of that decades' capitalism. Which of course has only grown worse in the present decade.)
Or imagine if the newspapers had got together to create a nationwide alliance of ISP services, based on the model by which 1500 papers own and maintain the AP wire service. Unfortunately, that thought occurred to no one - not even to any of the early electronic visionaries, let alone the print world's dinosaurs-in-the-making. (I only just thought of it myself the other day, when hearing more laments about how the newspaper as medium is near death and the last chance is to charge for content.) The traditional print media are reduced to helpless, reactionary moves, pretending they might charge subscription fees for viewing their page when, in fact, they no longer have control of the medium's distribution; whining like the RIAA or MPAA and dreaming Congress will impose a death penalty or at least the stockade for cut-and-paste offenses, as it might on songs and clips.
And so the telcoms and cable companies took over the vast majority of the ISP action, as the path of least resistance would have had us predict, and they have come to control distribution and the lion's share of Internet profits at an excellent operating margin, without needing to bother much with content themselves. On the current Internet model, all content and service providers combined, even the big corporate successes, in fact even the porn shops, make some tiny fraction of what the distributors (ISPs) pull in on a steady, predictable basis. (I refer here to provision of Internet content for immediate reading or consumption, rather than online retail operations like Amazon, which at best are merely replacing retail in meatspace.)
2. TAKEOVER PLANS THAT FAILED
In the mid to late 1990s Yahoo, AOL and others tried to eat the Internet by creating the illusion that you need a portal or a homepage as a front door to every Internet session. I sometimes think these companies would have never gotten anywhere if no one had thought of including the unnecessary "homepage" feature in browsers, and people had just learned from the start to input URLs or find sites by search engine and bookmark their favorites (which is of course what most people do in the meantime).
This myth that you need a portal still works with part of the less-skilled portion of the Internet user population, or else these "heuristic organizing" devices might have disappeared altogether. Anyway, their reach and earnings from the mere fact of being front pages have declined precipitously. If these companies still exist, it's because they're ISPs, or (like AOL), they wisely used their brief moment as apparent world conquerors to buy real companies (like TimeWarner).
In the late 1990s, Microsoft tried strategies to leverage its monopoly over PC operating systems in ways that would allow it to eat the Internet by pushing all users into MS-owned sites, and by establishing their encyclopedia as the authority on world knowledge. This revealed itself as an act of clueless hubris, like trying to move earth with a teaspoon they thought was a bulldozer. After a few billion dollars they figured out their folly, and so MSN is now a backwater known for chat engines and Encarta recently went belly-up. (In this at least Wikipedia is far superior: for all its drawbacks a user-annotated model is going to map knowledge better than some inoffensive "easy-reading" written by corporate nerds).
The telcoms and cable companies until now were happy to see content run riot, because it only meant more and more subscribers going online. By now the US ISP market is saturated and possibly even in decline, and with the infrastructure fully developed the services can be delivered more cheaply than ever, even with ever-higher volumes of data streaming. By capitalist tradition, this happy-sounding circumstance is of course the moment when profits will decline and crisis follows, if you actually allow competition to take its course.
3. WHERE WE ARE NOW - SOME THOUGHTS
It's very important for the ISPs to hide the fact that running an established infrastructure is actually cheaper than building it in the first place. So they've taken to whining about their supposedly staggering higher expenses due to increased bandwidth use. Their new hope for growth is to leverage their effective cartel position in service distribution to add parasitic revenue streams (i.e., without necessarily needing to invest anything more) by way of bandwidth charges. Thus their discovery in recent years that Internet neutrality is a sin against private enterprise and free market religion.
I'd love to see free universal public wireless access put an end to that particular potential nightmare. (Isn't that what they're doing in San Francisco?)
Otherwise, the king for now of the Internet is obviously Google. Everyone finally figured out that a good search engine provides the best map of the real-existing Internet, or at least the most effective one, for free. Rather than trying to force existing content into its own architecture (like the portals) or trying to leverage some position in the communication chain (like MS and the ISPs) into dominance over content, Google has found a position where it can let Internet growth drive its own.
This doesn't mean they aren't thinking up ways to leverage their present position into greater dominance or monopolies.
One thing that is happening is that machine-generated content is gradually coming to overwhelm anything humans write, at least in volume, though presumably not in readership! This replication of the same bullshit in 50 or 5000 different dummy sites threatens to take over all possible search queries.
The biggest factor I've left out of this random summary is the Government: the irony of Internet history as a government project; the rock-bottom reality that everything goes through a few trunks that the Commerce Dept. and a few counterparts abroad control, and that there is only one root server at Spook Central (Herndon, Virginia); Internet surveillance and use of Internet FOR surveillance (that would be RI among other places, right?), control and sting functions; potentials for prohibitions and use of Internet "crime" to feed the prisons; NSA, "GOVNET" and other nightmare scenarios. Much to talk about there, but I won't start or I'll have to add another 10 paragraphs.
Or perhaps the biggest factor I've left out is the users, and how they've shaped the Web for better or worse independently of what the big corporations try or like.
Anyone care to correct, object to or add anything to this pocket history? Where do you see it heading?
BEST: 2009 Global Internet Map by CISCO and TeleGeography.
