The Internet is not Dead.
But the Web definitely is.
Something I've been hearing a lot of lately is that the Internet is dead. Although there are a lot of good points in the hyperbolic suggestion that the Internet is dead, meaning the Web is essentially unusable for anyone who experienced the good old Web, I cringe every time I hear someone suggest it's the Internet that is dead, not the Web.
You'd know it's the Internet that's dead when you drop off your phone, laptop, and most of your devices as e-waste because they would be utterly useless.
Sorry to continue being pedantic, but the Internet is stronger than ever, and the web is dying, if not already dead.
This is excellent news because:
- We can build a new good Web on top of an increasingly better Internet.
- The Internet is more than the Web. (Yes, you, the person who's really into VoIP).
- Maybe the Web, as we know it, is for people born in the last century.
Now, on the first point, I really recommend you watch Molly White's recently published talk on what made the Web of yore so amazing:
Molly and I are the nearly the same age so the premise of her talk sent me into a reverie; My eyes start to twinkle as I think back to the days when I was very young, watching my cousin play Starcraft in his suburban basement. I was in awe, as I watched him get his ass royally kicked by someone who was also likely sitting in their mom's basement, far away. A few years later, I played BF1942 and Red Orchestra (a UK2K4 mod) with my friends in the Netherlands, UK, Belgium, etc. We chatted in IRC (I used mIRC back then). We laughed and talked smack in Teamspeak.
I also met a previous girlfriend when I was playing Cokemusic. We communicated via MSN Messenger – or, perhaps, later with Skype – for years until I finally moved to her hometown of Toronto, my home for the last 14 years.
What's fascinating in reminiscing about all of that is that ostensibly none of that, aside from Cokemusic, were actually the Web. All those services relied on {[TCP/UDP]/IP} and DNS. They worked because the Internet is built on protocols, not platforms. So why is the Web important? Because it was likely the Web that allowed us to find each other and send our valuable packets end-to-end. That's why it's worth fighting for.
But what if we're out of touch? What if we're just knights of the Web's round-table lamenting how chivalry fell-off? What if people moving from the dark forest into their walled-off cozy Web gardens is completely A-OK?
Now, if we demand that everyone:
- Add alt-text to their images
- Enable RSS or atom or newsletters or telegram bots or x-post to Mastodon...
- Make their content small
- Use very readable fonts and good colour contrasts
- Etc. Etc.
Although I agree with all of the above, maybe we're starting to sound like the old Internet folks who refused to join the Web's platforms and stayed on mailing lists, Usenet, IRC? The very same people who convinced a brown beard like me to use plain-text email.
But maybe Zoomers and younger want something else? Perchance they desire to play Fortnite with friends and hang out in a private Discord group. Perhaps they have another walled-off cool chat app, that I can't possibly understand because I still think Puddle of Mudd goes hard. Let's suppose they just don't want rules in the same way that my pre-teen self wanted to shoot the digital pixels of a college-aged man from the Netherlands. They may be okay with having an Internet experience with people they've met in person. Well, that's perfectly fine because that's the Internet we Network Engineers support.
Give me your skibidi rizz packet, yearning to be transmitted freely; I'll forward it. As for those among us who want to build a new good Web, like Molly, the time is nigh because the Internet still exists. Just as long as we don't attempt whatever this guy is smoking. Packets go end-to-end, as they should. It's up to the user to decide what kind of experience they want.