What happened to the decentralised internet?

In the late 20th century, the pioneers of the internet and a new generation of online radicals envisioned a future where free communication, access to information, and equality of access made people increasingly fair minded, intelligent, and empathetic. In 2016, that optimism seems like naïveté. So what happened?

In the early days, internet technology remained in the hands of large organisations, governments and militaries. Computers were large and expensive, and commonly used for transferring scientific or research data across multiple sites. During this phase, a key design goal was to build a non-centralised network; basically to build a robust communication system that could survive major catastrophes (aka nuclear war). Almost nobody at this time was thinking of the social impact of the technology. The whole point was to build networks that didn't have a centre.

​A second phase began in the late nineties, which is known today as Internet 1.0. At this time, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was growing, but nobody really knew what was going to happen. The exuberance of the dot-com boom (then bust) typifies the period. Any internet company could have skyrocketing valuations with almost no relation to the real world. At the same time as business talked itself into an irrational boom, thousands of people were creating basic websites, chat services were started, file and image sharing became popular, as did notice boards and eBay. This is really the climactic 'wild west' of the internet. You could say or post almost anything on some dark corner of the internet, and nobody would ever know. Unlike today, traffic wasn't dominated by a few big players. The inherently decentralised nature of the technology had created a social space that was also decentralised. Fertile ground for new ventures, but extremely hard to monetise any new services. Nevertheless, enthusiasm over the popularity of the new tech fuelled the crash at the turn of the millennium.

Cyber-utopians ambitiously set out to build a new and improved United Nations, only to end up with a digital Cirque du Soleil.

- Evgeny Morozov

​It was during this phase that a new consciousness developed regarding the possibilities created by this new, equal and free social space. An utopian vision of free communication, uninhibited by big media, governments or existing institutions. The internet is uniquely disposed to utopian visions. Unlike other technologies that seek an idealised transformation of reality (though it does this also), the internet creates the possibility of a new virtual space - a virtual space that at least in theory can be made perfect. These ideas were perhaps best expressed by Richard Barbrook in his essay The Californian Ideology, which expressed precisely the ideological tension between the free democratic potential of the left, and the free market potential of the right, that had developed in west coast USA in the late 20th century.

The Californian ideology offers a fatalistic vision of the natural and inevitable triumph of the hi-tech free market.

- Richard Barbrook

The convergence of media, computing and telecommunications would inevitably result in an electronic direct democracy - the electronic agora - in which everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship.

- Richard Barbrook

So at the new millennium there coexisted two very different ideas about the future of the internet, that in some sense mapped to a left/right ideological split within the dominant political paradigm. But there had to be a reckoning, and as in the past and in other social arenas, the combatants were those individuals in favour of decentralisation, those intent on aggregating power for themselves. Ultimately, the driver of change into "Web 2.0" was the monetisation of these emerging technologies.

Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for companies.

- Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com

​Companies and governments weren't going to sit around and watch media, communication, politics and eventually power slip from their hands. Enter Web 2.0. Jeff Bezos calls Web 2.0 "making the Internet better for companies". We are living in this period of the social history of the internet. Rather than enjoying the dream of a decentralised internet, today the internet is highly centralised. Most people use the internet every day, but use perhaps 2 or 3 services, perhaps Facebook, Google and Snapchat. These very companies are busy buying up any small competitor in order to maintain their monopolies, and these monopolies allow them to monetise their users, mostly through advertising (with some notable exceptions). Indeed, the class of technology billionaires eschew even the rhetoric of their libertarian predecessors, preferring monopoly to competition.

Competition Is for Losers. If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly.

- Peter Thiel

Today, there is an alliance between the large internet monopolies and governments around the world. Every large internet company (including Google and Facebook) provide intelligence organisations with direct access to their data. In return, they get to use that information to model your personality and target you with advertising. This alliance is completely reversing the idealised model of Internet 1.0: a centralised, controlled, monitored internet that cements the power of existing corporations and governments. But we shouldn't be too surprised. There have been many new communication technologies over the centuries. Every one has been appropriated by powerful institutions, or occasionally, like Facebook or Google, those upstarts challenging the existing order were integrated into a new order resembling the old. Centralisation of information technologies means the centralisation of political power, a power that can easily be turned against the public. After all, what political organisation could survive being labelled as purveyors of 'fake news' by Facebook or Google?

​As always, the challenges to rational, democratic social organisation are great. Our communication technology facilitates creation and dissemination of information at a rate orders of magnitude larger than at any time in the past. In the face of an information flood, it is quite natural for people to harden in their views; for their ideology to become more rigid. These are common features of politics today: compromise is almost impossible, polarisation is common, identities are solidifying, intellectuals are disparaged, and experts ignored. Even attempts to improve the situation seem desperate and dangerous: the targeting of 'fake news' by Google and Facebook are just as likely to further centralise their power as to improve public knowledge.

​I don't have the answer on how to reclaim the dreams of the early internet. There are questions that require creative answers. How to limit polarisation and mitigate the effects of echo chambers? How to mediate and balance the growing power of the corporate owners of these new technologies? And perhaps most importantly, who to listen to, and who to ignore, amid this deluge of information flooding our world.