The Internet is dead at age 41, it lived from October 29, 1969 – December 21, 2010. The Internet provided humans of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with a global communications medium until the creation of a multi-tier Internet destroyed it. The Internet allowed ideas and information to flow ubiquitously throughout the world, across previously established cultural and national borders. Several distinct services ran on the Internet while it was a viable service including; Web (access to websites and online applications), Email & IM (broadcast and personal messaging), Streaming services (on demand video and IP telephony), File sharing (distributed torrent files, specialized file clients), and many more.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States Federal Communications Commission voted on rules to create a multi-tier Internet. A fast Internet was designated for who can afford it (wealthy humans) while a slow Internet was relegated to the majority of the population. The creation of a multi-tier Internet had both immediate effects and long-term ramifications.
First effect of a multi-tier Internet: Online usage drops as human behavior adjusts to the removal of a “level playing field” on the Internet. Companies stop building websites, instead they create “Apps” or applications that can be downloaded once and only utilize the bandwidth that the enduser needs for a particular task. “Surfing” the web becomes a thing of the past. The “blog-o-sphere” dries up as people refuse to pay a premium for opinion. Information dissemination (news) is finally consolidated to organizations who have the resources to subsidize (most by a paywall) the additional bandwidth usage of those who view their content.
Second effect of a multi-tier Internet: Globally, despite policies which established fast broadband for all their citizens, many countries find themselves being blackmailed into a multi-tier Internet by Internet service providers with the political and monetary resources to do so. With the United States technology sector still leading the world through the early twentieth century and the effects of the great recession still being felt, those countries not strong enough or without the moral will to resist a multi-tier Internet, shortsightedly cave into the promise of greater revenue through taxing their multi-tier Internet providers. Worldwide, technology sector growth dwindles just when it is needed most.
Long term ramifications of a multi-tier Internet: More importantly, the new global consciousness for humanity being incubated by the Internet was still in its infancy at the time. With the Internet dead, a new global morality for humanity was sidestepped. Many have argued it was this lack of a new global morality that allowed the devastating global resource wars of the mid twenty-first century to occur. During the resource wars, one-third of the human population (~2 billion people) is dead from either starvation, disease or were killed in combat or as a civilian causality (thus fulfilling the “UN Low” population projection).
[editorial], [satire], [prognostication] The following was written on 12.22.2110, but since you are reading this in 2010, you will have to take my word for it.
