The demise of the internet started when private enterprise got hold of it.

Perhaps that's slightly inaccurate. I'm one of those people who used the internet before there was even Mosaic for Solaris. The highlights were gopher, archie and ftp. This was back when I was studying at university, and the possibilities of the internet were laregely untapped.

I'm not completely bitter about the "demise" of the internet, though. It was great to have it all to ourselves as a bunch of CS students, and it was even great to surf the net without being deluged with porn and banner ads.

What really irritates me as a purist however is when well-meaning and sensible protocols are subverted for commercial gain. Things like the following:

  • The bastardisation of top level domains such as the Tongan ".to" domain. http://jump.to/myshittywarezsite. This goes against the whole idea of per country domains.

  • Pages being indexed by search engines based on meta tags and hidden text which have nothing to do with the pages' content. This results in wasted time and effort when searching for valid information.

  • People who registered "au.com" because the Australian Internet Registry were not as liberal with handing out domains in the .com.au namespace.

  • Abuse of javascript for popup windows, all avertising.

  • Every movie that is realeased has it's own .com domain. This bugs me. I'd rather see universal.com/moviename than three hundred "movie.com" websites that really only exist for six months.

The internet is with us for good. The internet won't see a demise. It's the demise of the good old days of the net that we are seeing. Like it or not, people realise that they can use it to make money. Fortunately these same people bring about the improvements in technology that has seen great increases in speed and availability, so you have to take the good with the bad.

Private enterprise is what made Internet the way it is today. However with annoying things like banner ads and porn, it lets you have things like E2 and slashdot. In many cases it's this private companies that pushed the technology into your home (and the home of some shmuck who thinks that his homepage interests anyone).

Take TV for example -with 3/4 of it being ads and pure crap, the other 1/4 is sometimes genuinely entertaining and even educational. What I am trying to say is: with masses comes crap. But it doesn't mean that the good old stuff goes away.

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