Issue #1: An obituary for the open internet that we once knew
If you’ve landed on this article, chances are you’ve encountered the frustrating pop-up demanding that you sign-up to access the website. You might either relent, navigate a workaround, or begrudgingly create an account just to read a single article. This is part of the growing roster of issues plaguing the internet as we know it. As we say farewell to 2023, we might also be bidding adieu to the dream of an open web, once considered the haven for the common person.
When we take a look, over the past decade, the familiar landscape of the internet has contracted to a handful of accessible websites. Independent forums, communities, wikis, and blogs have been reduced to Subreddits, Discord servers, Telegram communities, and other alternatives. Similar to accessing this blog, you are also forced to sign up to access these entities without being given the option of browsing long enough to figure out if the service merits your time.
Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was the death of Twitter and the birth of X (the everything app). Twitter’s rise to prominence was its crucial role in the Arab Spring uprising and Occupy Wall Street movement. In fact, it helped journalists build an audience that they could directly communicate with, these journalist were later hired by legacy outlets. It was also the platform where public figures often gathered, occasionally making earnest attempts to connect with the masses and assert that they are not bourgeois and miserably failed at it. Twitter evolved into the central pillar of the contemporary communication infrastructure, facilitating the rapid dissemination of diverse information — from forest fires and natural disasters to government upheavals and celebrity cancellations. Here, you could encounter a plethora of events, each dissected by experts in real-time, utilizing the platform’s constrained character limits.
No other platforms wielded as much influence over politics and culture, even as certain entities (coughs Facebook, the company now known as Meta) deceived news platforms into transitioning to video content with deceptive incentives. In those days, Twitter appeared to be a democratizing power, offering a timeline that ranged from the President of the United States to your beloved celebrities and their fans, to your preferred e-commerce brand — to whom you could directly pose inquiries via this platform or build pressure for its fraudulent practices. This marks the point at which our infrastructures began to deteriorate. Rather than the internet being constructed around widely dispersed communities, it shifted towards concentration and centralization with a few behemoths. The present generation is unfamiliar with chat rooms, forums, wikis, or blogs because we gave all our attention and energy to these giants for centralized convenience. Consequently, when one service experiences an outage, it gives the impression that the entire internet has come to a halt.
Unfortunately, returning to the bygone era of chat rooms and forums is now unfeasible. The collective inclination to independently host such services has diminished, and our legal frameworks have adapted to regulate the intricacies of major services (albeit imperfectly and subject to debate). Hence, we find ourselves compelled to conform and rely on the services offered by Big Tech.
The black-box of algorithms spearheaded by Meta
When it is about recognizing that our communication infrastructure would excessively rely on social media platforms, Facebook perhaps anticipated the trend well before the average person. In 2015, Facebook launched its Free Basics program in India while facing opposition from various quarters. The primary critique centered around Facebook assuming the role of an internet gatekeeper by pre-selecting services that would be available on the app without providing any transparency. This practice was deemed detrimental to smaller services and local start-ups. In essence, critics decried Free Basics and similar zero-rating offers as a breach of net neutrality — a principle advocating that internet service providers should treat all internet traffic impartially. The program was eventually shut down by India’s regulatory body in 2016.
Followed by the net neutrality saga, Facebook faced various political scandals, including complicity in ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia and Myanmar, along with the massive Cambridge Analytica controversy, which shifted the company’s focus and compelled it to adopt a defensive strategy. Over time, the company’s objective shifted to prevent journalists from utilizing its platforms to decipher how information was disseminated to its users.
In 2016, Facebook bought the service CrowdTangle for an undisclosed sum. According to its founders, the tool was originally built to help activists organize their Facebook activity into a single place. However, as there was no financial viability in the initial endeavor, the creators repurposed a feature that displayed the most engaging posts on pages, transforming it into a product. The result was a dashboard that any publisher could use to see what was working — and what wasn’t — on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit (partnership announced in 2017).
Researchers and journalists were increasingly utilizing the tool to pinpoint tactics employed by Russian state media outlets. Additionally, they used it to gauge the effectiveness of Facebook’s moderation efforts against groups that persistently disseminated misinformation. CrowdTangle at present is a stripped-down version of its former self. The tool proved to be a headache for the company as it attracted heightened scrutiny. The company has now created a walled garden across all its products, to shield itself from scrutiny. Researchers, journalists, activists — everyone faces challenges in comprehending how the services offered by Meta platforms influence various aspects of society. It is now the standard playbook of all tech companies.
Today, companies like Twitter (X), TikTok, Reddit, Google, and even Netflix actively complicate the efforts of researchers to comprehend the societal impact of their services. Gone are the times when one could easily construct a potent bot using Twitter’s API atop its infrastructure. The costs associated with these research-assisting tools have soared to thousands of dollars, rendering them unsustainable for individuals or organizations seeking to subscribe. Nobody understands how videos are served to users on TikTok or why are Google search results getting progressively worse with time. In June of 2023, when thousands of subreddits came together to take their forums private as an act of protest over the company’s plan to start charging certain third-party developers to access the site’s data, the company remained unfazed. Instead, the company went so far as to intimidate moderators, compelling them to terminate the protest.
Our eager embrace of these services has dampened our desire for innovation and long-term viability. Perhaps this is why the internet seems lackluster, with everyone striving to produce “content”; companies now influence our decisions, leaving us with limited alternatives.
