One of the effects that he talks about is electronic human rights. From my experience there has been legislation put in place to make sure that large ISP’s would not be allowed to slow down internet speeds on different websites. However, a couple of years ago the the FCC decided to repeal the legislation that would stop ISP’s from slowing down a persons internet speeds. During the process of repealing this legislation was the first time that I and many other people had heard of net neutrality, this really opened my eyes to the importance in keeping the internet neutral and not allowing there to be a monopoly that controls access to the internet. Another ill effect of the internet is how easy it has made it for governments and and companies to spy on citizens/users without their knowledge or consent. In my personal life this is all around me every app or website that I use my information is being stored and sold to another company to sell me products. As we found out after the Snowden leaks the NSA is spying on their own citizens and recording every message that we send and phone call that we make is recorded for “National Security”.
- Universality and Isolation
Universality is the principle that everything has to be accessible on the internet. There shouldn’t be any barrier to access to the internet or any censorship of information that could be found on the internet, everything should be available. Isolation occurs when a piece of information does not have a URI. Without a URI the information is only accessible within a closed circuit, this threatens the possibility of there being universal access to information.
- Open Standards and Closed Worlds
Open standards mean that something is free to use there is no barrier to entry. This is mainly referring to access of information and essential tools that people can use to create new technologies. In this paper he talks about how open standards should be the standard for the entirety of the internet. Closed worlds refers to something that has some sort of barrier to entry such as a pay wall. Most of what people consider to be the best softwares, and tools would be considered closed worlds with people having to pay a fairly large amount to get access to them. However, more and more high quality programs are becoming open source, I think that this is a really good sign for the future of the internet and will help more people be able to use essential software.
- The Web and The Internet
While we tend to use the web and the internet interchangeably they are not actually the same thing. The web is what we see when we use the internet, it is the pages that we visit and the websites that we use and the games we play. Whereas the internet is what allows us to use websites, and play games. The internet is the physical cables that connect us all the wires that transfer data from one place to another, it is the physical part of being online. On the other hand the web is the coded applications that we use everyday, such as google, youtube, wikipedia, and so on. The web is the stuff that we can’t technically hold in out hand.
The Web of The Future
Open Data
Currently I would say that open data on the web is becoming a more controversial topic, while people are being able to upload whatever they want to no matter how bad it might be. However, people are being held accountable for their actions online, while this is a good thing sometimes people can also take this too far as we have seen in a few occasions with cancel culture. There is also the increasing problem of governments trying to censor what can be posted online with some countries outright banning certain websites, software, and in some cases banning the discussion of certain topics. While there has been an increase in the amount of information that can be found on the internet, there has also been certain cases of people creating barriers to certain data.
Social Machines
While currently consulting online reviews and looking at statistics for people places, and things has become the norm there is also more inflated positive/negative statistics. Many companies figured out that they can pay people to give them positive reviews this gives people a false reality where you may think something is good because of some reviews that they read.
Web Science
Our understanding of what is capable with the web and what good web design looks like now is infinitely better than it was 10 years ago. If you go back and look at the websites from 10 years ago and then compare it to a website from today they would look completely different, even the same website 10 years apart would be almost unrecognizable. Not only do we understand web design more but we also understand the effect that the internet has on us as a society.
Free Bandwidth
This is still one of the largest problems facing the world as far as the barrier of entry to information. Most places around the world you need to pay for internet access, and for many people the price of internet access is too high and they cant afford to pay it. However, we are becoming increasingly more reliant on the internet it leaves a lot of people behind and relying on outdated methods.