There is an increasing uneasiness on the foundations and principles of internet. In a TED talk, ‘how we need to remake the internet‘, Jason Lanier explains a fundamental mistake was made in the 1990’s: the advertising model to provide internet content for free.
“Early digital culture had a sense of a socialist mission: everything on the internet must be available for free (contrary to books, even if solutions like public libraries compensate to make them available to everyone). At the same time we loved our tech entrepreneurs that could dent the universe. The solution was the advertising model: free with ads. In the beginning it was cute. ”
The comparison with what happened before is of course not so abrupt, for example newspapers have long relied on ads to finance their activity and therefore could sometimes be opinionated, but everyone knew which side the paper was on.
And as it is proven now, the consequence of the advertisement model is quite incompatible with the principles to govern internet edited under a UN mandate that refer to universality and non-discrimination (refer to those principles here).
As Jason Lanier concludes, “Our species cannot survive in a situation where if 2 people want to communicate they need to go through a third person that wants to manipulate them“.
