[ih] The web as wind and whirlwind? (was Re: History from 1960s to 2025)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Dear colleagues,

On Thu, Dec 18, 2025 at 05:21:05AM -0500, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote:
> It would be hard to explain the success of the Internet without
>the HTTP addition in the early 1990s.

I think that is fair, but it may also be true that the introduction of the web sowed the seeds for the current anti-network backlash we see so widely.  I would argue that whereas much of the Internet tended towards decentralized management and operation, the web had two features that promoted centralization:

1.  The introduction of URLs/URIs made the identity of a site (the host part of an http URL) really important and encouraged the identification with trademarks.  In the very early commercial Internet, people often had experience of both the web and of Usenet.  The latter was much less linked to domain names, because one generally received the news from a local store of it rather than by going to the servers operated by whoever had posted the news article.

2.  Because advertising emerged early as a way to support web sites, there came to be a very strong incentive for website operators to try to "keep you on the site."  That many measures of a web site's importance or effectiveness continue to depend on an "engagement" score that is at least partially defined by how long someone stays on the site reflects that bias.  Or, to think of this another way, if the web had worked by distributing copies of data around the Internet, and that data were somehow fetched through addresses that came from (say) cryptographic tokens identifying the content in some sort of grand Dewey decimal (or LC, I don't care the version!) catalogue of information, the very idea of "sites" would not have been established and the centralizing feature wouldn't have been there.

It would seem that once there was an environment that encouraged resource centralization, it was all but guaranteed that commercial interests would tend to drive that toward  monopoly or near-monopoly.  And, given the prevailing views about antitrust in the most important jurisdiction for the web's emergence, we were all but fated to have the current misgivings so many express about the Internet.  In other words, the web was the necessary ingredient for the Internet's massive expansion but also the seed for its demise, and once we had the web there just wasn't a way to avoid the kind of decline that Zittrain[*] warned about.

Now, I don't know that I fully buy this story, but lately I've been having a hard time talking myself out of it, so I thought I'd see what others think.

Best regards,

A

[*]Jonathan L. Zittrain, _The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It_ (Yale Univ. Press & Penguin UK 2008).

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca