Could the internet now move towards the promise of earlier days?

In the late 1990s, I heard a speaker address an issue I hadn’t thought much about at the time – the opposing trajectories the internet might take as it became more central to our lives.

At the time, perhaps 15 per cent of Irish people had internet access. Irish organisations were barely online. Those of us who considered ourselves au fait with this dawning virtual world scoffed at the lack of perception and imagination in business and government, and their static “brochure” websites.

Most of us bought into the optimistic idealism of the early internet. We’d have a marketplace of ideas! Accessible services for all! Always-on news! The right information delivered to the right person at the right time! Public-benefiting disintermediation! Content would be king!

But that talk warned of another direction, an internet that would no longer be dominated by the small-scale, the citizen-run, the eager amateur, nor provide a level playing field where small companies could compete with the largest. Instead, the net might amplify the existing power differentials of corporates and governments.

Eurovision saw a collision of vintage operating systems and trashy Europop

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Say goodbye to your passwords and start using passkeys

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Google somewhat two-faced on workplace politics

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Is Ireland a sleepy back door providing China with access to global DNA banks?

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It might become a data-gathering nexus, an arena of information distortion and control, a festering landscape of spoof sites, deception and bad actors, from the small con man to nation state hackers.

Like so many, I thought, surely not. I believed that while some of those dire possibilities might materialise, they would not dominate. Within its own, co-operatively developed, open structures and its global base of enthusiastic human thinkers, creators and users, the internet surely had the ability to manage shortcomings and divert such threats.

[ Karlin Lillington: Beware your smart Christmas tech gifts in the season of surveillance ]

Curbed enthusiasm

A quarter of a century later, my internet enthusiasm is definitely curbed. The web remains a marvel and has brought many positives but, sadly, much of that negative arc also has come to pass and we suffer the consequences.

Data breaches are commonplace, we’re bombarded with disinformation, scams, and other miseries and exploitations, and our personal information is constantly, invisibly, digitally harvested by corporates as we become packaged data to be bought and sold.

A look ahead to 2023

Listen | 37:48

Still: as this year draws to a close, it feels like a take-back-the internet shift has begun. This past year brought a number of significant moves and reconsiderations that, just maybe, will reclaim that more promising internet.

On the corporate side, bad actions have had more vigorous consequences, with significant fines coming from national regulators including, at last, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (growing pressure from fellow EU regulators seems to have strengthened Ireland’s spine).

Sweeping new EU legislation is on its way, with the Digital Market and Digital Services Acts, plus related pieces to add further muscle. Public attention often focuses on the US regulatory landscape, but the EU will remain the regulator of import because multinationals cannot ignore its huge market.

However, in 2022 the Biden administration also began to recalibrate the US regulatory system after years of stagnation under Trump. Important moves were made to unthaw frozen negotiations towards an adequate data transfer system, producing a new agreement in an area worth trillions in transatlantic trade. The US also has beefed up federal tech-related regulatory agencies and seems poised to progress a long-needed federal data protection law.

[ Karlinn Lillington: Government inaction leaves our data retention laws in limbo ]

Damages and fines

Also significant this year were multiple hefty damages awards against talk show host Alex Jones for his lies about Sandy Hook, and the fines and sentences handed out to participants in the January 6th, 2020, US Capitol insurrection.

No, these punishments won’t end the spewing of online disinformation and hate, or associated acts of abuse or violence, but they will make many reconsider whether their twisted interpretation of “free speech” means they can act online without consequences. These are momentous decisions, both symbolic and concrete.

And Elon Musk has done us some service. In the year of his catastrophic Twitter bid, he has single-handedly honed public awareness of the value of social media platforms – and how easily one can be left weak, flailing and manipulable on the whims of a single ghastly individual.

In just months, Musk has out-Zucked Zuck, laying bare the brittle myth of tech business “genius”, and revealing the foolishness of a tech investor ecosystem that wasn’t savvy enough to demand basic due diligence. It’s a business and technology lesson for the ages, exposing hubris, misjudgment, mismanagement, ego, pettiness, overconfidence, a business-acumen black hole – and the need to reconsider whether online public squares of global scale should be in private ownership.

The ongoing public migration to decentralised, non-commercial Mastodon signals radically different possibilities for online communities.

Maybe this all adds up to nothing. Plus, regulation is tricky, and some misguided proposals could create new problems. But looking back, and further back again, it feels like change, a building swell, a possible inflection point at which the internet forks towards the promise of earlier days.

At the very least, 2022 was a pivotal year for asking questions, demanding responses and taking back personal initiative; a year of rising awareness about the choices we make and an insistence that we be given – or will ourselves create – more choice, and more control over our tech-saturated lives.