I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the whole centralization/decentralization thing, and privatization of the Web. Seems you can’t really get away from the topic right now, every other day some new privacy issue related to FaceBook or MySpace is lighting the blogosphere on fire, splashing cold water on our collective faces and reminding us what a fragile ecosystem the Web really is. The latest hot button issue is FaceBook’s Beacon advertising program, which basically broadcasts your Internet activities to your friends on FaceBook (yeah, just the kind of innovation we’ve been waiting for…)
I’m not going to go into the stupidity of this Beacon idea–really, is it even worth debating?–but to me this is just the latest in a long line of examples of the dangers of too much centralization. Give someone—anyone—unfettered access to your data, and they WILL find a way to milk it for as much money as possible. If you’re betting on the goodwill and good intentions of a corporation formed to make money then you obviously haven’t been involved in a capitalistic society for long enough.
One of the big fears I have about the future of the Internet, if we don’t decentralize and privatize it soon enough—is the growing power of the few centralized sites that everyone uses. If you think about it, there are a few select sites that have a LOT of power over the Internet and its citizens, simply because of the numbers of eyeballs they control. Probably at least 90% of Internet traffic flows through them. Without them, the Internet would be half as useful as it is today (which is a big part of the problem). I can think of a few sites in particular:
- LinkedIn, Facebook, and Myspace—to find people
- Yahoo, CNN, MSN—to find news and content
- Google—to find just about everything else
- Amazon, EBay—to buy things
The only real exception to this rule is when somebody physically sees a URL somewhere—on a billboard, on TV, or in a magazine, and types it directly into their browser. But even then, there are a large percentage of people who just type the URL into Google by mistake since they’re so used to using it. Using Google as the entry point to the Web is almost reflexive. I’m sure the browser toolbars don’t help with the confusion either.
A big problem is that people tend to go thru these clearing-house sites and central filters in order to get to the content they’re looking for instead of directly to the source of the content itself. Instead of looking at my business card and seeing my site address is jasonkolb.com, they’re much more likely to look me up on Google and find my site that way (judging from my site stats, a LOT of people do this). Or, depending on their age, they may look me up on Facebook or Myspace and find my profile there (which is just a placeholder pointing them to this site).
So far this has worked ok, but what if those filters and middle-men become unreliable? What if Google suddenly decides that there’s another Jason Kolb who deserves the #1 spot in the search results for “Jason Kolb” more than I do? (Not exactly “Joe Smith”, I know, but there ARE other Jason Kolb’s out there.) And then, what if that other Jason Kolb decides to pretend to be me? Hasn’t my identity effectively been stolen?
And since I rank #1 for the term "Jason Kolb", what if I pretend to be a different Jason Kolb? Haven’t I stolen his identity?
And then what happens if those middle-men and filters actually go down completely? As TinyURL so effectively demonstrated recently when it went down, if middlemen sites go down, the Internet almost ceases to function. If Google went down, not only would nobody would be able to find me, the Internet would be pretty much paralyzed. And if Facebook decides to block searches for my name, as it recently did with Ron Paul (vote for Ron Paul 2008, Save Our Country! Sorry, couldn’t resist 
, it’ll make it that much harder to find me. If FaceBook goes down, suddenly HUGE numbers of people effectively go off the grid and become unreachable on the Internet to many of their friends.
If everyone were running their own private site, similar to this blog, it wouldn’t be as much of a problem. Of course, that still doesn’t solve the problem of people looking for me via Google, but that’s a much more complicated problem to solve.
