Internet: Commercialise and be damned!

The planet is facing at least two calamities: one is the overheating of the planet, and the second is the information overload.

While people are trying to devise ways of avoiding the first, it is secretly contributing to the second.

The information explosion was already acute in the early 80's. People were producing research papers, reports, or what have you by the millions. To add to the grief, these documents also cross-referenced other documents. Perhaps you can recollect the tedium of reading a paper, which cross-referenced a dozen other documents.

With the arrival of computers on your desk, things actually got worse for the reader. With paper-based documents, one could have all the relevant documents all open at the same time, and manage to navigate among them reasonably well. It isn't that easy to navigate if the documents were all open on a computer monitor screen.

If only there was an easy way of linking the cross-referenced documents… This must have been everyone's dream at the time.

Then, having seen the problem at CERN, Dr. Berners-Lee came up with a method to do just that.

In the old days, and still is, of paper-based publishing, there was an industry language called "markup".

The term "typesetter", in this electronic world, is the "renderer". It is the agent - human or software, which makes the document visible/readable on paper or on a computer monitor.

Dr. Bernard-Lee invented a new "markup" for computer rendered documents. The most important invention being the cross-referencing system for documents. These links are called "hyperlinks", which is an address of a document in a computer location. These links can also refer to sections, words etc. within documents.

When networking arrived, computers could be linked to each other forming a network, allowing access to documents located anywhere in the world. The international network came to be known as the Internet.

Internet was invented for a purpose - to share research among scientists.

But, its potential was not lost on the commercial world. If research can be rendered on computer screens, why not advertisements?

So, the downhill slide of the Internet (in my opinion) began.

It has become a virtual shopping mall. Of course one can still use it to pursue one's research.

Look at the ills this commercialization has brought upon us: security problems, spam, pornography, crime,…

Some good things also have happened. Because of the rising commercial activities on the Internet, the demand for more capacity has spawned technologies, which otherwise may not have been pursued.

It has also brought us clever rendering software. Whole new professions have mushroomed. Whole new technologies have spawned. Jobs have been created. New jargon has come to enrich our vocabulary. More wealth for the economy…

Instant mail is here. You can instantly send queries to authorities, if only they would respond...

The takeover of the Internet by commercial interests is so complete that the academic community has decided to create a parallel Internet and call it Internet 2. This is to be used exclusively for academic activities.

The demand for better and exotic rendering schemes is driving researchers to invent such technologies as Web 2, Semantic Web and others.

You and I will be the first to experience these technologies, I suppose.

Internet has become a minefield, which needs careful treading. There are enemies out there waiting to destroy your information assets, steal your financial resources, and even make black marks against yourself without a hint of what is happening. Because our sweating software developers have inadvertently left loopholes for these attackers to get in.

Whatever bad said about the Internet, can we now imagine a life without it?