> The 'Internet' is working as intended. The issue is how HTTP is used and its availability in most consumer devices.
I partly put the blame on late 90s web developers for this. Instead of developing web /browsers/, the industry should've built web /communicators/ (one would think Netscape could've figured this out).
That is, we should've been using tools that make publishing content on the web as easy as consuming content[1].
If that mindset had been cultivated then and we had user friendly tools to support it, public mentality about sharing content would be different, and after years of improvement we might have a more balanced internet today where each user has full control over their data.
Unfortunately, we built web browsers for consumption only, the advertising industry took hold of our business models, which naturally created silos that grew richer and more powerful.
We can build and have built better tools, but the inertia of how things work today makes it difficult for alternative platforms to take off.
It still makes no sense to me that we use powerful computers to run web clients that send data somewhere on the internet where it is served for me, when the computer I'm using can serve this data just fine (assuming some infrastructure is in place to handle this).
[1]: This is something Opera attempted much later in 2009 with Unite (https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands...), but abandoned it shortly later. I imagine they were missing a lot of network infrastructure and it being too confusing for end-users to make this a success. Are there previous attempts of this in a consumer browser?
I partly put the blame on late 90s web developers for this. Instead of developing web /browsers/, the industry should've built web /communicators/ (one would think Netscape could've figured this out).
That is, we should've been using tools that make publishing content on the web as easy as consuming content[1].
If that mindset had been cultivated then and we had user friendly tools to support it, public mentality about sharing content would be different, and after years of improvement we might have a more balanced internet today where each user has full control over their data.
Unfortunately, we built web browsers for consumption only, the advertising industry took hold of our business models, which naturally created silos that grew richer and more powerful.
We can build and have built better tools, but the inertia of how things work today makes it difficult for alternative platforms to take off.
It still makes no sense to me that we use powerful computers to run web clients that send data somewhere on the internet where it is served for me, when the computer I'm using can serve this data just fine (assuming some infrastructure is in place to handle this).
[1]: This is something Opera attempted much later in 2009 with Unite (https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands...), but abandoned it shortly later. I imagine they were missing a lot of network infrastructure and it being too confusing for end-users to make this a success. Are there previous attempts of this in a consumer browser?