2log

One visualization of the internet

Mark your calendars for OneWebDay (Sept. 22nd), a holiday celebrating the internet and organize localized activism on its behalf. The folks organizing the invited me to write a blog entry as part of a blogger parade leading up to the event.

The internets are still in their infancy, and they're going to undergo major changes over our lifetime. As it changes, activists are hoping it will remain "free." But nobody agrees on the definition of free. The geek community believe keeping the net free requires government enforcement of the principles of net neutrality, which I tried and failed to 2log about previously. Some libertarian types believe that keeping the internet unregulated and subject to the whim of free markets is the definition of free. (For the record, I fall somewhere in the middle.)

The important takeaway from this is that the internet is a highly personalized experience. Each person's definition of the internet is shaped by the specific way he or she uses it. It can be used to read, write, or 'rithmetic. It's become a powerful channel wherein it becomes all things to all people. To me, a free internet is the one which most efficiently provides the most people with the experience they seek.

My use of the internet is probably different from 99% of the other internet users. My experience with the internet most closely resembles that of a gearhead. I like looking under the hood. I like understanding how it works on the packet level. I like tinkering. I like finding the hiccups and building tools to fix them. I like building things from scratch (spam filters, blog software, assorted web gizmos) when perfectly good solutions already exist. I like creating a fully independent island within the ever-fluctuating sea of the hypertubes.

Running a small, independent web server as a hobbyist, my freedom on the net is probably the most threatened by upcoming changes to the internet. Increasingly, the amount of work necessary to run a website is more than a single hobbyist can handle. SEO, fighting spam, backend maintenance, data analytics, and performance optimization are just a handful of the challenges I wrestle with. More crop up daily. Increasing governmental regulation threatens to dump legal liability onto my plate. If AT&T gets its way, I'll likely have to pay extra money to connect my machine to the information superhighway. The hobbyist like me will eventually drown, and my experience with the internet may eventually become impossible.

Can this experience be preserved? Maybe. Can the open nature of the web allow me to share my experience of how I've taken advantage of the open nature of the web? Yes.