How Google Destroyed the Internet

By Brett Stevens | alternative-right.blogspot.com

The internet was created to resolve a simple problem: in communications networks, any central node through which all messages passed was vulnerable to attack or takeover. To counter this, engineers designed a network where any node would pass messages to other nodes, routing around any damage.

Then came commerce and the democratization of the internet.

Under this model, frightened sheep flock to certain central sites that provide the services they need, and avoid everything else, lest it be politically incorrect or upsetting.

Enter Google. This company made its fortune on a simple premise, which was that picking the most popular sites allowed them to rank all other sites based on whether those popular sites linked to them. Guess what this does? It eliminates the small sites. We are back to centralization.

Consider Wikipedia. When Google had trouble with its algorithm often missing the best results, it came up with a simple idea: have thousands of internet volunteers plagiarize all of those other sites onto one big site, call it "The People’s Encyclopedia," and use that to generate "accurate" search results every time.

Fast-forward, and a few big sites — among them Google, Amazon, Apple, Wikipedia, and Facebook — dominate most of the traffic on the internet. The days of independent thinkers making quality information widely available online are mostly gone, simply because 99% of the traffic will type in a search and click on the most obvious result, and go to one of those corporate-controlled sites.

Writing from a more political, than economic, viewpoint, one article points out the problem of internet consolidation:

"The Internet, like other computing resources, operates on a pendulum swing: from centralized to decentralized, from rampant innovation to predictable results, from controlled to transparent processes. Some speakers at this year’s Black Hat conference were publicly concerned about an ever-more-centralized Internet and what we as an industry need to do. Otherwise, they fear, the Internet turns into TV, and the people who least understand the environment will control it.

…Technology used to enforce existing power structures, Granick said, but we discovered that people have not learned how to protect themselves. So we have centralized with choke points where regulation can happen. The problem is that, in the next 20 years, these policies will be created by governments with local concerns, not global concerns. And by powerful players with money."

The problem of this internet is that complaints rule the day. Businesses are interested in profit, and so they take down any content which will obstruct that goal, which includes exactly the type of content which "free speech" was created to protect: unpopular material that contravenes the dominant paradigm, but nonetheless could represent either insanity or an alternative to our

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