The Good Old Internet Days

Commentary

Few people fully understand how much the Internet of today operates differently from the pre-2020 Internet. From the early 1990s, through the invention of the web browser in 1995, through a quarter-century of networked development and innovation, the point had always been fundamentally democratic: of the people, by the people, for the people. Then everything changed.

Let’s take a look back at how search algorithms worked. As content grew, old-style search engines simply could not keep up with the remarkable volume that was growing daily. The advent of Google was a revelation. Their codes found and organized vastly more content and delivered it to the user based on interests and credibility.

The credibility point was crucial. How would Google determine it? It was based on how often the site was hit, how often it was linked to from other sites, and how the community generally regarded the site. This gave even the smallest site a fighting chance to earn attention from searchers. Site builders were careful and scrupulous about SEO (search engine optimization) with key words and good site structure.

The place rank in search results rewarded the best builders and the best writers based on earned merit. There was no overall discernable bias, no public orthodoxy to which the information systems adhered; it was the people who were driving forward what rose and fell based on use. This was a reflection of a general libertarian ethos of the tech community and its dogged attachment to free speech as the best path for everyone.

All of this was verifiable with public data. There was a ranking service called Alexa that sought to display traffic for every site of some size. It started with a browser plug in and moved to dropping cookies to follow browsing habits. It ended up with a highly sophisticated system that allowed one to check what was real and what was not. It even had a profitability model: paying customers could see longer-range data with more granularity.

Why should this matter? Because you could easily look up sites, individuals, and institutions to gain a measure of their reach and influence. The high and mighty were reduced to nothingness when you could observe that no one was really reading or using a much-vaunted site, while new information sources were achieving great heights. The whole system worked well together to provide an ever-growing information space that had checks and balances in all directions.

There was something else that made this era remarkable: the sheer diversity of voices. Blogs flourished, millions of them, on every conceivable topic. RSS feeds allowed readers to curate their own information diet without intermediaries. Forums and message boards operated as genuine communities where ideas could be tested and refined through vigorous debate. Early social media platforms like Twitter (in its first decade) functioned as public utilities where you could follow whomever you pleased and see what they posted in chronological order. There were no shadow bans, no throttling, no algorithmic suppression of wrongthink. If someone had something worth saying, he could find their audience.

The entire machinery began to fall apart by the turn of the century as consolidation began to take hold. Alexa was acquired by Amazon and then shut down completely. Search engines gradually began to put a priority on stakeholder content and pay-to-play advertising schemes. This was bad enough but the real problem would wait another two decades.

In 2020, the real blows hit one by one. Google became the handmaiden of the censors. The terms misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation started being thrown around to apply to everything that contradicted industry and government sources. Social media played along and started removing content. YouTube, which had been acquired by Google, started removing videos by the millions. A major excuse was to remove content by supposed anti-vaxxers in light of pandemic conditions. All major social media did this as pandemic dissident content was crushed before our eyes.

The mechanisms of control grew more sophisticated by the month. Independent journalists and commentators found themselves demonetized without explanation, their videos hidden from subscribers, their reach throttled into oblivion.

Fact-checkers—often funded by the very institutions being scrutinized—became the new gatekeepers, slapping warning labels on content they merely disagreed with. The old meritocracy was replaced by a credentialism that favored established media outlets regardless of their accuracy or relevance. A small group of unelected technicians at a handful of companies now decided what billions of people would and would not see.

In May of 2022, the Biden administration issued the tell-all document called the Declaration on the Future of the Internet. Free speech and the First Amendment were nowhere mentioned. The mentions of free in context read more less like free beer not free speech. Moreover, governance took a different form: “The Internet should operate as a single, decentralized network of networks—with global reach and governed through the multistakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”

This is a long distance from where we started. So far as I know, the State Department still embraces this document. It has not yet been repealed by the Trump administration though it should be forthwith. The multistakeholder model sounds collaborative until you realize it excludes the most important stakeholder of all: you, the individual user.

What we lost was not merely a technical arrangement but a philosophy—that human beings, left to their own devices, can sort truth from falsehood, that open competition produces better outcomes than managed discourse, and that the right to speak is inseparable from the right to hear. We are clawing some of that back now with Elon’s X, Substack, and The Epoch Times, but pushback is vulnerable on many fronts, especially with AI now grabbing the controlling interest in determining what you see and what you say.

The Internet was once messy, chaotic, productively creative, and gloriously free. Whether we can recover that spirit depends on whether we remember what it felt like to genuinely discover something rather than have it served to us by an algorithm, and whether we still believe that ordinary people—not governments, not corporations, not self-appointed guardians of truth—should determine the future of human knowledge.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.