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Another huge paradigm shift for the Net

Hands up those who remember what the internet was like during the 1990s?

Dial-up connections were all that most of us had available to us and they offered, at least initially, a mere 14.4Kbps of bandwidth. As a result of this limitation, webpages were simple and devoid of heavy graphics -- Xtra's initial website being the exception to that, even though it could take a minute or more to load the huge 135KB main image.

Platforms such as Geocities were the place to be and the closest thing we had to "social media" was usenet with its seemingly endless array of newsgroups.

Due to the limitations of early versions of HTML, even web-based forums were hard to find but that didn't matter because once GUI-based usenet newsreader software became popular usenet was made far more convenient and easy.

Eventually usenet kind of died. It never actually went away but it lost popularity and even the web-based usenet service Deja News was eventually swallowed up by Google and incorporated into Google Groups. In 2024 Google Groups dropped support for usenet but other usenet groups still exist, running on various NNTP servers around the internet.

Usenet was ultimately replaced for most people by a combination of web-based forums and platforms such as Facebook. These allow conversations in realtime, as opposed to the long delays often associated with the propagation of usenet posts.

Another form of free speech on the early internet was the "home page". This was a place where people could build their own webpage or pages, initially through hand-coded HTML that was uploaded to a webserver, usually run by their ISP or a site such as Geocities.

Homepages were great (IMHO) and allowed people to not only publish their thoughts, opinions, experiences and such but to also exercise their creative flare with styling and layout -- as much as early HTML would allow such things.

By comparison, Facebook and similar platforms are boring as bat-poo. These sites do allow you to write what you like (within their TOS) but force all material into their own style and layout. The loss of layout freedom certainly makes for a less exciting internet on such platforms.

Never the less, if we wanted information, opinion, news or just something to entertain us, we have (up to this point) simply fired up our browsers, done a search and followed the most interesting looking links. That's the way the web has worked since its earliest days and it has served us well.

In fact, one of the joys of early internet use was visiting seek.com, altavista, Lycos or whatever search engine you used and repeating the same searches you'd done the day before. If a new link showed up -- oh happy-happy, joy-joy, off you'd go to check out this new website.

Well strap yourselves in folks, the internet is about to undergo a huge paradigm change and it's all down to the effects of AI.

You'll have noticed, if you use Google search, at the top of most results is an "AI Summary" which, more often than not, will give you all the information you need to satisfy your needs. Yes, there are still countless pages of links but most people are inherently lazy and will first read that AI summary then, if it gives them the info they were after, they won't bother clicking any of those links.

I queried Google's Gemini and it stated that Google's goal is to keep people on its own properties for as long as possible so as to maximise revenues. That's great for Google but what will it mean for the diversity and currency of content that gets published elsewhere?

Why go to all the trouble and cost of creating a really useful website loaded with researched and accurate information on a topic if Google's AI is simply going to scrape it, assimilate the knowledge and then hand it over to people at the top of a search page without even referencing where it came from?

It becomes scarily possible that the average Net user may soon spend their entire online session on Google properties, never leaving those domains. Log in, check your GMail, watch a few YouTube videos, browse Google News, search for some information and be satisfied by the AI summary then log out.

Perhaps it'll be even simpler than that... you log into Gemini and ask it simple stuff like "show me my emails" and "what news might I be interested in" before getting it to queue up new YouTube videos that have arrived in your feed. AI will replace "Google.com" as most people's start page on the internet and because the AI will effectively create summaries of all the stuff you need to know you'll never have to leave that page at all... ever.

If this scenario becomes reality then we have definitely reached "peak internet". From here on it will be all downhill. AI-generated slop will replace good reliable human-generated content and AI will go psycho as it feeds on its own excrement in an attempt to boost the size of its training data. Much of the world's independent publishing industry will wither and die due to its output being scraped and appropriated by AI systems, protected from prosecution under copyright laws by already-set legal precedents in the courts.

Ah well, at least (if I'm still around) in 10 year's time I'll be able to tell my grandkids and their kids about the way the internet used to be -- before we wrecked it.

Carpe Diem folks!

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