Everybody loves the Internet, whether you are using it on your smartphone or on you desktop PC. But emerging dangers poses a real threat to the way we are using this new information medium. The Internet is in danger of being changed from a free and open structure to being heavily controlled and censored.
The non-profit ICANN runs the so-called IANA functions, the world’s top level domains and allocating IP addresses. This is what keeps the web glued together. Some Washington politicians wants to change a working system that has allowed other countries and stakeholders to have confidence that the Internet is free from abusive control and that the values that make the Internet work (freedom of access, free speech etc.) cannot be eliminated.
Even net neutrality is under attack. The FCC secret 332-page “Net Neutrality” document is said to be a scheme for micro-managing the Internet and censorship under the guise of content fairness. Some have speculated that big Internet Service Provider companies will bill extra fees on consumers for this.
The search giant Google is aiming to adopt an algorithm to judge the trustworthiness of a website by how accurate the content is. Their goal is to match content to other sites and rank it based on content accuracy. However, judging and ranking content quality is difficult and could cause big problems for both users and publishers. For instance, how can anyone truly judge the quality of the content itself on a site like Three Link Directory?
The biggest danger is that these aggressive changes could make the Internet less popular, and the future web could be shrinking in popularity just like radio, TV and newspapers, and not expanding freely like it is now.
