The Death of the Internet: A Pre-Mortem

Unbelievable. I am an American sitting in Budapest working on freelance translation jobs I get in seconds from my agencies all over Europe, who Skypes his wife doing research in Indiana on a daily basis and who organized his 30-year class reunion last year at the last possible moment (three days in advance) by Facebook bullying. Record turnout, too.

When I program I have up-to-the-minute solutions for nearly every technical problem I encounter (well, at least to get me started) - I HAVE CPAN. (So I'm old.) I read American news (from Budapest) while it's happening. I see video from news events that Joe Public has recorded an hour ago, and I don't need Walter Cronkite to discover things for me.

I haven't done an inter-library loan in decades. And I don't miss waiting two weeks to find out whether that book will really help.

And tonight, I read that the Internet hasn't brought anything new to the world. And that got linked on Hacker News. Post-mortem my ass. Much the same way monks were writing post-mortems of that new-fangled Gutenberg process, I mean, sure, you don't have to have a scribe write out a book by hand any more, but it's not like we never had books before that guy came along.

Idiot.

I have to disagree with the premise that we did the same things before the internet that we do today. Was it possible to order things remotely? Yes, but it was hard enough that most poeple wouldn't do it - they would go to their local store and just purchase an item there.

Did the average citizen communicate freely across the oceans? Not remotely. Mail was expensive, phones even more so. Can this continue without the internet? No.

Was information ever disseminated as freely as it is today? No. I have volumes of programming books which were years out of date when I purchased them to prove this.

That said, I agree that the internet is about to get a lot more expensive, especially as the ad bubble which supported so much of its growth falls apart. It will be interesting, and bittersweet, to watch how the internet evolves post-ads.

There are some tiny points in this article which are worth considering (the way internet companies are financed, the possible scenarios of internet evolution towards mainstream entertainment), but as a whole, it's quite incoherent FUD (and a machine to promote the overall authors' gloomy predictions about the future).

It's especially pathetic that in spite of all the arguments, casting doom on the internet, the author declares in the middle of the post that all these factors "won’t kill the internet". This is just ridiculous.

Just like ridiculous are the author's opinions which clearly stand against the facts, i.e. "(...) the internet can be expected to follow the usual trajectory of a maturing industry, becoming more expensive, less convenient, and more tightly focused on making a quick buck with each passing year". Can anyone provide an example of the industry for which maturing led to higher prices and less convenience?

What a bunch of nonsense!

His main argument is that the internet is not economically sustainable, but even IF the current infrastructure would stob being supported humanity would find ways to keep it alive because it made our lives so much easier and we can't live without it anymore. We might switch to a decentralized infrastructure like Maidsafe is building for example and that would eliminate the economic issue this guy is blabbering about.

But the END of the internet? That's ridiculous!

At first, Amazon's data center products were huge money sinks. Startup costs. Missed cost estimates for opex. Extraordinary events. Lack of scale. It looked BAD.

Now AWS is profitable, and Amazon's management knows enough about how to run it to live with thin margins that will cause their competitors lots of pain.

Stuff is getting paid for, and stuff is getting cheaper and there is plenty of room for stuff to get even cheaper.

I'd agree that a sales tax on Internet-based purchases will be imposed at some point, and that seemingly going industries can be remarkably unprofitable in the long term [1]. Don't know about the long term viability of Internet ads and do wish they'd die, but it'd be nice to see data.

But the rest of the article seems to be unquantified assertions -- the SST went broke, so of course the Internet will as well; data centers cost a lot of money to maintain. One could counter with other assertions-- Apple profits and Amazon revenues are huge, etc. Data would be nice.

[1]E.g. airlines have, over six decades of operation, not returned the cost of capital. http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/02/ec...

All of the people that disagree with this article forget to disagree with its author's prediction that once fossil fuels and other still plentyful but possibly not forever plentyful resources (water and fertile soil, for instance) are over, the internet is going to become a burden too heavy to continue to be lifted in face of more pressing issues, like eating. But I do agree that before that happens, thought I think it'll happen in our lifespans, the internet has no reason to go away, except for all of those free subsidized services. (Paid) email will probably still be around for a while.

Wow. To claim the internet is not economically viable requires an extremely selective view of the evidence. I had to check the date at the top of the article to be sure it wasn't written in 1998.

Why bother comparing the internet to supersonic jets? SST might have been a popular idea, but it never reached the same level of global acceptance and support as the internet.

This is just the rantings of some wacky doom and gloom person. The Internet's demise pales to the idea that the average American will lack running water in 2065.

That sidebar of books being advertised suggests a mindset heavily invested in inevitable decline.