“The age of information is here”
– A bro in an XL Tupac shirt
It may not seem likely right now, but the Internet is in fact living out its last days. You may wonder “how is this?”, “why would you say that”, or “why do you even bother to blog?”, but let’s look at the facts. While hippies were drumming away in their circles and the United States was in yet another year of the war in Vietnam, the Internet was invented to have a system of transmitting data from one place to another through a series of networks that it would itself find in case one of the lines failing due to nuclear war. Now, to be sure, the Internet sucked back then. The computers of the time weren’t even made to use it, as they were primarily made to store data for companies and the government. You couldn’t even talk to anybody on the Internet because e-mail wasn’t invented until 1972. I’m not sure what exactly they used it for, but it was probably really boring. Back in those days if you wanted to talk to anyone you usually sent some morse code to their teleprinter or something.
Anyhow, the Internet didn’t REALLY exist until 1973 when TCP/IP, the protocol for making sure you get the data you’re sent, and that it gets to you and not anyone else was invented. It’s not very secure though so even today you can download software to see what everyone on your local network is doing. Anyhow, by 1980 most universities and government agencies already had their Internet systems connected to each other and could send emails to each other some, of which were logged into bulletin boards where everyone got the messages they had on it when they logged on. By the late 1980s a lot of companies started doing that for people with PC’s, though their networks were closed in and only had stupid games, boring news, forums, and email. By the 1990s, however, these companies started connecting their networks through other companies that installed cables from one to another. If this makes sense, this picture should illustrate it”:
It’s basically a lot of networks tied together with a lot of the communication between them going through shared centralized infrastructure, but a lot of different networks.
Flash forward to today where the Internet has grown about 20 million times from what it was back then and most people get it through Verizon, Comcast, or whatever their local cable TV/telephone service is called, and mostly use it for stuff like e-mail, Facebook, Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon. It’s easy to understand that the Internet infrastructure today is not really sufficient considering both the growth in the amount of people who use it and the growth in how much data they transmit for bank accounts, social networking, and videos.
Now, with all this Internet usage blowing up, you may have a lot of the Internet has become slower and more unreliable in recent years, especially when providers like Comcast try to cut costs as much as possible because of their near-monopoly status and almost everyone already being connected to the Internet so they really have nowhere else to go. A lot of this is because centralized services like Netflix already eat up a lot of the carrying capacity that the Internet has. In fact, most of what is carried on the Internet is media nowadays, rather than text, even in developing countries. There has already been a lot of conflict over the idea of Net Neutrality, or that your Internet company should provide all of its services at the same rate, rather than slowing down websites that don’t pay them for full-speed access, but now it is more likely that the Internet itself will disappear in the next few years.
The military and much of the government have already migrated its Internet to some super-secret networks, and the universities that were the backbone of the Internet to begin with are moving all of their inter-university communications to Internet2, which is not dominated by movie downloads, Facebook photos, and the general rubbish you see on the Internet. At the same time, cable and telephone providers have been providing ‘triple-play’ services where you get your telephone, Internet, and TV all through the same cable. The digital TV that we have is still transmitted the same way it always has been, with different signals on different frequencies depending on the channel, but instead of analog signals it essentially streams .mpeg files straight to your receiver on one wavelength and sends upload and download data on other wavelengths that every few milliseconds take turns transmitting signals on the cable.
There is also a different technology, used by AT&T’s television service, that simply sends the TV signal through the same way the Internet does, with you requesting the channel and the company turning the stream on for you, rather than already have it as a frequency on the cable, though after that it’s the same deal.
Anyhow, now that television is digital and most Internet traffic is media, and Internet TV capability is offered by Apple, and Google through Sony, it would only make sense for cable and telephone companies to start offering these services through a centralized service separate from the Internet so that it doesn’t require regulation. It would make sense for both the content providers such as Netflix, Hulu, and the like, and the service providers, as it would be cheaper to directly connect the content to the service, rather than through a network, and both would save money as the content providers no longer have to lease cables and service providers would no longer have to install more equipment to allow for the traffic increases due to video services.
On the other hand of this would be service reductions for those who do use the ISP but don’t use the service, done this time by the content provider which is completely legal because it’s a private connection to an unregulated autonomous system, and has been done, in reverse, by ESPN360 which only provided its service to ISPs that it had contracts with, as well as when YouTube blocks a video to a country. The media aspect of it is also beneficial to the said companies because such a controlled flow of information would basically eliminate unlicensed and pirated content, and service reductions would render online piracy and P2P much more difficult.
After this all that would need to be done is a migration of all the other features the Internet provides – social networking, commerce, games, video sharing, (and porn.) After some technological upgrades, this would not be difficult to achieve, after all these have already been moved to smartphones. Centralized services like Facebook, Amazon, and YouTube would be the first, of course, but others would likely follow, at least in the form of apps. The privacy issues would not be significant, as many people do already have televisions in their own quarters, and the idea that a television could replace a computer would only make it more popular. The only remaining uses for the Internet would be things that actually require either the Internet itself, such as e-mail, or greater privacy and security, such as on-line banking, neither of which requires high bandwidth and can also be replaced with time.
And then the Internet will die.
COOL OPINIONS, bro 