The World Wide Mess

The Internet is a world on its own. For many people around the world, it is the alternate world. And for many of us, it is where we live, and we dream – it is our primary world. But it turns out that the Internet is so broken, so insecure, and so dynamic that it is very difficult to live peacefully in here. Here are some problems I see with the Internet and why it works in spite of all these.

No or low Standards

99% of the websites (including this) are not made adhering to the standards and this is magnified by the fact that our major browsers are worse in standards compliance. People will respect the web standards only if the web browsers strictly follow the standards. But the current trend is that developers of the major browsers are competing in making standards of their own. Yes, the IE8 passed the Acid2 test, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft will not introduce any proprietary standards in it. And every new proprietary standard they introduce will result in a more broken web some years down the line.

Interoperability

There is nothing like this in the whole Internet, and most of the people don’t know what the term means. Interoperability is a big issue in today’s social web. Users would like the different web services they use to be helping them in combining the services. I would like to see the different web services to merge their services seamlessly and thus giving a unique experience to each user by forming a large application that incorporates all the small web services.

Data Portability

Data portability is an issue being discussed by many, related to the Facebook-Scoble debate. As Mathew Ingram puts it, the main question here is:

Who does that data belong to? It might have been collected and organized in the way it has because of Facebook’s tools, and he obviously agreed to the terms of use that he has since broken, but there’s no question that the information itself should belong to Scoble (and the rest of us). So what rights should he have when it comes to removing that data from a site like Facebook? And who gets to decide?

Obviously, the problem is that most of the big corporations ignore this right of a user. And this persuades users to continue with the crappy web application because their data is trapped in it for ever.

Privacy

Again, privacy issues are all around the place and people are enjoying the furious debates. Google knows what you searches for, what is in your e-mails and what videos you watch. And if you think that Google would not know you visited this site, think again.

The Adsense ads in this site may be tracking the cookies in your computer and it knows exactly who you are. It know exactly what tabs are open in your browser. We have heard the Facebook Beacon row too. Also I don’t mean privacy issues are related to just Google and Facebook. Something must be done fast before privacy becomes history.

Anonymity

Anonymity is different from privacy, but both are related. By anonymity I mean the inability to know who did what in the web. For example, in the real world you know who bought an item from your shop. You may not know his address but s/he has an identity. But in the web, you cannot know for sure who commented on your blog and who downloaded a software from your website. People do not have a face in the web. Anonymity or rather the feeling of anonymity is what boosted file sharing networks and caused widespread Piracy.

Others

There are other problems which I will just list here. These are mostly irritations which causes junk data in the web.

• Ads – Too much of them
• SEO – Why the hype?
• Meta-blogging – Blogging about blogging about blogging…
• Multiple accounts – Where do I store all these passwords?

If you can think of any others, please list them too.

So, how does the Internet work in spite of these?

The answer is simple. Millions of people out there are wasting billions of man hours trying to make the things work. It is not that the whole Internet is working in spite of it being broken. It is the magic of the hard work by human beings that make it work.