The end of the internet. can be closer than we think | by Michal Malewicz | Feb, 2024 | Medium

The end of the internet

can be closer than we think

Michal Malewicz

6 min read

1 day ago

The internet as we know may be coming to an end.

I’ll share with you some changes that I witnessed myself and where I think we’re heading and sadly it’s not going to be pretty.

I mean there is a positive scenario here, but likely one most people won’t be too happy about either.

So let’s take the internet down from Big Ben for a minute and examine it more closely. Yeah, you can hold it too but don’t drop it!

The internet

We have come to take the internet for granted and, like a slowly boiling frog have accepted all the shifts in the wrong directions it has taken over the years.

Heavy regulation: Check.
Censorship and truth manipulation: Check.
Privacy intrusion and tracking: Check.
Everything’s an ad: Yeah!

and worst of all…

EU enforced Cookie banners

This is one of the worst things that happened to the web… ever.

The major shifts

The 90's

I got my first internet access in 1997. It was a 33600 kbit modem and downloading this article on it would’ve taken over 5 minutes.

The nineties were a wild west. Everything was permitted and nobody could even take down an offensive site. There was no censorship, ugly GIF advertising and Altavista search engine.

If you want to compare it to something, Altavista was like a Google where you needed to learn specific prompt techniques to get anything useful out of it. Sounds familiar?

Early 2000's

The early 2000’s were the era of animated Flash websites — a creative time for all…