Web Profits in the Gutter

The New York Times has an article about the web's one true growth industry: spam, fraud and porn. Societal meltdown or flourishing ecosystem? The talking heads debate.

Comments

Leave it to the New York Times ...

[radicalsubversiv]

... to write an articulate article, with lots of sweeping claims from important-sounding people, which doesn't really offer much to substantiate its claims.

In some ways, I wish the "cyberspace" notion had never been introduced, because it furthers bad analogies like these, comparing the net to a geographical neighborhood, which has apparently become a red-light district.

The reality, of course, is that the internet is a communication medium, not a neighborhood, and the apparently-proliferating number of sleazy businesses making use of it proves very little. Sure, you can make money selling fake penis-enlargement pills at a $57 markup, so long as you can find suckers (although I do admit being a bit surprised that there are so many of them).

Brewster Kahle is right on point, even if his thoughts are buried in the article:

Brewster Kahle, who has created a large Internet archive he calls the Wayback Machine, which contains several times the amount of information in the Library of Congress, said that the number of questionable sites is beside the point so long as search engines do their job.

"We don't worry about how many pages that I don't care about are in the Internet archive," he said. "What you do care about is, `Does it have the pages that I want?' "

Now if only the NY Times would stop running articles about the supposed decline of electronic "civil society," and start commentataing on the actual decline of actual civil society. Or, heaven forbid, the sleazy nature of elected officials and their corporate benefactors.