Internet Is Having a Midlife Crisis (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: The rise of cyber-bullying and monopolistic business practices has damaged trust in the internet, pioneering entrepreneur Baroness Lane-Fox has told the BBC. The Lastminute.com founder also called for a "shared set of principles" to make the web happier and safer. She said the internet had done much good over the last 30 years. But she said too many people had missed out on the benefits and it was time to "take a step back". "The web has become embedded in our lives over the last three decades but I think it's reached an inflexion point, or a sort of midlife crisis," she told Radio 4's Today programme. Baroness Lane-Fox co-founded travel booking site Lastminute.com in 1998 before going on to sell the firm for 577m pound seven years later. She described the early days of the internet as being "full of energy and excitement," and akin to the "wild West". "There was this feeling that suddenly, with this access to this new technology, you could start a business from anywhere," she said. However, she said that while technology had become a hugely important sector of the UK economy, it had not fulfilled its early potential.

Comments

If one wants to recapture that Wild West energy...

[forkfail]

... I cannot think of a better way than imposing more regulation.

And if she thought that the 'net was a "nice" place in its early days, well, I suspect that she missed huge swaths of usenet...

With this said, she is right. The character of the 'net has changed. But her own response seems to be very midlife in and of itself: let's try to recapture a childhood that cannot be returned to.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Lastminute.com founder also called for a "shared set of principles" to make the web happier and safer.

Umm. Ok. Now compare to:

She described the early days of the internet as being "full of energy and excitement," and akin to the "wild West".

You can't have a vibrant, safe, wild-west. IMO, it's your "shared set of principles" that killed the Internet (or at least made it a lot, less interesting).

The problem is not the Internet

[William Baric]

"Cyber-bullying" affecting "young people's self-esteem" is not a problem. The problem is that young people from Western countries are now unable to cope with "bad" words which might hurt their precious little feelings. It's not "the Internet is having a midlife crisis", it's "Western civilization is crumbling".

Re:The problem is not the Internet

[mjr167]

Because this is what they are teaching in schools. My 2nd grader was told by her teacher that "words hurt forever". I found this out while calming her down after her friend calling her 'mean' reduced her to tears.

There is no "sticks and stones..." anymore. Now it's "words hurt more than hitting" and "words are unforgivable".

Re:The problem is not the Internet

[imidan]

I guess this goes along with the madness that is college students' belief that disagreement is innately hurtful and may even extend to the level of hate speech or threats. Young people seem to be taught that conflict is necessarily aggressive and wrong, and if someone else's opinions conflict with theirs, then those people are also aggressive and wrong (and their own side is blameless and innocent). And, apparently having lost the capacity for friendly competition, all that's left is ugly, go-for-the-jugular, all-out destruction of the other side. We see the same thing in our government, where compromise is now a craven weakness.

once again...

[Anonymous Coward]

The rise of cyber-bullying and monopolistic business practices has damaged trust in the internet

Internet culture died around 1993..

Since then, it has been stamped into the dirt by idiots who have begged for and bought with their own money: more surveillance, less freedom, more censorship, less end user control over their own devices, and a wholesale transfer of that control to megacorps. They've constantly favored Facebook and other data-broker intrusions into "private" communication, putting a few for-profit companies into gatekeeper roles over ever increasing swaths of the internet. They've punished open standards and open protocols, replacing them with closed, central control ones. They've removed the ability of people to defend themselves against that "cyber-bulling" by requiring more and more be tied to real world identities, which enables the bullies and denies the victims a key form of self defense.

No... the internet died long before this "Baroness Lane-Fox" probably ever heard of it. She's part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Weird article

[Sumus Semper Una]

Things that have contributed to eroding my trust of the Internet to some degree:

Proliferation of fake news (by which I mean ideological propaganda specifically designed to look like news but with incitement as its goal rather than information)
Government (pick whichever one you want) sponsored spying
Dodgy business practices by large, well-known, IT-focused companies
Data breaches and other hacks
Viruses
Spam
Advertisers trying to disguise their ads as if they were a natural part of the parent page
Advertising by looking at metadata

Things that have definitely not contributed to eroding my trust of the internet:

Cyber bullying

Re:Who is having the crisis?

[mikael]

I think she is complaining it's not possible to create an Internet startup like she used to be able to do so, because there's always someone out there who is already doing something in the Amazon marketplace or elsewhere. Railway tickets? Done. Airplane tickets? Done. Car hire? Done. Alternative to taxis? Done. Retro merchandise? Done. Discount fashion show throwaway items? Done. Second hand books? Done. Antiques? Done.

It's like academic research. What was once a hot research field topic, becomes one of a hundred books on that subject a decade later.