The ‘Free Information Sandbox’ Is Buried

For most users of the Internet and for the watchful, anxious mavens of Wall Street, the World Wide Web is brand-spanking-new. It was therefore curiosity that pulled me to a panel discussion at this week’s South-by-Southwest (SXSW) Multimedia Festival in Austin, Texas, a panel with the provocative title, “Is the Web Dead?” And it was a little strange to hear all four of the panelists answer yes.

Austin has ambitions, as one speaker put it, to transform itself from the “slacker capital of the world” into the world’s leading center of multimedia production. The city is crawling with start-up firms with young people who spend most of their waking lives in front of a computer screen--not just programmers, but graphic artists, musicians, animators, writers, composers and “concept directors.”

There are constant rumors that Microsoft is close to putting its multimedia center in Austin. The city is poised to marry its booming high-tech economy with its arts community and take advantage of the youth culture that permeates this university town.

The SXSW Multimedia Festival, which is part of a larger film and music festival, was guaranteed to make anyone over 35 feel like Methuselah. The average age seemed to be about 25, and participants were nearly all dressed in T-shirts with obscure logos, baggy pants and sandals, with a few postmodern Roy Rogers get-ups thrown in for color. They drank lattes and jabbered about “joysticking minds” with CD-ROMs and new, interactive Web games. A New Age masseuse was doing a brisk business in the corridor outside the exhibition hall.

As hard as it may be to take sage advice from people who are a few months out of college, we had better listen to them. The next Netscape may emerge from this crowd.

Why do they think the Web is dead? Of course, it depends on what one means by “the Web.”

Phil Hood, the editor of NewMedia magazine and one of the SXSW panelists, said: “The dream of a free, egalitarian, universal information sandbox is dead.” It is that vision of the World Wide Web that seems to be on its last legs, ironically because of the recent, massive influx of new users who have been attracted to the Internet by the Web’s ease of use and its promise of limitless information.

Fifty percent of the 10 million people using the Internet in the U.S. started using it in 1995. Within the past couple of years, the Internet has been transformed from a communications network used almost exclusively by academics, scientists and government officials to a mainstream communications medium that is universally regarded as the future of information dissemination for the entire globe.

This metamorphosis has had two significant effects. First, it attracted private corporations to the Net that hope to reach millions of new customers in a medium that is far more conducive to targeted marketing than television.

Second, it has introduced a version of the “tragedy of the commons” to cyberspace--the phrase ecologist Garrett Hardin invented in 1968 to describe what happens when too many people pursue their private advantage, with diminishing returns, in a common space, which leads to fencing and private, market-based arrangements.

The commercialization of the Internet, via the Web, first produced online advertising, with users clicking on ad “banners” to jump to an advertiser’s Web page. But only a handful of Web sites are making money from advertising.

The next step, which is increasingly prevalent on the Web, is registering users and then using the registration data to build consumer profiles that are valuable in themselves. A related step, not common now but expected to grow, is electronic subscriptions, which will depend on developments in cash transfer over the Internet.

The “tragedy of the commons” is reflected in the expanding prevalence of junk e-mail--”spamming”--and in the visible slowdown of many Web sites because of overloaded network traffic. Some corporations are exploring the use of “spam-killing” software to protect their e-mail systems. Others are creating virtual “zones” of Internet access by building Web sites that can only be accessed by people with very high-speed connections, or else a lot of patience.

And some of the big telecom companies are even building their own proprietary high-speed networks, like @Home, a project of Tele-Communications Inc., the giant cable TV company.

The frontier metaphor for cyberspace is overused and tired, but the idea that these trends represent the “fencing” of the electronic frontier is not inappropriate. It was, after all, increasing population that spawned the fencing of the Western frontier a hundred years ago.

In fact, the scramble for market share that the new federal telecom reform legislation has unleashed might be thought of as the new “range wars” of the electronic frontier--the parceling out of cyberspace. The Communications Decency Act is playing a major role in the erection of new cyber-fences. The astonishing thing to behold is how fast this has all happened, how rapidly we went from the dream of an unlimited information frontier to the current frenzy for fencing the information commons.

The closing of the American frontier in the West was announced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in a famous speech in July 1893. This produced a crisis of confidence in the U.S. at the time, which eventually set the stage for a significant political movement, Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” Progressive Party.

Will the death of the Web and the fencing of the electronic frontier have some analogous effect on the politics of the U.S. a hundred years later?