Over the last year, the worldwide web has started to look less worldwide.
Europe is floating regulation that could impose temporary bans on United States tech companies that violate its laws. The U.S. was on the verge of banning TikTok and WeChat, though the new Biden administration is rethinking that move. India, which did ban those two apps as well of dozens of others, is now at loggerheads with Twitter.
And this month, Facebook clashed with the Australian government over a proposed law that would require it to pay publishers. The company briefly decided to prevent users from sharing news links in the country in response to the law, with the potential to drastically change how its platform functions from one country to the next. Then on Tuesday, it reached a deal with the government and agreed to restore news pages. The deal partially relaxed arbitration requirements that Facebook took issue with.
In its announcement of the deal, however, Facebook hinted at the possibility of similar clashes in the future. "We'll continue to invest in news globally and resist efforts by media conglomerates to advance regulatory frameworks that do not take account of the true value exchange between publishers and platforms like Facebook," Campbell Brown, VP of global news partnerships at Facebook, said in a statement Tuesday.
But if such territorial agreements become more common, the globally-connected internet we know will become more like what some have dubbed the "splinternet," or a collection of different internets whose limits are determined by national or regional borders.
A combination of rising nationalism, trade disputes and concerns about the market dominance of certain global tech companies has prompted threats of regulatory crackdowns all over the world. In the process, these forces are not just upending the tech companies that built massive businesses on the promise of a global internet, but also the very idea of building platforms that can be accessed and used the same way by anyone anywhere in the world.
And the cracks only appear to be getting deeper.
"I do think there is a global tendency towards fragmenting the internet much more than it has been fragmented in the past," said Daphne Keller, director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center.
As recent events have shown, a platform doesn't need to be banned or shut down outright for that fragmentation to happen. In response to Australia's effort to make it pay publishers, when Facebook stopped showing links from news outlets to its Australian users, users outside the country could also no longer access content from Australian news outlets. The temporary move ran against the very premise of the internet serving as a tool for the free flow of information globally.
In India, when warned that it was "welcome to do business" but "must also respect Indian laws," Twitter sought a middle ground by withholding some accounts that were using what the government called "incendiary and baseless" hashtags which means those accounts weren't visible within the country but could still be accessed outside. (The South Asian nation has also shown a greater willingness to go after foreign tech companies, proposing major restrictions on their operations and, amid a diplomatic standoff with China, banning TikTok and dozens of other Chinese-owned apps.)
It's a very different landscape from the one that allowed U.S. tech firms to accumulate enormous wealth and power. With notable exceptions such as China and North Korea, Facebook and its peers were able to launch their products all over the world with little pushback. Now that openness may no longer be a given.
"What's legal in Sweden isn't legal in Pakistan, and so we have to find some way to reconcile that with the way the internet works," Keller said. The result is that "either platforms voluntarily or governments forcibly are erecting geographical barriers, so that we see different things in one country than in another."
Europe is floating regulation that could impose temporary bans on US tech companies that violate its laws.
The great retreat
While Facebook isn't the only tech company in the crosshairs of governments around the globe, it is perhaps more emblematic than any other Silicon Valley business of the promise of a global internet running up against various countries' laws.
Five years ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was talking up his goal of reaching 5 billion users, or the majority of the world's population. Already, the company has more than 3 billion monthly active users across its various apps, in a testament to its rapid expansion all over the world.
"We want to make it so that anyone, anywhere — a child growing up in rural India who never had a computer — can go to a store, get a phone, get online, and get access to all of the same things that you and I appreciate about the internet," Zuckerberg said in a 2013 interview.
Even in China, where the government's online censorship apparatus known as the Great Firewall has locked Western tech companies out for decades, Facebook and Google both sought to make concessions to be allowed in (albeit with little success).
Now, Facebook is instead turning to what's become an increasingly tried-and-tested playbook for the tech industry: threatening to pull its products out of markets in the face of unfavorable regulation.
In 2014, Google shut down its Google News service in Spain after the country passed a similar law to the one Australia is now contemplating. In Australia, too, it threatened to pull its search engine out of the country over the same media law before ultimately giving in and signing deals with some of the country's top publishers.
This time, at least, the playbook seemed to work somewhat for Facebook. But there are signs that countries around the world — including the United States — are more willing to play hardball and follow each other's leads on reining in Big Tech. Those companies are ultimately dependent on continued access to billions of users around the world, and governments have shown they are willing to cut off that access in the name of protecting their citizens and sovereignty online.
The stakes will only get higher if more governments jump on the bandwagon.
"It's kind of a game of chicken," said Sinan Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Business and author of "The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy and Our Health."
Aral says companies such as Facebook and Google will encounter a slippery slope if they start to exit every market that asks them to pay for its news, which would "severely limit" the content they can serve their global user base.
"They have a vested interest in trying to force any one market to not impose such regulations by threatening to pull out," he said. "The other side is basically saying: 'If you don't pay for the content, you're not going to have access to our market of consumers or the content in this market.'"
As the internet fractures, global regulators coalesce
A fight over news in Australia is a relatively small part of the clash between tech and governments, which has largely been focused on issues such as censorship, privacy and competition. But the response to Facebook's move in Australia has shown that a more international effort to rein in Big Tech may be gathering momentum — and with it, the potential for additional fracturing of how internet services function from one country to the next.
As his government faced off against Facebook last week, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison issued a warning to the social media giant: What you do here may come back to hurt you in other countries.
"These actions will only confirm the concerns that an increasing number of countries are expressing about the behavior of Big Tech companies who think they are bigger than governments and that the rules should not apply to them," he said in a Facebook post. "They may be changing the world, but that doesn't mean they run it."
On Tuesday, Morrison said Facebook's decision to restore news was "welcome," adding that the government remained committed to proceeding with its legislation to ensure "Australian journalists and news organisations are fairly compensated for the original content they produce."
Several other countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada are now considering similar legislation against social media companies — and many of those countries are talking to each other about how best to do that.
"It would be extremely useful if governments would come together in some kind of transnational process and come up with a treaty or some kind of standard about who gets to reach out and affect content and information outside their national territory," Keller said, "because that's what a lot of them are trying to do, but they haven't, and so as a result you get this very fragmented patchwork."
If that increased fragmentation is allowed to reach its natural conclusion, however, the consequences could be dire.
"If the eventual outcome of that is that we have social media platforms in every major country or market that are separate, then what we will have is an information ecosystem that is completely bifurcated or splintered across the globe," Aral said. "What that portends is a citizenry that has completely different sets of information about local events, about world events, and perhaps a very splintered worldview of reality."
50 fascinating facts about the internet
The public internet is almost 30 years old, and what we use today would be almost unrecognizable to the people who built the networks that came before. Stacker has compiled a list of 50 fascinating facts about internet technology, culture, history, and more, using everything from Buzzfeed and Pew Research to the Internet Hall of Fame.
Beginning with ARPANET in 1969, computer scientists realized they could use cables to link individual computers into networks. From there, they continued to build out bigger and better features until the World Wide Web stretched around the world and allowed users to add images and even sounds to rudimentary websites.
As more and more people used the public internet, computer scientists continued to make huge leaps forward in technology, innovations that, in 2020, we can’t imagine living without. From the invention of the MP3 came filesharing and eventually streaming music. From inventions like relational databases and sorting algorithms came more powerful and accurate search engines, changing the way people interacted with a rapidly growing number of websites.
We think a lot today about social networking, but qualities of social networks were pioneered by technologies like Really Simple Syndication—RSS—that let search engines get an easy heads-up that websites had new content. And specialized code like HTML, CSS, and PHP turned the plain, static internet into a dynamic, multimedia experience that’s accessed by 90% of all American adults.
Where will the internet be in another 30 years? If history has taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what talented computer scientists and theorists around the world can dream up next. In fact, one of the key lessons from lists like this is how important it is to document what happens online—websites constantly disappear, companies go bankrupt, and different brands merge their online identities. Sites like the Internet Archive, founded in 1996 and with a catalog of tens of billions of website “captures” since then, help to secure internet knowledge for future generations.
Click through to find out more about the history of the internet.
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The company that invented the modem was a successor of Alexander Graham Bell
In 1958, Bell Labs invented the very first modem. The company was the descendent of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and the modem capitalized on phone lines as a great way to “beep” information back and forth—like the telltale dial-up modem sound many of us could probably still hum today.
Networking was first developed in 1961
For computers to exchange information, there has to be a set of rules to make sure the pieces don’t mix, crash, or get lost. Computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock developed packet switching beginning in 1961. This is just what it sounds like: Computers bundle information into small containers called packets, which are securely passed back and forth through network cables that obey shared “rules of the road,” so to speak.
ASCII, invented in 1963, allowed characters to have uniformity across any computer
In 1963, computer scientists developed the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII, a way to share characters like letters and numbers so as to ensure they’re uniform across any computer or display that uses them. This is a big change from typewriting, for example, where what results is just a flat piece of paper that can’t be repurposed without retyping.
Two faraway computers were linked for the first time in 1965
In 1965, computer scientists linked two faraway computers for the first time—a key milestone the same way it was for telephone and radio many decades before. Today, everything we send between computers still travels over physical infrastructure or, in some cases, an airborne medium like satellite internet.
The first network of four computers were linked in 1969
Today, most of the world is interlinked with a massive cabling infrastructure that includes gigantic cables beneath all the world’s oceans. In 1969, computer scientists made proto-internet history when they linked four computers together at the same time. This sounds so simple, but it requires complex thinking: How do you decide which computer passes information in which direction, and how do you make sure everything arrives both quickly and safely?
ARPANET paved the way for the internet in 1969
The Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA (and today known as descendent forms DARPA or ARPA-E), made the first local computer network of any kind in 1969. ARPANET became a vital forerunner to what became the internet and wasn’t decommissioned until 1990.
The term 'internet' was used for the first time in 1974
In 1974, the term “internet” was used for the first time to describe a growing network of linked computers around the world. The term contrasts with intranet, for example, meaning an internal rather than external network.
The first spam email was sent in 1978 by a computer seller
Buzzfeed reports the first spam message was sent in 1978 over ARPANET by a man named Gary Thuerk, a computer seller. That was just a few years after email was invented in the first place.
The first online games were text-based
In 1980, users built the first examples of shared online game spaces. These were text-based games called multiuser dungeons (MUDs) that covered a variety of genres. Active MUDs still exist in 2020.
The first LAN party was created in 1981
In 1981, computer users made the world’s first local area networks, or LANs. These were made possible by the first generation of ethernet products made for both business and home computers, letting users plug in and link up.
The Internet Archive was founded in 1982
In 1996, Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive, which remains a vital place for programmers, historians, and public interest advocates. The Internet Archive allowed Stacker to pinpoint when Jeeves disappeared from AskJeeves.com—keep reading to find out when that was.
The Science Network was created in 1985 to help researchers share info
In 1985, the National Science Foundation started a new nationwide network to make it easier for researchers to share information. The resulting network, NSFnet, stayed online until 1995.
The World Wide Web was coined by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989
1989 was a big year for internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who coined the term World Wide Web while working at CERN in Switzerland. A year later, he invented HTML, the markup language that turns plain text into—at the time—separate paragraphs and even lists.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by privacy advocates
In 1990, privacy advocates founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This organization works to limit intrusion of tech giants into our lives, which has been an uphill battle for 30 years now.
The public didn't have access to the internet until 1991
Versions of the internet existed for over a decade before public users outside of university programs could finally get online in 1991. Most ISPs at the time sprung up in college towns, because that’s where existing networks and technology hubs were.
Invented in 1991, Archie was the first version of a search engine
The first version of something like a search engine was made in 1991 and named Archie, short for archive. Should it be pronounced "ar-key" or "ar-chee"? As with GIF, you must choose for yourself. Search engines are powered by unfathomably huge databases and a series of clever algorithms that shorten the trip from A to Z.
The term 'surfing' the internet was coined by blogger Net Mom in 1992
An early proto-blogger named Jean Armour Polly, using the handle “Net Mom,” was the first to say users were “surfing” the World Wide Web in 1992. That was just a year after public availability of the internet, which caused a tidal wave, so to speak, of new terminology.
AOL used half of all CD-ROM discs in the 1990s
During their peak in the mid-to-late 1990s, America Online (AOL) was using up 50% of all the CD-ROM discs in the world for their free software mailings. These usually came with offers of a certain number of free hours. The caveat was that many users didn’t have a local telephone number to dial, meaning they paid long-distance rates.
Mosaic is the ancestor of Netscape Navigator
Mosaic, the first graphic web browser and the ancestor of Netscape Navigator, came out in 1993. For the first time, public internet users could add small files that would load into the layout of the page using HTML tags.
The MP3 changed music in 1995
Engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg invented the MP3 audio format in 1995. Like the pixels of a digital camera, digital audio involves turning the smooth curves of real sounds into chunked, compressed sounds that make up reasonably sized files. MP3s were revolutionary for having a tiny size that retained listenable audio quality, as well as letting users tune just how much they wanted to compress the file versus keeping the sound quality.
Jennicam was online 24/7 in 1996
In 1996, Jennifer Ringley put her life online in a very primitive form of streaming video, where a still image refreshed on a set interval of seconds. Jennicam gained huge popularity by 1996 standards, and Ringley eventually monetized it for viewers who wanted to see...well, her more private moments.
The Ask Jeeves butler was inspired by a P.G. Wodehouse character
Ask Jeeves was an iconic early search engine started in 1996 on which a P.G. Wodehouse-inspired butler character named Jeeves helped you find websites. Its creators rebranded to Ask.com and began phasing out the Jeeves character, who officially disappeared from the site in early 2006.
Google was name after googol—a large number
In 1998, Google was founded as a revolutionary search engine in progress, named for the large number called a googol. Before Google, search engines were much patchier and often more like lists of recommended sites. Google’s technology used feedback, such as which results users really clicked on—even if those didn’t have the most appearances of search terms—to continue to improve its search results.
Napster began as a peer-to-peer file-sharing service
In 1999, Napster started as a peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Users could put shareable files into dedicated folders, allowing other users to search their offerings and choose what to download.
Artists quickly began suing Napster after its 1999 launch
Filesharing service Napster launched in 1999 and was quickly sued by a handful of artists, the most high-profile of which was Metallica. After several months of newsworthy court procedures, they succeeded in having the Napster service taken down. Napster tried to pivot and rebrand, but their popularity never got close to those 1999 numbers again.
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Today's social media feeds have RSS technology to thank
Today, we’re used to curated feeds on Facebook or Twitter, or even personalized content on news sites. This is all made possible because a team including tech luminary Aaron Swartz invented the RSS feed—Really Simple Syndication—in 2000. That RSS technology lets search spiders identify any new stuff on a website extremely quickly and easily.
Heather Armstrong was fired for blogging in 2001
Dooce is still the online home of writer Heather Armstrong, who started the site in 2001 as an outlet for her personal thoughts, including those regarding her coworkers. She was fired from that job as a result of the blog, but she leveraged that event into a career of which momentum has only started to wane in recent years.
OKCupid dates back to 2003
Free internet dating behemoth OKCupid started in 2003 and quickly spread to even the rural corners of the United States. Today, almost all the dating sites and apps you can think of are owned by the same company: Match, the creators of Match.com.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in 2003
Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in 2003. Other knighted computer scientists include Quicksort inventor Tony Hoare and microprogramming inventor Maurice Vincent Wilkes.
The Mozilla Foundation is a Netscape spinoff
We remember 2004 as the year of Facebook, but it’s also the year the Mozilla Foundation introduced the Firefox browser. The Foundation began the year before as a spinoff from the defunct Netscape company.
Mark Zuckerberg was the 4th user to join Facebook
In Facebook profiles, each user is assigned a name based on when they joined. Mark Zuckerberg’s profile number ID is 4. The website was also originally called The Facebook.
Tila Tequila had 1.5 million MySpace friends in 2005
Reality TV celebrity Tila Tequila was explosively popular on the young internet, reaching a peak of 1.5 million MySpace friends in 2005. Her social fame forecasted the kind of influencer culture that didn’t take off until years after her star began to dim.
Twitter was originally called Twttr
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey also sent the first tweet on March 21, 2006. It’s hard to imagine in the politically fraught, 280-character Twitter climate of 2020, but the site—originally called Twttr—was a microblogging service full of people sharing just a few words in a more diary-like style. Everything else, from active links to multimedia, came later.
The first Bitcoin transaction happened in 2009
In 2009, users made the first-ever transaction with cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Bitcoin combined the idea of a shadow economy with a then-new cryptography style called blockchain, with prices peaking at astronomical highs in the early 2010s.
Geocities had 7 million sites by time it shut down in 2009
Iconic early website host Geocities offered free small websites to users around the world. The service hosted 7 million sites across thousands of “neighborhoods” by the time it shut down in 2009.
2.5 million people had a paid subscription to AOL in 2013
In 2013, more than 2.5 million people still paid to subscribe to AOL services. Statistically, these customers are likely to be in places that are underserved by broadband and still rely on vanishing dial-up services.
The 2016 'Baby Shark Dance' video holds the record for most YouTube views
The 2016 YouTube video for “Baby Shark Dance” holds the record for most YouTube views at over 8 billion, passing other multibillion club juggernauts like “Gangnam Style.” Slate’s podcast Decoder Ring explains that “Baby Shark” isn’t even a new song, but rather a children’s version of a song that dates back decades and has been performed by different artists.
100% of emerging adults in the US are online
Pew Research reports that 100% of Americans age 18–29 use the internet. For adults overall, the number falls to a still astonishingly high 90%.
The 'Space Jam' movie website is still live
Buzzfeed reports that the original website for the movie "Space Jam" is still alive and well, making it a time machine to 1996 web design.
The internet is more than 11,500 days old
Buzzfeed reports that HowOldIsTheInter.net shares up-to-date information on how many days we’ve all been online. In 2020, the internet's age is in the mid-11,000s.
Internet Explorer turned 25 in 2020
Microsoft developed Internet Explorer to go out with its brand new Windows 95 operating system, and the iconic animated lowercase “e” icon followed internet users for the next 20 years until the release of Microsoft Edge in 2015.
The first list of registered domains, created in 1972, looked like IP addresses
In 1972, computer scientists made the first list of registered domains. At the time, these were strings of numbers that look like IP addresses—our domains are “plain language” shields for these numbers.
The ethernet cables used today for the internet were invented in 1973 for telecom networks
Today, we all use a lot of wireless products, but businesses still primarily rely on wired internet. The ethernet cables we still use were invented in 1973 and used for telecom networks before the development of ethernet internet. Like a railroad or a highway built in pieces, if everyone agrees on one set of guidelines, they can build a uniform network that works well for all users.
The sender of the first email doesn't remember what he wrote
Computer scientist Ray Tomlinson invented email in 1974, and it’s reported that he doesn’t remember what his first message said. At the time, it would have been strictly plain text with no formatting.
The first dot-com website was for a computer manufacturer
Computer manufacturer Symbolics registered the first “top level” domain, Symbolics.com, in 1985. The company is gone and the domain has changed hands, but it has been active since 1985, making it the oldest exigent dot-com domain in the world.
The inventor of the GIF meant for it to be pronounced 'jiff'
Compuserve engineer Steve Wilke invented the GIF image format in 1987. In many image-processing programs, for a decade or more after that, the format was even called “Compuserve GIF.” Wilke made news when he insisted he meant for the pronunciation to be “jiff.”
The first YouTube video was uploaded in 2005
YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded the first video to YouTube in 2005. In the video, Karim walks around the San Diego Zoo.
Up to 20% of Google searches were brand new in 2012
In 2012, Google engineers said up to 20% of the site’s searches in any given day were brand new. Assembling long strings of words formerly helped searchers find exactly what they want, but in 2019, Google changed their algorithm to begin discarding parts of user strings from their searches without their permission.
The first webpage is still online
Buzzfeed reports that the first website, a landing page at CERN’s domain describing what the “internet project” was trying to do, is still online after 29 years. CERN is where World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee put the global network online.
Google searches are timed
One of Google’s trademarks from the very beginning is a display that shows how long your search took. For this piece, Stacker searched “How fast is a Google search?” and got an answer in 0.6 seconds. Buzzfeed reports that the average time is 0.2 seconds.
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