The Net's gettin' messy

[Brad Isaac]

This probably doesn't come as any surprise to you if you use your Pocket PC to surf the web, but it's interesting to hear someone come out and say it. In a commentary/Internet history lesson titled The Net's gettin' messy, Eric Norlin discusses how the Internet wasn't designed to work the way it is being used now. It was instead a quick and efficient way for the Military and some scientists to exchange documents and carry on public discussions. And now it's evolved to sort of a dirty mess. :? (No comments about this site please. :P )
"The Net started this way. In the beginning, it was "good enough." Good enough for some forms of communication. Good enough for posting documents that linked to other documents. Good enough for putting dirty pictures online.
But lately, the Net is no longer good enough: identity fraud, viruses, worms, phishing, snarfing, child porn--oh, and endless piles of spam. All of these problems exist because the Net's core infrastructure--its architectural essence is no longer "good enough."
It makes for an interesting read and quickie history lesson about the Net.

[jkendrick]

The author has an excellent POV in this article. You can make the argument that the internet got really useful once everyone (virtually) had access to it. Unfortunately, as he points out in the article that's when it got messy, too. I have often wondered how the internet would look if anonymous access was impossible. Everyone could still get the same access but only with a genuine ID behind it.
Would certainly be different, wouldn't it? Food for thought, anyway.