The Wild West

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Did web standards lead to the hegemony of online corporates, despite the best of intentions of Web Two proponents - and what of Web Three, Four...X? As I've mentioned before, I remember the days of the internet before the World Wide Web ('The Internet' in most people's understanding), and certainly well before the current concept of 'my internet'; which even now has pretty much been subsumed into a generic 'white goods' scenario.

The rise of corporate control - hegemony, if you like - of 'the internet' was predicted by some of us early adopters/users, well before Google existed, let alone Amazon, eBay et al., were even a glint in their progenitor's eyes. During what we thought at the time were the Dark Ages of the browser wars, when proprietary was king, nothing worked properly unless you ran with the appropriate software to correctly(?) render a website (yes - website, archaic though that term may seem in 2022), let alone perform any commercially viable activity, apart from pointing people to bricks and mortar establishments or shareware sites to trade.

In the gold rush days of online trading - and we knew, personally, one of the very earliest pioneers of this - the web browser and lack of HTML (look it up if you're unsure) standards still stood in the way of really fluid online commerce - we know, we were very (too) early adopters in trying to sell software in as green as possible a way - stuff really didn't work consistently enough to make the whole thing fly.

What drove the movement to the 'modern' internet and the current corporate bean feast that it is, were the entirely laudable attempts of standards organizations and volunteer coders, pundits and sundry others to try and make the web a better place for the those hitherto disenfranchised by the lack of accessibility afforded to it, for instance the blind. The web simply wasn't working cogently across the piece. Then came the push for Web 2.0.

I worked as a freelance for a small company nearly twenty years ago that espoused the new virtues and mantras of Web 2.0: accessibility, accessibility, accessibility, oh, and finally getting around to agreeing coding standards that would allow this to happen: to a large extent, all good. But the dark side of this shift is that standards have allowed corporates to pretty much muscle in and take over what was originally a playground and turn it into an online bastardization of their meat space world: a virtual market which we all now take for granted, and what for younger generations is simply an intrinsic part of the landscape of life. I actually miss the days of crappy text-only web pages rendered in Mosaic (look it up...) There's a book in this for someone...

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