cademic publishing and elsewhere, these shifts have not generated the predicted revolutions. Major music labels eventually adjusted to web-based distribution and revenue models, as did the old giants of academic and popular publishing. Other ideas that promised to “disrupt” this or that have fallen flat, such as the massive open online course (MOOC) craze that led some pundits to predict “the end of college as we know it”.
The best example, of course, was the dot-com crash. Entrepreneurs and starry-eyed investors had fuelled the bubble, eager to believe that the web’s rise changed all the rules. But by 2000, everyone had learned the harsh reality: Sound business practices were not fundamentally disrupted by the “get big fast” ethos of web entrepreneurship. And despite predictions that the web portends a new economic era of commons-based peer production, old-fashioned industrial capitalism has proved quite resilient. Even companies that lead the “sharing economy”, such as Uber and Airbnb, have massive capital expenditures and valuations that rival those of industrial giants such as Ford and General Motors.
Myth No 5: A massive cyberattack is coming One constant in the web’s history has been the expectation that a major event will come along and change everything. Political figures often issue warnings about a “digital Pearl Harbor” or a “cyber Pearl Harbor”. In Elon University’s fascinating “Imagining the Internet” survey from 2004, two-thirds of web experts agreed with the statement that “At least one devastating attack will occur in the next 10 years on the networked information infrastructure or the country’s power grid”. But so far, we’ve seen nothing of the sort.
Even though a large-scale attack hasn’t materialised, experts continue to use the threat of one to try to shake the web out of some bad habits and inferior technologies. Neither the web nor the internet was designed with unshakeable commitments to security or privacy, and efforts to update them have, for the most part, failed. There have been plenty of proposals with broad consensus among technical communities, such as the World Wide Web Consortium’s Platform for Internet Content Selection and Version 6 of the Internet Engineering Task Force’s Internet Protocol (the current internet runs mostly on IP Version 4). These and other efforts have faltered, however, because of poor design and lethargic adoption rates, leaving web users vulnerable to governments, corporations and anonymous bad actors of all kinds.
In the meantime, most users have grown accustomed to intrusions from hackers and viruses; they assume that there is no way to guarantee privacy or security on the web. But despite the massive vulnerabilities and the regular occurrence of significant data breaches, the long-predicted “digital Pearl Harbor” has not come to pass.
– The Washington Post
Over the past three decades, governments at all levels – local, state, national and international – have claimed and exercised jurisdiction over behaviour online.
A floor map at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore shows the routes of undersea internet cables in Southeast Asia.