General Discussion • Re: Is the internet still useful nowadays?

The internet is going to die because it has become an utterly stupid and pointless waste of time.

Please define what you mean by "the internet ", and what should replace it.

For me (just slightly older than the pope in charge and sir Tim Berners-Lee ) "Internet" (in my native language it is used as a proper noun, capitalized and without article ... otherwise one can use "la rete = the net") is "just" the infrastructure using TCP-IP protocol connecting nodes around the world. It is not the first "net" (we had Bitnet and SPAN/Decnet in the academic world at least since 1987). The early net(s) allowed at least to do things like e-mail exchange (do you remember postage letters, or submitting hardcopy manuscripts to journals ?); remote login (originally telnet before ssh), though originally not so often used; remote file transfer and retrieval (originally ftp, also gopher; do you remember magnetic tapes sent by post ?). All things which I do use regularly (and I would deeply regret their disappearance). There was also mail exploders and Usenet news. Then (1993 for us) http came and in a few months each institute got its own web server.

The availability of web access to public administration sites, banks, and e-commerce sites came later, and also that is something which is now necessary for virtually all citizens (not just in the academic world). Do you remember the time you got the electricity bill by post ? when you had to pay a bill in person queing at the counter ? etc. etc. One might criticize the implementation, not the need.

There may be more (the so called "socials", music, video etc.) which does not concern me.

Off-topic: In fact, if you allow me a dream, in the old times each apartment had a land phone line (we call it "fixed" in my native language), and a phone number of 10-14 digits was sufficient to cope with them. If each apartment would have got one static IP number and one DNS entry as a public service, everybody would have been able to have an individual connection and run one's own server.