Last night I noticed that one of my domains had renewed. I marvelled at the price charged, for what is just a line in a database. But I found a strange agreement of price from so many vendors. It didn’t seem easy to find anywhere that was cheaper. I then looked at the registry where most of my domains are hosted, and found – to my fury – that they had invented a fee to transfer domains elsewhere. How kind.
These charges add up, if you have more than one or two domains. I let tertullian.net go a while back, and quickgreek.com. But what happens when I get older? Will I want to spend any of my slender retirement income on inflated domain name fees?
This led me to reflect. Does anybody create their own domain any more these days? I can’t think of the last time that somebody created a site like this. But if they do, these absurd charges await them. Furthermore the same people have invented a requirement to use https, rather than http, and so created a need for a certificate for which – of course – they charge annually. In fact this whole business is a racket. It looks like a cartel, and it probably is one.
But it’s a racket aimed at companies and corporations. The internet infrastructure is increasingly aimed at companies and corporations. Google, our beloved search engine, is now aimed entirely at advertising, and so prefers websites which sell advertising – companies and corporations.
Private individuals hardly get a look in any more. If they do, they will create blogs on WordPress.com, or a Facebook page or group, or something like that. It is another matter whether they will ever be heard of.
The world-wide web was originally decentralised. Anybody could take part, on equal terms. But this is no longer the case. Google favours monopolies, companies and corporations. It privileges Wikipedia, for instance – a monolith – rather than treating sites equally. And if Google privileges you, you are privileged indeed! Google itself is a monopoly, or nearly so.
But Google is now a very bad search engine. I did a search on myself, and got around 70 hits – the product of thousands of pages of ceaseless contribution to the web over a period of 23 years results in 70 hits. A quick check on Bing revealed far better results. But the reason is very obvious – Google is the one making money out of all this, and Google is slanted to monopolies and corporations.
As I thought about all of this, I started to wonder about the results of my labours. What will become of the translations that I made, or commissioned, which are all of value? In every case there is or was no other English translation. Can anybody find them?
In the past I relied on the decentralised nature of the web. I was and am very happy for anybody to mirror my content, or to upload it anywhere. The more the merrier, I thought, and thereby preservation is ensured.
But can anybody find any of this stuff any more? I wonder, sometimes. And what happens to my sites, my content, when, in the passage of time, something happens to me?
In the past I never worried about this, because I knew that Archive.org existed, and I felt that it would all get preserved somehow. But is this true any more? Are there measures that we should take, those of us working in specialised areas, to preserve our content? If so, where?
Long ago someone at a university offered to provide a home to my content. I declined, because I was young and thought nothing of it. But I know that universities do not preserve websites. The number of broken links that I encounter these days, from older content, is considerable. In fact they don’t preserve paper content very well either – there are a number of books on my shelves which were originally donated to a university library and were then sold off by the heedless library. Even if it continues to exist, web standards change, and old technologies become obsolete and things stop working. The raw HTML page is perhaps the most enduring – a website generated from PHP will start giving errors in a decade.
Most of my stuff is probably at Archive.org. But is that a safe place now? I have my doubts. The corporatisation of the internet means that corporations will gain ever greater power. In Germany that means that the book publishing firms basically prevent anything much going online without their permission. The publishing firms have sued archive.org in the past. They have sued Google. They don’t want any books online, because they want to make money selling that content. As the corporations gain power, surely the future is with them?
The evolution of the internet into something centralised, composed mainly of a handful of websites has rendered that internet much more open to control by others, whose motives may be to exploit, not contribute. I don’t want to delve into US politics, but what has happened in the last couple of weeks suggest to me that a radical change is about to overtake the world wide web. We have seen the social media sites act as one as a cartel, banning a sitting US president and purging his supporters. Although they must have acted under political pressure from the incoming party, it is possible that they have thereby fallen into a trap. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Nobody anywhere likes the idea of a handful of people like Mark Zuckerberg controlling the political environment. They can hardly now plead freedom of speech, or claim impartiality. They now have no allies. They have probably acted illegally. They have violated the trust of a huge number of people around the globe. This leaves them at the mercy of the new administration. If the latter chooses, they can use this as a reason to break them up, and reshape the web, with little opposition. I have already seen articles on how unpopular Facebook is with the new administration. This suggests to me that Facebook is toast. How a future internet will work is unclear, but it will be much less free-wheeling and much more regulated. I suspect that Archive.org may die in the process.
So we face a period of change, and this will bring opportunities as well as problems. What seems clear is that the internet which we all remember is dead.
What now? And … how shall we preserve our content and transmit it to the future?
I have started to use duckduckgo.com as an alternative to google. It doesn’t filter or guess what your content SHOULD be like as Google does with all their algorithms.
The political filtering by Google is quite grotesque sometimes. Probably it filters on other things too. How would we know? I notice that the results are different on mobile too – sometimes shockingly so. But DuckDuckGo is basically Bing, I believe?
Welcome to the future! Monopoly, or oligopoly, tied to political power, and backed by police and military might, will lead to increasing scarcity of both choice and freedom. The days of human liberty are coming to an end.
I am pissed off especially at the publicly funded and university published material, especially when it can’t be downloaded. It was only few day before that I used a dictionary of my mother tongue which was publishe in the 19th and in 30+ volumes. It was only accessible on one faculty site and it was taken down recently. And this trend is nothing new, it has been going on for some time now. There is stuff always uploaded but there is also great material being brought down without any reason.
Also that you mention your contributions, it is sad to point it out, but a good case of how a good site filled with great info can become obsolete and go down in a pinch is Robert Bedrosian and his page. We are lucky that it was saved, but it could have also gone to oblivion.
Again thank you for your contributions, although most of it is not something that really pertains to my field of interest it is wonderful and encouraging to see someone doing so much for so neglected topics.
I highly recommend DuckDuckGo as well. Quick, ad free and private. I think your site is a great resource. I found this by searching for Walton Castle, Suffolk.
Thank you for the suggestion, and glad you found the Walton Castle stuff.
Hosting Matters and some other hosting sites have pretty cheap fees, IIRC. You can probably ask around and find out, or use Duck Duck Go and other better search engines, and find better deals than on Google.
Duck Duck Go mostly draws from Bing, but they use slightly different algorithms. I think they also do some search through other engines.
If it makes you feel better, I’ve seen a lot of people regret lately that they ever gave up their self-hosted blogs and private Internet sites. Bill Whittle has a particularly regretful video called “Terms of Service.”
Thank you for the info on hosting matters. I’ll look.
Those who relied on Facebook must now feel foolish and betrayed, I agree.
I learn that fb banned the trotskyite Socialist Workers Party over the weekend on some frivolous ground or other. They’ve reinstated them for now. It’s humorous, in a way, because the trots have been strong proponents of political censorship, and never thought it would affect *them*. I believe a Roehm-like purge of some Antifa groups is also going on.
It all adds up to a very different world.
I google for “Velia”, home of the Eleatic philosophers, as part of a personal research project. My first ten hits: a dedicated server company, English wiki, Spanish wiki, again the server company, Italian tour company, a Spanish language printing house with books about Parmenides, tripadvisor, a clothes company with Velia in the name, Getty Images, a vacation website. Sigh…
I rely less on search engines these days and use dedicated sites that I know “will work”. Unless I enter an extremely specific search string, at least google will be useless for what I want. Duckduckgo does a better job, for the moment being. I also don’t rely anymore on the “everlastingness” of Library Genesis and Internet Archive. I archive everything I’ve needed or might need in the future on HD.
This is my experience – Google prioritises companies selling stuff. It’s infuriating.
I agree about sites like internet archive. Local copies are what we want.
Oh, I forgot. There is also mee.nu, a tiny little company that hosts a few gigantic blogs and websites, and a lot of small ones. The person who runs it is pretty much impervious to political or monetary pressure, and his prices are mostly cheap or free. I can’t find his price list, so you might want to ask Pixy yourself.
Thank you very much – I will look into this.
But Google is now a very bad search engine.
Back in ’04 or so, I was actually nicknamed the Google Queen because I was good with remembering specific phrases, and then tickling them enough to find stuff we were looking for.
It was *wonderful*.
…
I really miss the old Google.
Between ten and fifteen years ago, it just stopped working.
Bing is _better_, though not good, it may randomly give me results for synonyms in a phrase or only one word in a whole-phrase match, but it won’t bring up zero results when I just directly copied a phrase off of another page. (I was testing what on earth I’d done wrong, after finding the article with Bing, so it definitely existed… Google just decided I didn’t need to see it.)
Google is getting a bit sinister. I find that it doesn’t return a link to some sites, but does link to reviews of the sites.
I anticipate in another hundred years this form of knowledge (i.e. the internet) will almost cease to be. (People will become more clearly aware of what they have been inventing and using over that period of time.) It will then just be in the records of how things were. And that could begin to happen fairly quickly. On the other hand books have a habit, do they not, of remaining on the shelves and in libraries, whatever might happen around them.
Yes this could happen.
Steven Ring’s passing highlighted how his work is now almost impossible to find.