The internet does not belong to us

In light of recent major changes to shake the internet such as the dissolving of Windows Live and the awkward transition from BlogTV to the hilariously bad "Younow" (that quite possibly no more than two people signed up for), I've been thinking a lot lately about how increasingly obvious it is becoming that anything we keep or store on the internet ultimately does not belong to us. For the moment, I am speaking with neither condoning nor condemnation, I'll share my views in just a moment.

It can be scarily easy to get locked in this mindset of feeling like the places you hand out online are somehow sanctuaries for your personal use. It is easy to get complacent or even naive about just how sacred those places are. One fine example of this is Youtube, which continues to enforce its policy of "If it ain't broke, keep fixing it" and subjecting its users to an endless barrage of increasingly non-user-friendly alterations to their system. Facebook also is notorious for this, with its implementation of things like "timeline" which literally not one single user on the face of this earth actually likes or wanted.

As a result we often tend to feel affronted by these forced changes. I know that to me, my Youtube profile feels very much like a home away from home. It rests at the hub of my internet activity, and then Youtube periodically barges in like an uninvited maid and begins moving things around, changing the settings and preferences I have gotten just how I like them, utterly ignorant to my protests. Of course whenever they implement changes like these they insist that they had testers vote on whether they liked it and followed the popular demand, but nobody believes that, because nobody knows anyone (except contrarian trolls) who claims to actually like these designs.

Anyone who has lost an email account due to companies changing hands, or spent any time on a beloved forum only to have it crash and lose much of their work can relate to how frustrating it can be to have years of dedication and memories get swept away in the backwash as these big conglomerates come bursting through our sacrosanct domains like runaway trains and not even notice the damage they are doing. We spend years building our profiles and contributing hundreds or thousands of posts/comments to various discussions only to have to stand there and watch as it all gets thrown away.

The thing we need to remember though is that these online domains to NOT belong to us, they belong to those mindless corporations. The purpose of those corporations is to make profit, and if they can make a little extra money by snipping away some of your home page to add a little more ad space there, they will do it. They don't care about the effect it has on us because they genuinely don't understand what these places mean to us. We're in a sense like spiders building our own Web (see what I did there?) around manmade objects. We've made these little internet cubbyholes our homes, we're adapted their shapes and capabilities for our own purposes, but this is very much like a whole different world from the one they see.

Case in point - I used to blog on something called "360" hosted by Yahoo. It wasn't especially great as blog sites there but circumstances just happened to be such that I ended up moving there from LJ when I got bored with it. I posted many very detailed blogs there, commented on all manner of things and reserved it for only a few precious friends. In the end, however, Yahoo shut it down deciding it wasn't worth their investment. It wasn't making enough money for them, and as a result I had the pages torn from my diary. I fully expect the same thing to one day happen to this blog too.

You might be saying right now that it's not that bit a deal. Why do you care so much? I hear you cry. Well, imaginary person, let me tell you. Online content is getting increasingly necessary to every day life. Records are being transferred from physical to virtual, companies are becoming more and more reliant on online registration. We've gotten to the point now where we can't even watch movies or play vidja games without having some kind of utterly pointless online connection to grant us permission to do so. Even when you OWN something you don't really own it without the net.

What's going to happen when everything you do in your life is in some way completely dependant on having an internet connection? I am typing this directly into my blog, as opposed to a Word document like I normally do, because the measly effort of copy-pasting the finished product from one to the other is slightly annoying. Do you think Word hasn't considered this? That they aren't working on ways to make this transfer even smoother? Eventually it could very well be the case that any and all similar programs might no longer exist on our computer but rather are streamed directly from the internet.

What if, at some point the whole concept of having "downloaded" programs becomes redundant, and we all exist as part of this continuous data stream sending us everything in real time with all updates and mods constantly sequenced directly in? Data storage would take on a whole new meaning, now our literal diaries will become the belongings of whoever holds the keys, everything from the pictures we take to the most meaningful conversations of our lives will become the hostages of larger corporate bodies who will mess around with that data as much as they want. Think this is all hypothetical? Consider how much of this stuff of yours actually is stored on your computer verses online right now.

Do you think your Youtube subscriptions are no different to a TV service or magazine subscription? You're wrong. Do you really think that anything on your profile on your favorite forum or social networking site belongs to you? In addition to the profile itself being on their website, your history is stored in their servers, your avatar is hosted on photobucket, your friends list is the product of online stored email contacts and every discussion, poke, karma rating or shared post exists only on someone else's archive which they are lending you access to for so long as they decide you may do so. Even your credit card info is in the hands of probably a dozen strangers you never met.

This has huge ramifications when it comes to things like privacy. We've already seen steps towards targeted advertisement, where your private conversations are studied so that adverts hosted on those websites can be tailored to your needs. Facebook is infamous for its lack of respect for its members privacy, constantly trying to push at the boundaries of what we will let them do, meanwhile Google+ was a trainwreck that didn't do nearly as well as they wanted precisely because of their stupid rules such as forcing you to use your real name and linking it to your other google accounts such as youtube. Even Amazon has been reporting private transactions to the police to get people arrested for marijuana use.

All the while this is happening we've been assaulted by a plethora of bills designed to destroy internet privacy, usually in America, because America seems to think it owns the internet. SOPA and PIPA were just the start, there's nothing to stop these nutjobs from constantly throwing the same bill with a different name at the Supreme Court indefinitely until it sticks, and that has come very close to happening with CISPA, which has already won half of its victory.

The world is slowly transitioning from personal hubs that branch out to various networks, to online hubs that feed us directly into theirs. The distinction between online and offline is becoming obsolete, and the most powerful forces leading the internet know this, and want to be ready for when it happens. They want to have systems in place so that they can remain in control from the moment we realise that in order to do anything with our own work we are immediately beholden to their whims. If they want to force us to openly reveal all our personal data, we will have no choice but to comply.

Just look at Ebay. They were once the cheapest auction site on the internet, but as soon as they choked up all their competition they raised their prices to phenomenal levels. Then they purchased Paypal, and now they can charge twice as many obscene fees. Why do we tolerate it? Because we have no other choice. No other company can come close to competing with them precisely because of these tactics. They hold the keys to us being able to do the things we want to do,

Your Youtube account does NOT belong to you. Your favourite forum can vanish from the internet at a moment's notice. Facebook might go the way of Myspace tomorrow along with all of your other most used online resources. Think you have a right to Google? If they decide to, they could make it a premium service and soon all other decent search engines would follow suit. Wikipedia could be torpedoed by internet censorship laws, pornography is already under attack (which I'll maybe get to in a different post). Your vlogs could vlog off, your torrents might wash away, Reddit could be Redidn't and 4Chan... well 4Chan is already crap but that's beside the point.

If you are under any illusions that the online bedroom walls you plaster with posters of Miley Cyrus or lolcats or whatever the kids are into these days really are yours to keep, you are in for a rude awakening. These corporations that have the right to strip those personal spaces of yours bare and stir your personal data around the web are not malevolent, they are thoughtless machines. Yes, there should be accountability, yes they should care what their customers want, but no, they don't HAVE to, so they don't.

Perhaps at some point we could all get together and build a site that is entirely user-generated, where we do as we please and nobody can dictate the way our preferences should be set up, but in the mean time, one of the difficult lessons we all need to learn is that the places we treasure most can be taken from us at a moment's notice. However intrusive that may feel, however unpleasant, regardless of whether or not that is how things should be, it is the way things are.

Remember to keep a firm line drawn between the virtual things which you keep in your own safe possession like objects, and those which only appear to be in your possession, but actually reside in someone else's virtual back-pocket  The internet does not belong to us, we just rent a room there, and our landlords can do pretty much whatever they please. I am not condoning the fact that they may come for your illusory freedoms, I'm merely informing you that it could happen, so you don't get taken by surprise when it does.

The internet is our playground, and feels like a wide open world through the shining window of our monitors, but in reality it is a chain of linked hands passing money and responsibility from one authority to another, and we walk upon that chain with precarious naivete. Our playground could be sealed behind iron gates or utterly obliterated at a moment's notice, so if you have anything valuable hanging out there in the electronic ether, be sure to reel it in and at least make a hard copy of it.

And next time you decide to go running into the internet like a care-free child, stop, and check your footing. One of these days you may just find that the very ground upon which you tread has been pulled away. Nothing is certain in this day and age, and everything you hold dear online is but an immaterial incantation of code and binary signals, however real it may look, it is not really there. Always be mindful of this, lest you lose something so treasured because you thought your DeviantArt page or your LiveJournal was an actual diary under your bed.

Keep the internet safe, my friends. And keep yourselves safe from it, both in terms of security, and dependency.