During the three months that the ad was up, 44% of the people who visited the site clicked on it.

Advertisers took note, and flocked to the new medium. Initially, they would negotiate with websites directly, for a flat rate, much like AT&T did. But soon a new advertising model emerged. By 1995, the websites Netscape and Infoseek had shifted to a pricing model known as cost per thousand impressions (CPM; M being the Roman numeral for 1,000).

In 1997, the infamous popup ad was born. The first ad servers to measure the return on investment of online ads appeared. By February 1998, the search site goto.com was “selling” its top search results slots, by auctioning search terms – or keywords.

Later that year, Google launched its search engine.

Ethan Zuckerman, former director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Civic Media, and the inventor of the popup ad, has called advertising the internet’s original sin.

It “became the default business model on the web,” he wrote, in a 2014 essay in The Atlantic, “because it was the easiest model for a web startup to implement, and the easiest to market to investors. Web startups could contract their revenue growth to an ad network and focus on building an audience. If revenues were insufficient to cover the costs of providing the content or service, it didn’t matter—what mattered was audience growth, as a site with tens of millions of loyal users would surely find a way to generate revenue.”

***

If we look at the internet in those early years, it was characterised by a desire to make information available to everyone. “Information wants to be free” was the motto of the early internet.

The easiest way to keep the information free was to accept advertising. And for a while, this seemed to work. In the early Aughts, especially after the election of George W Bush and during the Iraq War (2003-11), the “blogosphere” bloomed. People — ordinary people, but people who felt deeply about the state of the world — started sharing their analyses of news and current events. Blogs with passionately argued positions, supported by facts and figures, found massive readerships. They would reference other blog posts, sometimes in agreement, sometime in opposition, and the reader would find themselves going through a maze of links, starting from a piece on the legal basis of the US invasion of Iraq and ending up with a detailed scientific analysis of Superman’s superpowers.

Meanwhile, Google was learning to provide answers to our questions, even predict them, with an accuracy that seemed almost uncanny. The new social-media sites saw us connect with friends from school and college, rebuild old networks and find new ways to meet, talk and congregate.

Somewhere along the line, it all began to go off-track.

Today, we spend most of our time on social media, trapped in the infinite scroll invented, incidentally, by a man who now deeply regrets it: Aza Raskin. He was in his 20s at the time and, about a decade later, would co-found the non-profit Center for Humane Technology, with the stated aim of “exposing the negative effects of persuasive technology and social media”.

On Instagram, X and Facebook, our infinite streams are filled with content designed to maximize “engagement”. The best results are garnered by content that is negative, or inane, or both. A study published in Nature last year, conducted by researchers across four countries (the US, Germany, Switzerland and Sweden), found that topics that arouse emotions such as anger and fear get better engagement than more nuanced or neutral takes.

For social media, this engagement is critical. As users stay glued to their feeds, their private data is harvested across devices, in order to target them with a customised stream of ads.

“Information wants to be free” changed to “If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

***

In November 2022, this decline of the internet got a name, when internet activist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification”. Here’s how he describes the phenomenon: companies begin by needing millions of users, so they provide good services and benefits. Users attract other users, which brings in business customers; usually, advertisers.

Once the business customers are locked in, the company starts to put the squeeze on them, and all benefits now go to the tech company’s shareholders.

“Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle,” he wrote in Wired last year.

And that’s the state of the internet today. Google’s almost magical ability to come up with the truest answer has all but disappeared, replaced by pages and pages of search-optimised dreck, now AI-generated dreck. The quirky sites dealing with individual obsessions, the passionate and detailed discussions on politics or books or movies, have all but disappeared (subreddits are possibly the last remnants of the old Net). Conspiracy theories, hate-mongering and rage-bait abound.

So what does the future hold? Maybe an ad-supported internet is not for everyone. Already, platforms such as YouTube offer ad-free experiences to paying subscribers. Most professional news organisations have moved at least some of their content behind firewalls. The old bloggers have moved on to Substack’s subscription model or to direct-monetisation platforms such as Patreon.

Governments have taken note of the power these platforms wield, and may seek to control how they operate. In 2022, the EU passed the sweeping Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires online platforms to give users more choices and rivals more opportunities to compete. Earlier this month, the deadline for compliance passed. Violations can lead to fines of up to 10% of a company’s global revenue, and up to 20% for repeat offenses. (Apple has already been fined 1.8 million Euro for thwarting competition among music-streaming rivals, and is appealing the ruling.)

Similar action has been unfolding in the US since 2020, with the government filing suits against Meta, Alphabet and Amazon. There is talk of action against Apple too. It remains to be seen how successful such action will be, in altering how these companies conduct business, tackle competition, and leverage revenue streams.

Because even the original slogan of the internet, “Information wants to be free”, was part of a far more nuanced idea.

Counter-culturist Stewart Brand’s original quote, from the first Hackers Conference in 1984, was: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become… too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate… (and) each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.”