Speak Up, the Internet Can’t Hear You

The Internet might have looked very different than it does today.

When Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina were building Mosaic, the browser that practically created the Web in 1993, they included the ability to annotate any page. Discussions immediately sprang up. But they quickly realized that the server to host the annotations would have had to scale to enormous size, which was not practical. So they took the feature out. What would the Web have looked like if annotation had managed to stay in? Maybe a million conversations would have bloomed, and some of the furious divides that plague this country would have been bridged. Or maybe it just would have been a deafening free-for-all, cranking up all the cranks.

Twenty years later, there is a vast amount of discussion on the Web, much of it in the form of comments and reviews. But it is generally hosted by corporations – Facebook, Google, Amazon – that are selling ads or products, which kind of undermines the democratic spirit of give and take. When the companies fail, like MySpace did, the content simply goes away.