It’s hard to imagine life without the Internet, especially if you grew up with it. I remember sitting at the family desktop, clicking away at princess dress-up games and suspicious ads that predicted when you were going to find your true love (spoiler alert: it was malware). Eventually, those days of innocent web-surfing evolved into scouring every sketchy site imaginable to find PDFs of university textbooks I couldn’t afford. The web and its usage are embedded into our day-to-day lives and activities, and there are now very few places in which its navigation or use is not part of workday tasks or academic learning. It’s a stark difference from the childhoods of just a few generations back, when computers were still a futuristic concept and not something you could carry in your pocket—younger Millennials and older Gen Z kids earned the label of “digital natives,” and now the youngest of Generation Alpha are glued to iPads, knowing how to tap their way around an electronic device before they even learn to walk or talk.  

With the revolutionary creation of the Internet came a golden age of information—there was a period of time where it really did feel like you could truly find or learn anything by just typing your query into the search bar. The future of the Internet was bright until it wasn’t. Link rotting and the decline of quality in online content has since tarnished the web. Being online isn’t the haven of knowledge and innovation it purported itself to once be or the best place for kids to go play Adobe Flash games anymore; for most, it’s a mundane part of the average day, now filled with more disinformation and defunct links than ever before.

So, what happened?

Addressing the decay of the Internet requires several looks back at the legislation and events that have shaped the Web, as well as some looks forward into the future as companies bank on emerging technologies that promise to positively impact our lives. However, the history of the Internet is much more extensive than I could ever cover in an article—but three of many reasons that I associate with the Internet having a turbulent period of change are as follows:

Net Neutrality and Legislation

Net neutrality, the concept that data transmitted through Internet service providers (ISPs) should be accessible and open to users without interference, was only recently voted to be reinstated in 2024. Bitter legal battles during the Trump administration repealed net neutrality rules in 2017, with broadband providers monopolizing Internet services and website access. Within these past seven years, data mishandling has been rampant, consumer safety has been increasingly jeopardized, and ISPs have taken advantage of the repeal to charge premiums and enable paid prioritization. While the Federal Communications Commission is now making efforts to restore net neutrality for the benefit of consumers, this fight for access has been greatly harmed by the 2017 ruling, and its effects are still visible in the online landscape of today. With the results of the 2024 election looming over every aspect of the American lifestyle, there’s no saying what’s in store for net neutrality. Given that the 2017 decision to revoke net neutrality partially stemmed from the desire to empower private businesses to take control of broadband access as they saw fit, there is still uncertainty surrounding the future of fair Internet access, even as the restoration of accessibility is underway.

Attacks Against Digitization and Preservation Efforts

Link rotting accounts for a major portion of information loss. According to a Pew Research Center study, “a quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible” (Chapekis et al., 2024). However, there are few regulations or sites set in place to combat this—cue the Internet Archive, an archival site created by Brewster Kahle meant to combat digital decay by preserving World Wide Web documents. Founded in 1996, the Archive and its sister tool, the WayBack Machine, have offered open access to digitized scans of texts and sources for loaning, as well as archives of now-defunct or changed website links. 

Within the past five years, the Archive has come under scrutiny, even suffering through cyberattacks and becoming flooded with lawsuits from major publishers over mass copyright infringement claims. The nonprofit was loaning out content in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic through “controlled digital lending,” akin to an e-library would, but without having licensed said texts through the publishers. While publishers claim that the Internet Archive’s method of loaning texts was damaging authors’ earnings, Kahle claims fair use. Recently, attacks against libraries and information archives have been more prevalent nationwide, fueled by the hostile political climate and the call for increased censorship within public education—books banned for supposedly having sensitive or unconventional content are altogether removed from the curriculum, and nationwide funding for education and local libraries is being slashed. This sentiment is also present online as archival sites are gutted, and we are left to wonder what we have lost to broken links and obsolete or deleted sources, and what will happen to remaining sites as this trend continues. 

The Role of Generative AI

It seems you can’t go online without someone singing the praises of artificial intelligence (AI), heralding the popularization of machine learning models (MLMs) and generative AI as an unstoppable force that will “revolutionize” whatever industry it is trained to automate processes for. Models like ChatGPT have become akin to a go-to search engine, amassing millions of users within the past two or three years since its release to the public. Generative models are especially popular amongst users who want to create images and write paragraphs on demand. However, as useful as it claims to be, there is more to machine learning and its role in changing the Internet.

To keep it brief, AI threatens to be a polluting force, not only for the environment but also within the digital ecosystem. AI systems are largely reliant on the input of data that oftentimes has been sourced and used for training models without the consent of creators. Unethical implications aside, content being generated by users is not unique, but an amalgamation of the source materials it draws from, a sloppy Frankenstein of texts and art that, if unrefined, does not contribute anything new to any conversation or process. This will arguably lead to muddier, inaccurate research at best and dangerous disinformation at worst—without the ability to filter for AI-generated content, how can you know you’re receiving your information from accurate or truthful sources? How can you be sure you’re not granting a machine learning model the power to rewrite or obfuscate history?

Sure, the Internet is not what it used to be, and as we lose more sources of information, it becomes harder to navigate and use, but not all hope is lost. Doing your part to counter the loss of information—like downloading content you enjoy offline, visiting your local library and using its resources, consulting archives, and more—is a step towards preservation. While the loss of media and information is not solely a digital problem, the online world is ever-expansive, and with its exponential growth also comes the responsibility to make it safe to use (for ourselves and for future generations).

In the dark era of widespread misinformation we’re living, we’re also learning to navigate through technologies whose long-term effects we have yet to fully grasp; preserving online artifacts is crucial to our collective safety, as well as to creating accountability and maintaining knowledge. The digital world has revolutionized our lives—let’s not forget to protect its positive impact by deleting the human history we have let it shape.