Our love affair with the internet is ending. It is as if we have discovered a long standing lover has hidden being arrested numerous times for DWI and then says "it's nothing to worry about."
The US only woke up to the cultural infidelities of the internet when it threatened democracy. It seems abusing blacks, women, Jews, Muslims, LBGTQ or the physically challenged for the past 10 years wasn't really considered much of a problem. The companies were glad to let it go and the US public defended the digital industry's free speech assertion. But the Europeans were far less sympathetic and, it seems, basically correct.
Abuse and exploitation by hate groups, extremists, foreign antagonists and a variety of malcontents has certainly taken the shine off the internet. When you add toxic online social and gaming environments, over-reaching data mining and user activity tracking, the entire picture looks bad. While testifying in Europe and Washington D.C. everyone from ISP, hosts, game developers to corporate giants are left with the task of trying to paint a friendly face on an ugly canvas.
Being realistic, the internet is not entirely evil or bad, but where it has been bad, it has been awful. Some of those bad places have been very large, very influential and have done some serious damage. It is no longer practical or possible to ignore the downside of an unregulated, unmoderated internet.
Companies are not ignorant of the problem or the business implications. Users can be fickle, ask MySpace. The same goes for advertisers. Politicians are always looking for issues to build or support careers. Companies know all this and are now scrambling to make corrections that are long overdue.
Users and communities have been told numerous times about wonderful new adjustments that will greatly improve the livability of the internet. Yet old issues left dormant and unattended emerge unexpectedly to unleash new daunting problems.
Some things take allot of effort to reverse. It's hard to change the recipe once the cake has been baked. In those cases, it is important to make the recipe sound good and make the icing attractive. You really want to get it right the next time. Meanwhile, all your guests are asking if there's ice cream or fruit or something else because everybody knows bad cake when they taste it.
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