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How Will 4.2 Billion New Users Transform the Internet?
 Robert J. Hansen - Internet Evolution
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January 23, 2010
 |  | Think about the cultural sea-change that has happened online since 1993, and then think about this: There are still about 4.2 billion users left to join. |  | | |
In a taxicab in Puerto Vallarta heading towards El Nogalito, I saw the future at the side of the road.
I don't know the name of the place - the cab driver just shrugged when I asked him what it was called - and I couldn't tell you how to get there. But if you travel to El Nogalito, you'll find it.
Midway to our destination we traveled through a place that was beyond surreal. The packed-earth roads probably hadn't seen a road grader since the Reagan Administration. What had once been an upscale cluster of homes and shops had since fallen on hard times. I didn't see a single automobile anywhere. There were no power lines to be seen, no telephone poles, and there was an aroma that made me wonder about the local sanitation. It was the face of poverty, plain and simple. Kids were running around barefoot on the road, chasing a dog up and down and back and forth, while a mother looked on from the porch of what had once been a very nice home, and could be again.
I did a double-take when I saw she was talking on a cellphone, and a triple-take when I saw the flat-screen HDTV in the room behind her. As we went on through the village I started counting all the satellite dishes. By the time we came out the other side, no more than a few minutes later, I had run out of fingers. I was smiling like a madman, all self-satisfied: Look at how the communications revolution is transforming their lives!
I asked a lot of questions once I got to El Nogalito. Where did they get power? Where did they get the televisions, the cellphones, the satellite dishes? No two people had the same answer, but the general consensus was that it was a mix of honest work and outright robbery. (As one person colorfully told me, "Sometimes a wealthy family comes back from vacation and discovers now they only get broadcast channels.") Power came from gas-fueled generators, and cellphones are ubiquitous throughout Mexico. It's easier to get a cell plan than it is to wait for the government to lay down miles of copper cable.
On the way back to Puerto Vallarta we went through this neo-punk City of the Future again. For a moment I was living in a William Gibson novel. As I sat there slack-jawed, I got to thinking: How will the developing world change the Internet? We often hear a lot about how the Internet will transform the developing world, but what about vice-versa?
The nearest historical precedent that comes to mind is September 1993. AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) made the Internet a mass-market phenomenon then, by offering an @aol.com email account to every AOL subscriber. I remember being on USENET in those days: what had been a no-holds-barred, freewheeling community of marginally sane geeks suddenly got drowned in "Me, too!" posts and Green Card spams. The Internet was technologically capable of supporting that kind of explosive growth, but the social fabric of the Internet was ripped to shreds. A different Internet culture arose from the ashes. The current culture of remix, mashup, viral video, iPods, BitTorrent Inc. , and Hulu LLC was absolutely unimaginable in '93.
By 2005 there were 600 million online users. Not only had everything changed, but nothing had stopped changing. Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace were just arriving on the scene. By the beginning of 2010 we could no longer imagine an Internet without those services. There are 1.8 billion people online now. We're seeing social networking exploits, viruses that spread through Facebook, people losing their jobs because of the photographs they post online...
Think about the cultural sea-change that has happened since 1993, and then think about this: There are still about 4.2 billion users left to join.
On my way to El Nogalito I was giddy with glee at how the Internet was going to transform their lives. On the way back I sat in somber contemplation of how all of their lives were going to transform the Internet.
Robert J. Hansen, freelance hacker and computer science doctoral student at the University of Iowa
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