Why has the Internet stagnated, page-20

I tend to agree that there is a form of stagnation happening with regard to the Internet. It's being used more and more heavily for fewer and fewer things. The Internet is being used increasingly as the medium for video, voice and file transfer.

This is of course awesome for Vocus! The more demand there is for bandwidth, the better we will do.

The area that's stagnating is information exchange and financial transactions.

As a source of information the Internet has degraded to a fraction of what it was around the turn of the century. Google has come to dominate the search-engine space and they take advantage of this by manipulating search results to promote their clients' information. At the same time, the rise of blogging means that skewed, uninformed, and just plain wrong information abounds and is ranked equally with well-researched, reliable information. Re-postings of material result in page after page of the same article swamping search results. The information density of the Internet is probably less than 20% of what it was 15 years ago.

As a platform for financial transactions the Internet is similarly degraded by the increasingly alarming security situation, which is exacerbated by the proliferation of connected devices. Smart phones in particular are a huge source of risk. Jail-break exploits can be deployed on your phone with just a visit to a web page, without any need for a click or a user-confirmation. Open the page... you're done! Security researchers estimate over 30% of all Internet connected devices have open vulnerabilities, and probably over half of those have actually been broken.

But none of those considerations really matter to Vocus! We carry the bits... and that's good for us!