The Aether of the Internet

I want to talk about something that I think we all know, but I don't see articulated out loud often enough. Maybe because it's obvious, but I'm going to talk about it anyway.

The Internet used to just be the webpages on your desktop computer. To go on the Internet meant starting the holy ritual of beeps and scratches from your modem while staring at your browser window. When the ritual ended, the universe opened before you. That was the Internet.

The web pages were the data. There was no mobile Internet. Your Samsung fridge didn't require online access. But that's changed.

The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. […] The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] maybe even your microwave oven.

– Fragmented Future by Darcy DiNucci in 1999

She was right. The Internet today isn't just web pages. It's the data powering the web pages, the mobile apps, the video games, the IoT devices and everything else. Data is the lifeblood of the Internet. Search indexers like Google, in a way, are actually way behind what the Internet actually is today. They only index public web pages. There's a whole treasure trove of public information they can't access.

I think the next superbloom of internet applications will be built on infrastructure that solves this discrepancy between the Internet of today and the indexing technologies we currently use. They'll build on a unified API of all the world's public information, not just the web pages.