During our last class discussion I was repeatedly asked “is the internet ours” and after this reading I am asking myself this question again with serious doubts about what kind of control (if any) we have over things on the internet regardless of whether we were the ones to post them or not.
While the cloud is seen as an evolution of the Internet, allowing businesses to enable “a digital (social) marketplace on a worldwide scale” users of the Internet have less of an understanding of how it works, but because everything is accessible and easy to use we don’t question it. Why? This seriously scares me. With the evolution of the Internet things are made easier for us everyday but we don’t stop to question where our information is going or who has access to it. Its going up in a freaking cloud, multiple clouds depending on what websites/apps you are using. Is this something that people just don’t care about or do people not understand what is happening because the Internet is becoming more and more abstract?
Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box, makes a comment on the cloud and says, “This is probably going to happen at a larger scale than any other technology transition we’ve seen in the enterprise. Larger than client servers. Larger than mainframes.” When clouds become bigger than the mainframes what is going to happen to the Internet? How will it change? Even though the Internet isn’t a private place now, at that point will we have any control over what other people can see? All information will be accessible in the cloud if it already isn’t now. If the Internet is at all ours now I am afraid it wont be in the near future.