The internet has reached its half century, but how will it change now?

IN HALF a century, the internet has transformed society. Billions of us can connect at the touch of a button. Access to information, banks, shops and memes has never been easier. The world has changed dramatically and continues to do so in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first message sent across the precursor of the internet (see “Happy 50th birthday, internet: How it was born with an error message”), we salute the ingenuity of the people who built it, built it to last and built it to be freely available for all – not least Vint Cerf, co-author of the rules that run the internet.

The internet isn’t without downsides. It has unleashed forces that undermine things we hold dear. By design, it has no central authority, and this makes protecting people online or tackling misinformation, cyberterrorism or bullying a near-impossible task.

Efforts to wrestle back some sort of control will determine what the internet will become. The European Union, for example, wants its citizens to have more digital rights. But when it introduced legislation last year to do this, people in the EU suddenly found their internet a little smaller. Rather than changing their websites to avoid illegally tracking Europeans, many companies simply blocked visits from people in the EU.

Russia is protecting its portion of the internet by attempting to control it: its telecoms companies are required to monitor and filter internet traffic. It is also experimenting with an off-switch to sever its internet from the rest of the world in the event of a cyberattack.

China has had extensive internet censoring infrastructure in place for years, and its technology firms are increasingly challenging US tech firms for market dominance. Many who enter that market end up self-censoring.

How these developments play out will shape our future. If the past 50 years have been dominated by free and open exchanges, the next 50 will be about whether rules and restrictions actually make the internet, and the world, a better place.