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- guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 November 2007 13.26 GMT
Charles Arthur: you say the internet's too big?
Part of my job involves being called up by PR people who have a "survey" to tell me about. Actually, it's usually a "new survey" - old ones are so, you know, passé.
But this week brought a stunner. This survey, she said, had found that 75% of its respondents think "the web is too big".
When the PR person eagerly touting this revelation called me, I needed some time to wrap my head around the concept. Too big? Too big for what? To fit in a box?
"No, no," said the PR person. "Too big to be useful. Thirty-eight per cent said that half the websites they see aren't relevant. There are too many search sites, just too many… sites."
Who let the stupid people on the net?
I grappled for a bit with the concept of an internet that has grown too big. The PR person obviously interpreted my silence for uncertainty. "Is there more I can tell you about it?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "Who let all the stupid people on the net?"
I mean, that's where they must have drawn the people in their sample from, surely? And I doubt it was a proper representative sample - which, just for the record, is as follows:
To reflect the UK adult population, for example, the sample should comprise at least 1,000 randomly chosen people weighted for age and class, and be conducted door-to-door - though these days we'll accept the telephone, albeit with reservations.
Can't squeeze another page on
Yet the idea is a fascinating one, isn't it? What if the internet actually did have a size limit. The other day some companies suggested that internet capacity will hit some sort of size limit by 2010. (Note that date: as all reporters know, 2010 is the sort of date that's "close enough to worry, far enough away that we won't get pulled up on it". Set your alarms for two years and let's see, shall we?)
Let's imagine a world where the internet was full. Not just big, but full. No more room. Can't squeeze another page on. What would it be like?
For a start, you'd need someone to run it - none of this turning up and putting up any old rubbish. You want to do something? You'd have to wait for someone else to stop using their pages and site. It would be like a merry-go-round - one off, one on.
Oh, OK then, I'll accept the post of Internet Tsar since I'm the one who's identified the problem. (Ignore those people in the survey. They were just helping out.) Let's get to work!
We all have to make sacrifices
First off I wouldn't allow any of these "page not found" pages - what a terrible waste. We'd have a single, centralised "page not found", probably on my Internet Tsar website. None of these different ones on different sites. We all have to make sacrifices, you know.
At a stroke, that will free up 181,000 pages. Not bad for the first morning's work. 181,000 pages might not sound like a lot to you, but to many people it's the chance to put up a gallery of pictures of their cats looking surprised by the camera flash - you know, the ones with the foreground showing what a mess their desk is, and the background showcasing their poor interior design sense.
Next, blogs. We simply can't allow these people whose blogs have fallen into desuetude to just jam up the space, their wise words gathering cobwebs. I'm sorry, but there's a squeeze on. If you don't blog at least once a - hmm, well, let's say month for now - then your blog will be summarily removed and its space passed to the next person who wants to spend their time copying and pasting entire stories from mainstream news sites, thus denuding the latter of page views and revenue.
Video? Well, we might have to have a stern word with YouTube: do we really need 4,380 videos of people putting mints into bottles of cola? Surely one, or perhaps two, is enough. Make some room for people who have come up with new things to put into cola. Or new things to do with mints.
Everyone squeeze in together
Obviously all the social networking sites will have to squeeze in together, because it's simply wasteful to have MySpace and Facebook and LinkedIn using up valuable pages when many of the people on them are the same. As are the sites. The integration should be fun to watch.
And Wikipedia - well, what can I say? Of course it will have to be cut back and shrunk - we can't just have it expanding all the time. Oh, hang on, it seems to be doing this already of its own accord. Splendid - you know, there's no better way to please a tsar than to anticipate his demands.
You may think I'm being a bit aggressive. What, you say, of all the people who want to set up new companies online: will they have to wait for others to go bust? What about those who want to create new search engines - will they have to wait for one of the old ones to die, or might they find themselves saddled with an old domain that used to be someone's knitting blog? Will Amazon have to check with me before it expands its catalogue? To which I'm afraid the answers are yes, yes and yes.
I'll need an iPhone and a BlackBerry, please
It's going to be a tough life being Internet Tsar, but as long as I'm kitted out correctly - probably with a donated iPhone and BlackBerry, routed of course through third parties - I think I should be able to keep a handle on things. Who'll donate them? Well, I think Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and those other search engines should be falling at my feet singing hosannas: since the web will change only very slowly, they'll be able to refine their search engines so you find exactly what you want every single time. Feel lucky? Hell, you'll feel prescient.
You have to remember, of course, how we got into this position where I've been made the Tsar of all the (Limited) Internet. It was because you wanted it. People think that the sum of human knowledge keeps increasing, and that the internet should reflect that. Well, we've made it a zero-sum game. The web was too big, you said, and I listened. While everyone else just shrugged, I was prepared to do something about it.
Just bear in mind: there's only one internet. Use it wisely.
Oh, and by the way, that article you were looking for - about claiming back charges for late credit card payments? I'm afraid I had to delete it to make way for this one. Enjoy your day!