> These companies add value but they are not the Internet.
Even more importantly, they are not people. By that I mean that (marketing departments in) so many companies just love to take credit for the things people bring to the table. Which is a pet peeve of mine, so this rant is probably a bit besides the point.
It's people, friends or otherwise, who can make simple things like communicating via ASCII fun. In school we exchanged pieces of paper when the teacher wasn't looking, in forums we came up with things, and so on. It's great to have better tools, of course, but it's not like this "enables" us in some fundamental or even very meaningful way - if you don't give us tools, we make our own, if you only make tools to make communication harder we find ways around them. If we don't have decent search engines we use things like web rings or word of mouth. The internet with its routing around faults is a mere shadow of human ingenuity, and the reasons why we do that are also what makes the communication interesting in the first place.
A lot of people seem to be making kind of a cult around completely forgetting that, putting the horse before the cart. The internet isn't that special, we already were a network. Everything is, and scale and speed matter most to people pulling fast ones. The rest want to live in integrity and dignity first and foremost, and then "add value" or numbers.
So the internet isn't special, and the way it's going, since commercial interests came to the forefront, it's becoming kind of a shit show. So if we're going to call that a great achievement of humanity, that's kind of depressing. Maybe it could have been one, but right now we have what we actually have and do what we actually do. Sorry for ranting, but I'm so sick of the hybris over things that are so mediocre in such large parts, that are just becoming more bloated without ever having been good.