To hear it told by Ping Identity Vice President of Strategic Marketing Eric Norlin, “the Net’s gettin’ messy”:

“The bottom line is this: the sundry schemes, scams, and shams that now dominate the Net are quickly dragging us toward a future where the Net as we know it is basically unusable. Put plainly: the Net’s getting messy.”

He goes on to argue that the Internet is simply a step in the evolution of networks. If that’s true, what comes next? I’ve been studying one possible answer as part of my computer science curriculum: the Semantic Web, as proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the original creator of the World Wide Web. As glossy as the Semantic Web sounds, though, it’s not good enough to serve as the next step up. It was always intended to coexist with the WWW, not replace it.

We can make all the claims we want and point out the obvious — the Internet is becoming harder and harder to navigate and manage on a personal level. But making these claims is a lot like announcing that you’re offering something that you aren’t really offering: while it adds insight, it does nothing to solve the problem. If someone’s finally tired of the Internet the way it is, start trying to come up with ideas as to how to fix it or replace the current technology so that it actually makes sense. Patching a problem temporarily only delays the leak later on (and may, in fact, make the leak much larger).

The Internet may be aging, but there’s nothing else stepping up as a better alternative with higher security, better features for commerce, or more intuitive interfaces. Go invent something great. Make a ton of money selling it as the next big thing. Griping about it won’t get any of us anywhere.

(For more information on the Semantic Web, you can check out the Semantic Web Colloquium series, held weekly at The Evergreen State College from March 30 to May 25, 2004.)