Internet’s biodiversity

Internet was born as a new world where everyone will have equal opportunities. However, after almost 30 years, we find out that it wasn’t true and that it’s incredible biodiversity is being lost. Especially, a study focused its attention on the domain .com and it discovered something incredible.

What’s the Internet’s biodiversity?

The biodiversity is the biological diversity, which is the variety of living organisms inside a specific ecosystem. And so what’s the Internet’s biodiversity?

Even Internet has its diversity and it’s incredible, if we think that the only domain .com pass the 150 milions. Sure maybe the suffix bio is a little bit risky, but the complex mechanisms with which the web works can easily resemble the ones of a living organism.

The growth of Internet

Even if Internet is usually dated on the 1969 (1986 in Italy), we have to consider as its real birthdate only the most recent 1991, with the advent of the World Wide Web.

Only in that moment Internet was really born. At the beginning it was presented as an utopian world, which was accessible to all and where everyone will have equal opportunities and rights. Where everyone was able to create his own business, to let everyone know his own ideas.

With the time that utopian world became a bloody battlefield where, everyday, millions of websites die, under the power and the cruelty of the biggest.

Since the 1993 (the year when the web became accessible to all the users of the world) Internet exponentially and no-stop grown.

Even though this continuos growth, today, all the digital world is focusing on the hands of few and there are many small web sites that disappear every day.

The research about the biodiversity of Internet

An interesting research about the Internet’s biodiversity comes from a team of australian researchers that, with the help of the artificial intelligence, carefully search out the ecosystem .com.

The researchers wanted to examinate the last 20 years. What did happen to Internet since the 2006 to today?

To know it the researchers examinated the comments posted on Reddit and Twitter and the links that were with these comments.

They examinated them according to them diversity: maximum diversity (all the links brought to different websites) and minimum diversity (all the links brought to the same website).

What did they discovered

The results of the research shown how, 20 years ago, in the web there was much more diversity. Every 100 comments posted, infact, there were links that brought to 20 different websites.

Today, instead, every 100 comments there are only 5 different links.

From it came out how, during the 2020 (the most recent year that they examinated) between the 60 and the 70% of the users’ attention was focused on only 10 websites.

Therefore, only the 1000 most visited websites of the world sharply and exponentially grow, at the expense of all the other millions of websites.

Who isn’t able to compete with the big

In this scenario there are many small websites that aren’t able to compete. This makes the life of the small internet websites ever shorter.

The research, infact, shown how in the 2011 the 40% of the websites created 5 years before was still active, a percentage that drops at the 3% in the 2015.

But this doesn’t stop the growth of the web, which number of domains, even though all, is still growing.

How to save the Internet’s biodiversity

According to the researchers the growth of the domains isn’t enough, because all the attention of the web is focused on only  10 websites.

This endangers the biodiversity of the ecosystem of the World Wide Web. But the small ones don’t give up, it’s been always more the ones that believe in the innovation and in the digital, will be it enough to fight against the kings of Internet, or its biodiversity is irreparably lost?

This post is also available in: Italiano