An Essay: Draft 2: 10.03.10, 10.08.06, 10.08.09
Summary: The Internet has been "world wide" since 1991. Why is there not better low-cost, or free and open, universally accessible, high quality, distance learning available on the Internet already? If there were, would not that create -- by the intrinsic nature of the Internet -- world wide, to some extent free and open, high quality, education for all human beings on this planet? My answer is: YES, it would, YES, it could, YES, it should... sooner than later for humanity's sake.
This essay gives an overview of some of the educational problems created by (1) the unethical, socially irresponsible, classically capitalist "monetization" games being played by the larger "Internet Providers", search engine companies, and by the large monopolistic Telecommunications companies, (2) by intentional manufacturer-delayed and crippled and vendor-delayed releases of more innovative computer software and now "more advanced" socially-useful web software as well, and (3) by the persistent use of static web page content on Internet web sites in general and on the very few "historic" distance learning "Web 1.x" web sites and the emerging, soon to be more numerous, and more popular, "Web 2.0" web sites in particular.
It has been 19+ years since 1991 when the Internet became relatively cheaply accessible to the ordinary US, EU, Japanese and S.E. Asian citizen who owned a personal computer or who used one at their work place. In 1991 Internet-browsing began in earnest nation(s)-wide, for the first time outside the historic academic and medium to large business uses of it since the 1970s and 1980s. General citizen use of the Internet exploded exponentially with the advent of the first free, graphic-user-interface web-browser software in 1991, later renamed Mozilla. Thereafter exponentially more and more people in countries world-wide began to have "Internet connectivity".
Also from that time on, there arose a trend to put more and more information of all kinds on the Internet as "web pages" (static web pages). And Internet users increasingly became able to find "most" of that information more and more easily with "search engines" like Google and Bing, the latter two which became the most popular for people to use world-wide up to the present day.
Yet what we have on the Internet today (2010+) in terms of affordable, or free, easily accessible, well-formed and maximally informative distance-learning in 2009+, is almost 20 years since the popularization of Internet use; it is still pretty meager and mediocre material educationally; but there is a whole lot more of it! And what educational material, or worse, what edutainment material, exists on the Internet is increasingly dominated and retarded by commercial-ism, in this investigator's opinion and in the opinion of many of her colleagues. In fact we can argue that commercial interests have come to dominate and slow-down or delay Internet innovation and the types and ways of Internet content presentation that is "truly educational" (beyond a certain point or threshold I will try to define elsewhere on this site). All Internet content including educational content increasingly is intended -- i.e. it is being channeled by the most wealthy and powerful would-be dominators of the Internet -- dominating more for the purposes of forcing users to view advertising, albeit increasingly well targeted and more likely wanted advertising, which brings the owners higher profits, than is the content itself intended for better informing -- or educating -- the Internet end-user. And these would-be Internet tyrants, smiling soft-spoken sure-of-themselves hegemons, would have the rest of "us Internet users" pay the highest price for the best content presented to us at the fastest Internet speeds if they succeed.
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