The Mozilla Foundation On A Healthy Internet

Sean Gallagher over at Ars Technica reported yesterday on the 2018 Internet Health Report, which Mozilla puts together. I’m linking the article in addition to the report itself because Sean does such a great job summarizing it. Of course I also think the Report itself is important, and I particularly like the metrics it uses to gauge how healthy the Internet is.

Gallagher summarizes the report’s concerns this way:

Of particular concern were three issues:

• Consolidation of power over the Internet, particularly by Facebook, Google, Tencent, and Amazon.
• The spread of “fake news,” which the report attributes in part to the “broken online advertising economy” that provides financial incentive for fraud, misinformation, and abuse.
• The threat to privacy posed by the poor security of the Internet of Things.

I’d point out that the Report itself alludes to another concern, and it’s one that I hope to give a lot of attention to in my writing here, and that’s the topic of Web literacy. As I hope to explain in future posts, I think there’s a reciprocal relationship between the problems above and Web literacy, which is to say the problems above are both made worse by Web illiteracy, and at the same time make Web illiteracy worse.

For now I’ll put that out there as food for thought.