Untangling the World Wide Web

For the past few decades, a huge network infrastructure has provided billions of people with access to information and technology that was inconceivable to earlier generations.

But if the cybergelicals of the 1990s were right about how the Internet would transform everyday life, they were less prophetic about what exactly those transformations would look like. As the number of users and applications has expanded, so have the frustrations and risks of plugging in.

This week, the United States banned soldiers from websites such as YouTube and MySpace – concerned that downloads and social networking could overload military systems and lead to security breaches. Some banks have reverted to snail mail to help customers steer clear of phishers trying to bilk them out of their money.

“Over all, the situation is not getting better, it's getting worse,” says David Clark, a senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the early creators of the Internet.