WWW Balkanization

Karl Auerbach's prediction that the internet is balkanizing into groups of people who only accept traffic from each other took another step closer to reality today. The veteran TCP/IP engineer and ICANN board member has warned of the effect for years.

"The 'Net is balkanizing. There are communities of trust forming in which traffic is accepted only from known friends," Auerbach told Wired last year.

The trend can be seen at various levels. At the user level, where we see bloggers repeating each other in an echo chamber and reinforcing their views; in the middle of the network, where Verizon recently blocking off inbound email from Europe, and it's happening deep down at the packet level too, as a result of the net's background radiation.

But all these may look like an innocent prelude. Google said today that its search engine will respect a new link attribute, "rel=nofollow", which will means its algorithms will not give weighting to the target URL. MSN, Yahoo! and blog vendors said they'll follow suit. It's effectively declaring PageRank™ dead for weblogs, in an attempt to stem the problem.

The problem is the explosion of comment spam, whereby spammers use the open comment sections of weblogs to promote their wares in the major search engines rankings. PageRank™ era, too. Google owed its success in part to the early effectiveness of link maps, but it has since demoted the factor after widespread criticism, and some embarrassing incidents. [More on that at The New York Times and Le Monde]. It's also a major blow to the 'Religion of the Hyperlink', faith in which you can see expressed in phrases like "the uniquely democratic nature of the web", coined by Google. Obviously this doesn't refer to spammers who are voting early and often, and in ever greater numbers.

[ el Reg ]