The Internet has struggled with everything its received. Domain names have become a hassle for many individuals, companies and countries, hosting companies come and go without telling their customers, millions of users use websites that take little to no security practices into consideration, and so on.

A group of people that have suffered the most are Web Designers and Web Developers. These people are the ones who have had to work on this unstable medium with even more unstable colleagues around the world offering to build websites for chump change. Whilst some will argue that Web Designers/Developers have very unchallenging jobs I believe that the way that the Internet has evolved has allowed these people to constantly be on their toes, awaiting the next news that’ll forever change how they work.

It seems that we’re now looking to one of the most drastic changes to the Web for some time.

For the past couple of years a small group of academics and professionals have been pondering the validity of a Semantic Web. In essence this could be called an ‘intelligent web’, allowing websites to understand the information given to them to help satisfy user requirements far better than before, perhaps even taking the sometimes tedious task of finding information on our own out of the picture and leaving it in the hands of a computer.

It all sounds too good to be true, especially to a cynic like myself. Being the naive bunch we web developers seem to be we cannot wait for real plans to be made, so we’ve jumped straight into it to try and make parts of the Internet ’smart’, tagging content in certain ways so that other websites can crawl the information themselves. Perhaps I just don’t understand enough about this Semantic Web thing?

All this talk about the web changing is true, but I’m not sure if it’ll go down the semantic route.

A struggle that millions of web users seem to be facing now is Net Neutrality. As of now the Internet is a neutral ground for anyone to compete on as the infrastructure is free of restrictions. However, Internet Service Providers are looking to take control of the Internet and very soon we could see the Internet almost being treated like TV, in the form of subscriptions based on what you want to view. This would be the first step in destroying small websites and could potentially kill off the next Google or MySpace just to make more money. There’s a lot more to it so I would strongly recommend reading the Wikipedia article on Net Neutrality before making a judgement on it.

My bleak point of view of the Semantic Web almost stems solely from Net Neutrality being an issue that people don’t wish to deal with until it’s too late. I simply do not understand how we can plan for the next revision of the Internet when for many of us there won’t even be a real Internet around that we can use and modify freely. The Internet needs to be neutral, even the inventor of the Internet Protocol agrees with me!

We are fighting two wars when we can barely handle one, and unless Network Neutrality is promised in some shape or form I cannot see a Semantic Web taking off.