I had the sudden thought this morning that it is 20 years ago this month since my firm won a significant new client (the subsidiary of a California tech firm) because we had a unique selling proposition in the South West: a website. They found us using the web browser we all used – Mosaic. Safari and Chrome were all in the future and Explorer (1995) hadn't yet grabbed much market share. We have gone from having a website beng a USP to not having one being a significant disadvantage in one generation.
In those days, of course, there were no mobile phones (actually there were, and our one client who had one was something of a figure of fun…it weighted roughly 5 kg, cost him £2,000 a year, had a lousy connectivity and the batteries lasted about an hour).
MySpace was founded 6 years later and Facebook the year after that. By the time these had appeared, we'd built and sold the LawZone online community and weekly newswire (which had 28,000 subscribers as I recall) to the Lawyer. They closed it down in 2004. Anyone pining for the good old days can see a 1999 issue here https://web.archive.org/web/19991127213353/http://www.lawzone.co.uk:80/. Gosh it was fun…
There was no cybercrime or online video (YouTube joined the web in 2005).
So, if anyone tells you that things really haven't changed much, they are talking garbage. However, what hasn't changed much is people…so the tech is different, but that just means the tools are different, not the objectives of their use as it were.
But so is the agenda, which is now all about trawling data (about you) and selling it to corporations or political parties so they can sell their products to you or persuade you to vote how they want you to vote… It isn't fun anymore. In 1997 we were all looking forward to having free and unfettered access to information. In 2017, we're worried about cybercrime, loss of privacy and the prevalence of false content placed to manipulate the gullible.
The excellent Yair Cohen cogently makes the argument in his very readable book 'The Net is Closing' that the law needs to catch up with the web…and that there's little sense in having the high degree of legal protection we enjoy in real life immediately abandoned when we log on.
if you are indifferent to or unaware of this problem, I suggest you look at his website.
You may not agree with his solution, but it is hard not to agree that one should be found.