“Data-Pollution’:How much data is good for the Internet?

London has it, Stockholm has it, so does Milan and Singapore. Mumbai and Bangalore needs it.

If you are done guessing, I am talking about the Road Congestion Taxes that is in place in these cities for entering Prime Areas with very high traffic density.

While Supply in real world is related Infrastructure that is finite, the Supply in the Virtual World for Digital Traffic at the moment appears unlimited. So instead of viewing Infrastructure as the supply, we should look at time as the supply and not necessarily infrastructure. It costs one “Time” both when you get stuck in a road in traffic congestion and when you get stuck in the Web in a Data Congestion.

The other day when I was doing a Search on “Cloud Computing” (Just to prove the Point of my Blog), Google returned a cool 36 Million results for the string “Cloud Computing” – The results came from the following categories:

·         2.44 Million Blogs,

·         10,500 News Results,

·         10,800 Videos,

·         20.5 Million Images (If one picture can say a thousand words, imagine what can 20.5 million Pictures say- Easy Math),

·         1.28 Million Discussions,

·         60,400 book references ,

·         3 results from the Category “Places” (of course Cloud is a Place, it was on the skies sometime back J) and

·         The rest of the results probably coming from a Category “Real Time” – The Tweets and Scraps and Stuff like that.

I like Google for it acknowledges the rising volumes of digital content and it does try its bit to improve the User Experience of performing a search and also making it reasonably possible for someone to use the results of the search (it is getting harder these days however). How so ever Google tries to categorize its Results, I still find it overlapping. Blogs, Discussions, Real Time, News- It’s hard to tell the difference, especially with so much cross referencing of content going on between various forums. Someone Blogs, then he Tweets about his Blog and this sometimes does get reported in the News and then there is a discussion on it.

While Analytics, Big data and Smart Search does try to give its best to pull out the rough diamond out of the litter and filth, would it be worthwhile to limit production/creation of data/ digital content on the internet.

Could a “Data Tax” be enforced, can we have “congestion Taxes” to Control (Digital) Traffic.

So far Internet has owed its success to the concept of free web, where increased participation, increased content, increased number of users has contributed to the increased “Net worth” of the internet.

But…will we see a change in the Economics of Internet? Will a demand for better quality data lead to a restriction in the supply?

Can someone sue a Search Engine for misleading results? Will we have a Law of the land that says Search Returns by Search engines should only return the “Most Meaningful” and the “Most Correct” Results?

Will there be a Penalty for Littering on the Web? Did I just data-pollute now?