Garbage

There was a small story published on the BBC website yesterday that made me laugh a little:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7986483.stm

Whilst its an innocent mistake and something not within the control of the foreign office, it does bring up some points and questions about the management of the internet over a long period of time.

As with real life, companies come and go and domain names will change hands. If your website has a company directory on it or contains a large number of links to other places it will become obsolete over a period of time and its prudent to have some kind of process for periodically checking that all the links you were using are to the things and companies you think they link to. If the foreign office had had this in place, they may have spotted this before the BBC did.

The bigger picture here is probably to do with garbage on the internet. There must be trillions of bits of data that are being stored and deposited around the internet that have little or no relevancy or are not required or in use. We pay for garbage collection in the real world so should we pay for garbage removal in the virtual one? Would we be more considerate about what we commit to the internet if we knew we would be charged to remove it?

I'm not suggesting that the internet is in any way clogged up but it does occur to me that some form of garbage removal protocol should be established so that users and consumers of the internet get the best possible services from the network and that companies and organisations are more thoughtful about what is sent into cyberspace.