Picking 1997 as a start date is interesting because that's when ISP's had started serving Internet access to general public in Turkey. The state had subsidized this by waiving phone-call costs when dialing an ISP. That had caused sudden increase in Internet's popularity. I remember staying online until morning chatting on IRC, downloading stuff, browsing the web, playing MUD. Great times.
I read the title as an epitaph.
Peacock Maps published a poster titled "The Whole Internet" with data collected in 1999. I think they had a second one in the early 2000s. This was the best I could find: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3...
I helped start a pretty big ISP in 1994 (2nd biggest in America for a while), and it was a wild and woolly time.
Our first week of operation, signing up users at a rate of 1000 - 2000 a day, I decided to check in on the servers I'd spent days getting ready for launch - USENET, DNS, Email, etc. Just for grins (because those were woolly days), I launched a network scope to see what the traffic was all about .. my naive enthusiasm for this "new era of knowledge and access to information" literally leaking out of my eyeballs .. only to discover, 90% of the traffic that our over-heating modem banks and under-provisioned 56k T-1 line, was all .. porn.
That was my first big reality adjustment with the Internet, and the beginning of my disinterest in the subject, as a commercial activity. I just didn't feel like it was worth it to do all that fuss and nonsense, only so that 90% of the traffic was boobs.
Well, I left that scene. If I'd stayed, I'd have raked in the cash, at least 3-figure millions (the guy I started it all with made something along those figures) .. but I definitely am glad I didn't have to spend years, afterwards, scaling to masturbation.
I know, I know, there's nothing wrong with it and we need to grant people the respect to exercise their rights (and lefts) whichever way they want. I just didn't personally want to be involved, and left to do other more productive things, like start one of Californias very first full-service web development agencies, and get Prime Sports Network their first live-sports event streaming on the Internet happening ..
The title made me think it's a type of eulogy to the pre-AI, pre-ChatGPT Internet, but I was pleasantly surprised by pretty colours instead!
(2021) Really needs an update, as IPv6 in China picks up.
Also, can this data collection see enough of internal China traffic?
Internet in 1997. That is when the web was small enough that you did not need Google, you just used a 1200 page "internet yellow pages" book [1]
Around that time the book form became untennable so they started switching to CDROM versions [2]
[1] https://archive.org/details/luckmansworldwid0000unse_1997ed/... [2] https://archive.org/details/new-riders-www-yellow-pages-1997