It's hyped as a hive of innovation, where celebrities, companies and brands trend or tank, but this view of the internet is fast becoming outdated.
The World Wide Web now resembles a series of "walled gardens" run by embedded brands such as Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook, which have been busy attaching their online platforms and services to smartphones and tablets; this year has seen the arrival of Amazon's Fire Phone and Fire TV, the Apple Watch and a bevy of fitness devices governed by Google's Android Wear operating system.
Facebook might not have any hardware, but it's busy expanding into fast-developing areas of the world, and buying up apps; it now owns WhatsApp, which just about every Hongkonger uses, for example.
Competing with the big tech brands is now virtually impossible, but it wasn't always like this.
Remember Napster? The pioneering peer-to-peer file-sharing application that popularised the easily transferrable and ubiquitous MP3 file format, Napster only existed in its original form for a couple of years. From 1999 until 2001, its 24 million users downloaded and uploaded music from and to each other to such an extent that it dominated web traffic and changed perceptions of what the internet could do.
After several lawsuits filed by bands, artists and record companies, it was shut down by court order for violating copyright, but its existence shocked the music industry into eventually accepting the internet and remodelling itself.
What's it up to now? It's not the same company, but the Napster brand was reborn as Napster 2.0, a legal music subscription service, and also used to sell MP3 players.