Does the Snapchat Generation Even Know What Yahoo Is?

The $4.8-billion acquisition of Yahoo—the brand and its Internet properties—by a telephone company, Verizon, is a watershed moment in the history of the Internet. It caps off an era—Web 1.0, for lack of a better term—that will soon be remembered much like telegraphs and rotary phones. Like Verizon’s similar purchase, last year, of another ancient bauble, the once ubiquitous dial-up service AOL, the acquisition of Yahoo speaks mainly to the past. Tomorrow’s Internet users don’t dream of using Yahoo’s properties any more than they do AOL’s. Instead, they lavish their attention on Instagram and Snapchat, Musical.ly and Spotify. And software continues to move in directions far removed from the early Web, as new voice-based interfaces, on devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home, train us to think about the Internet beyond browsers and smartphones.

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