The internet is a system of requests
What corporate and finance professionals actually need to understand.
The idea
The internet is not a place. It is a system where computers ask other computers to do things. What a user experiences as one page is actually a chain of transactions.
It is physical, not a cloud
Fiber, undersea cables, towers, and data centers. "The cloud" is just infrastructure someone else operates. Digital businesses still carry capacity limits, energy costs, geographic exposure, and points of failure.
The unit of activity is a request
A device asks; a system responds; the exchange generates records: time, location, device, account, network. Businesses turn those records into metrics: visits, users, impressions, conversions, revenue.
The metric is not the event
A page-view is not a person reading. An impression is not a person seeing. The metric is a record a system created; whether it represents human activity is a separate question.
The numbers are not neutral
Business models shape what gets measured, and figures are often produced by the same suppliers whose pay depends on them being high. In finance you would never accept that without controls.
People are not the only users
Automation has always been present and is often useful. The problem begins when human and automated activity sit in the same dataset without reliable classification.
First principle
Never confuse a recorded event with a verified human action.