15 ms·

The Web in 2050

333 points by darwhy 9y ago

AaronFriel 9y ago
If I know anything about the future, it doesn't look like the present. The web won't look like it does now in 2050, and neither will the internet. But it might very well be built on webassembly on browsing engines cum operating systems on top of hypervisors on top of verified microkernels, and the web will probably be delivered on top of HTTP/2 on top of TCP/UDP and so on. The layers probably won't change that much.
- the8472 9y ago
  > The layers probably won't change that much. If someone solves the multicast problem during that time span things might change radically on several layers. And even if not some immutable, content-addressed protocols might make some inroads. SRI is planting the first seeds in that direction.
  - sanxiyn 9y ago
    I had high hope for CCNx. Do you know what happened to it?
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  IPv6 is also a very safe bet.
  - hossbeast 9y ago
    But I would also bet IPv4 is still in use.
- jcelerier 9y ago
  > The web won't look like it does now in 2050, and neither will the internet. we're closer to 2050 than we were from 2017 in 1980 and yet people are still using emacs and telnet.
  - YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
    I'd venture to say that few people are using the emacs of 1980, and that telnet is mostly confined to legacy applications (not that it means the point is wholly invalid).
    - adrianN 9y ago
      Do you think that an 1980 emacs user wouldn't be comfortable in a 2017 emacs because it advanced so much, or what's your point?
- dmoney 9y ago
  It's possible now to run Linux in a web page. How long before every web page has an Linux running in it?
aaron-lebo 9y ago
If things really are so dire in...33 years, then it won't be Facebook or Google's fault, it'll be the fault of hundreds of thousands of hackers who had the technology available and did nothing because everyone knows those two are unbeatable, despite the fact that the tech gets cheaper and more accessible every single day. We've got a long way to go. They're not unbeatable. They're massive goliaths, yes, but they also bloated and slow to adapt, can't focus on any one thing, and don't have consumer loyalty. They can be beaten. Not saying they will, but they can. Side note, Halt and Catch Fire, which has always tried to be technically accurate starts focusing a lot on the early web in season 3 and 4. CERN, NeXTcubes, and related all make an appearance. It's a fun watch if you are interested in that stuff. The pilot starts with them reverse engineering an IBM PC.
- odammit 9y ago
  That show is great. Really hoping the story arc MacMillian into McAfee. That could get really entertaining.
nafey 9y ago
So guys who will you place your bets on personally I think Google will prevail over FB.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hawkice 9y ago
If you reduce the details of the story into the statement "the future of the web will be driven by anti-trust", I'd probably agree. The _present_ of the web is driven by anti-trust, and there's always more consolidation. Where machine learning, social networks, and advertising have economies of scale, a tolerable future for the web would necessarily involve diseconomies of scale. Personal connection, concierge service, local long-term engagement with communities.
- timtas 9y ago
  Throughout history, the moment anti-trust enters the picture is the exact moment the supposed monopolist begins its natural collapse.
gaius 9y ago
I remember in the late-90s portals were all the rage, everyone wanted to be the one-stop shop for all their users browsing needs.
- hnlmorg 9y ago
  Absolutely. Yahoo! used to be a particular favourite of mine. Search, email, chat and games. A great place to hang out and weirdly not that far removed from Facebook. Sure the UI has evolved quite a bit but it's similiar basic services.
  - timtas 9y ago
    For a decent chunk of time maybe 1/4 of all internet users thought AOL was the internet.
altotrees 9y ago
I like the idea of "rebooting the web". If things continue in the direction they are going now, I could see many forms of the internet existing. Just as the Darkweb exists, I could see other splinter networks and technologies taking shape as the internet we know now becomes more homogenized, whether it is because of giants like Google and Facebook or government control (oh god pls no) or any other factor. I still fondly remember looking at Nike's newest shoe offerings in 1997, waiting for the photos to download and listening to my dad complain about the phone line being tied up. I looked at my girlfriend the other day in fact, and just went "god, think of how different the internet is now compared to when we were younger. What the hell will it look like in twenty years?" She called me a nerd, but still considered the question. Exciting and sightly terrifying thought to ponder, really.
- platz 9y ago
  I'd be hard pressed to find examples in history in which they were able to go back to a time before the consolidation took effect.
- drostie 9y ago
  It's worth remembering that there is an important difference between "the Web" and "the Internet". This is the only way to understand something like when Alan Kay says, "The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." If you're less clear on what this distinction is: HTML+CSS+JS transmitted over HTTP based on domains looked up via DNS -- this is the Web. Things like email and BitTorrent and peer-to-peer networks and older things like Usenet newsgroups have always existed on the Internet parallel to the Web, to say nothing of, say, SSH and ping and other developer-friendly utilities, or newcomers like BitCoin. I've given a chunk of thought to how we might reboot the Web as a new service living on the Internet and I've come away with more questions than answers. What the Web has done extremely well is to convince a bunch of companies that they need to have a Web Server living on the thing and hosting their content. What it has done extremely poorly are these problems which maybe we don't even think about: link-rot, the fact that you can't throw a dime at a YouTube video you liked and trust that the content creator will get 8 cents and YouTube will get 2, the fact that nobody can directly advertise to you, "watch this video and we'll throw a dime at you!", the fact that you can't actually just fire up your browser and start publishing a feed of videos and articles that you like interspersed with a bunch of content you're writing -- you instead need to sign up with some social network or blogging platform and then play by their rules. The problem gets even harder when you think about systematically purging illegal content and discouraging spam and so forth -- indeed the key trait is to be able to say "I want to identify who is holding onto this content and go after them via non-technological enforcement measures" and such. One gets the impression that the Web is a very niche tradeoff in a vast configuration space and that there are many other possibilities -- but it's hard to see one that does something so fundamentally different to the Web that people will instantly be addicted, "THIS is what I want."
talyian 9y ago
The year is 2050. You are reading this comment from a compatibility layer in your open-source browser that translates HTML from the 2010s into Thought-Interface Language 3.2, which was an open standard ratified in 2045 by a global consortium of content and browser developers. Back in the 2010s, web access was peculiarly gated in a dendritic configuration as ISPs provided all the single-points-of-failure interconnections between end users (including both content providers as well as consumers) and the true "internet", a multiway resiliently-routed interconnect of servers. As we know now, extending the peer-to-peer core of the internet down to the consumer has had lasting impact, including breaking up the routing monopolies of the ISPs as well as making it possible for anyone willing to spend a few grand a year on server capacity to host a new peer-to-peer router for nearby Internet users. Many of you may not remember the origins of Google as a "search engine", a monolithic index of "every reachable page on the internet." Such a quaint idea has long since joined even further historic concepts such as Yahoo's "human-curated list of pages on the Internet". Ever since the Searchtorrent protocol was introduced and consumer searches were conducted on one of several competing distributed hash tables across the internet, no one entity has had to shoulder the responsibility of storing all the web content on the internet. This author gladly pays a small monthly fee to a local search cache provider for reliably fast localized caching of search results. The web is here to stay. Remember your history next time you visit the local Homo Sapiens preserve and give thanks to the carbon-based beings that invented the Internet.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  I think it's more likely that we'll be talking about "Guzzaline" and eating each other.
  - gm-conspiracy 9y ago
    Brawndo? It's got electrolytes.
    - neonhomer 9y ago
      It's what plants crave!
csomar 9y ago
I disagree. Cryptocurrencies have shown that the new generation (as well as the old one) can embrace new and decentralized technologies. The decentralized web is already a "successful" idea. The correct implementation for its wide use is not there yet. But it will be there. It is just a matter of time before we have a bigger "dark web", a decentralized web, decentralized payment networks, and still have Google, Facebook, and the likes. As the internet population grows, and as people move to more digital lifestyles; the people won't be limited (or gravitate) to a single portal. Instead, they'll spread over different networks/infrastructures for their different needs. Facebook can still be successful and grow while the decentralized internet happen. The Internet is growing both in number (population) and in use. People today use the Internet to surf, chat, read the news, buy stuff online, book flights and hotels, pay taxes, work, study, find partners, buy drugs, etc...
- staltz 9y ago
  The internet is growing in users (http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/) and sites (https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve...) BUT this growth means most of it goes to Google and Facebook (see case Latin America: https://www.sandvine.com/resources/global-internet-phenomena/2016/north-america-and-latin-america.html https://www.sandvine.com/resources/global-internet-phenomena... and https://blog.parse.ly/post/2855/facebook-continues-to-beat-google-in-sending-traffic-to-top-publishers/ https://blog.parse.ly/post/2855/facebook-continues-to-beat-g...). Basically the internet grew about 7% in users from 2015 to 2016, but FB/G mobile traffic share in Latin America grew 16%. It's hard to get better statistics, but the statistics we have point to indeed a FB/G domination. As for cryptocurrencies, as long as they are dependent on ISPs, they aren't actually decentralized. They're quite vulnerable, and the only way out is to not depend on ISPs or the whole wired internet to be honest. Blockstream is a good way forward. Basically, the new decentralized web must be wireless-first: http://ssb.staltz.com/view/%25a1xQAO6/UCC370Cq+HcWjEni1ziXH+k3/DVsENl73pM=.sha256 http://ssb.staltz.com/view/%25a1xQAO6/UCC370Cq+HcWjEni1ziXH+...
- mynewtb 9y ago
  Cryptocurrencies are used for financial speculation, fraud and illegal trade. With only tiny fractions of the cryptocurrency-using fraction of society using them for other purposes. I would not call that nonsense the embrace of a generation.
swiftting 9y ago
"at first joining the AMP bandwagon not realising this was the trojan horse that led to their eventual demise" Hopefully this will not be the result of AMP but interesting take nonetheless.
- eponeponepon 9y ago
  It seems reasonably clear that it's one of the motivations _behind_ AMP - the result is down to us, in the end.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Directionally, AMP does make the Google search page start to look more like the semi captive AOL interface of old. Content producers upload stuff to AOL, and pay for things like ads and "AOL keywords" to get an audience. AOL, meanwhile, controls the UI, puts whatever they want in the sidebars, has all the analytics data, etc.
shubhamjain 9y ago
The rebooted decentralised web sounds exciting, but it's hard to deny that there are large number of projects that only Google can carry out. At what point does the dominance becomes irresponsibly large and requires intervention?
- rvanmil 9y ago
  I think we've recently reached that point with AMP.
- hossbeast 9y ago
  Hmm, do you have any examples?
triangleman 9y ago
>If you’re over 50 you might just remember the birth of Google, with their famous motto ‘Do No Evil’. I love how people misremember this motto. The original slogan was "Don't be evil" which is quite different and far more subjective to start with. Now they have updated it to "Do the right thing" and you can imagine how easy it is to dance around that. But people seem to think Larry and Sergey were actually trying to be ethically meticulous. Nonsense--the slogan always had the subtle meaning of "Don't be Microsoft-level evil" and it turns out that was not an easy hurdle to clear.
- choxi 9y ago
  Facebook changed theirs in 2014 from "Move Fast and Break Things" to "Move Fast with Stable Infrastructure". It's funny how they predictably become vaguer and less controversial.
  - CGamesPlay 9y ago
    Wait, is that true? I could see the case for less controversial ("breaking things" can't be universally agreeable, right?), but it certainly seems less vague to me. Anyways, the mission was never either of those. It was "make the world more open and connected" and after the last US election changed to "bring people together".
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Funny I thought it was 'more profits for Facebook'.
      - SkyMarshal 9y ago
        '... while performing creepy psychological experiments on our users.'
        jacquesm 9y ago
        I'm glad to see other people remember that. Unbelievable they got away with that.
mdekkers 9y ago
An aging Richard Stallman throwing his towel into the ring That's when I realised this article was Fake News!
- ubertaco 9y ago
  Some prefer the more-charitable, longer-lived term "fiction".
romaniv 9y ago
If I was to bet, I would bet that in 2050 the web will be mostly replaced by some kind of VR network with a lot of sound, 3D videos and interactive objects. The web as it is already decays due to tons legacy cruft, insane complexity of doing trivial things, oceans of bad content and hyper-centralization. And all of these things are getting worse every year. VR is our best bet for a clean start.
- sebular 9y ago
  Whether or not VR becomes massively mainstream depends on whether it can become more standardized, affordable, and most importantly, whether the hardware can be miniaturized. It's clear that we have a long way to go in those departments, but 2050 is still a long time from now-- so it could be possible. But your comment isn't on topic. The article is about predicted changes in how content is owned, distributed, and made profitable. It's about the trend away from decentralization, and how that's going to hurt certain people while benefiting others. You're only thinking about the interface to the web, not the web itself: You might as well be saying, "The only way to fix the decaying internet is this new keyboard I heard is in the early stages of development!" The article's prediction is that the entire web--VR or not--is going to be controlled and owned by Google and Facebook, and because they'll have such total control over information, they'll have a dangerous and unregulated degree of control over the lives of their users Since your response is, "nah, VR is going to give us a clean start", how do you reconcile that with the fact that Google and Facebook are the two biggest players in VR right now? If anything, the way that the "VR revolution" is playing out is just reinforcing what the author is saying. If you buy an Oculus, you're strongly encouraged to connect the device with your Facebook account, and the only way to launch a VR experience with the Oculus is through a custom app store similar to Steam, complete with social media integration and all. VR's current state is looking worse than any other introduction of computer hardware in history. Could you imagine buying a monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, etc. and being forced to associate the device with a social network and app ecosystem? Welcome to your new mouse! To install, please choose from the following: [Express installation (recommended)] [Advanced] Advanced Settings (WARNING: Advanced users only) Share my mouse movements on Mousenet with: [x] Everyone [ ] Friends of friends [ ] Friends only [ ] Just myself
- 9y ago
hackertux 9y ago
>If you read this far you should probably follow me on twitter
hyperfekt 9y ago
Did I miss the mentioning of any premises that allow this dystopian masturbation? Does he mention anywhere WHY things would happen in this (very unimaginative) way?
freech 9y ago
Servers are only going to get cheaper. Programming is only going to get easier. If anything, things like search engines and social networks are going to become more competitive. If someone has a genius idea for making a better engine, he won't work for google, he'll create his own. Implicit in this fear of centralization is a kaczynskiist belief that "everything that can be invented has been invented". People predicted some company taking over everything forever, and in fact even before the web existed sci-fi-authors imagined a centralized network, were from the servers to the software everything is provided by the government. It's never going to happen.
- pascalxus 9y ago
  >Servers are only going to get cheaper. Programming is only going to get easier. If anything, things like search engines and social networks are going to become more competitive Programming skill and number of programmers is not a limiting factor to Product and social networking development. In fact, there is a vast oversupply of talent. If you look at the talent to opportunity ratio: it's enormous. Look at product hunt. Dozens of potentially brilliant projects built and released everyday and yet only a tiny tiny percentage will ever be successful. Most fail because, either they've built something that too few people find useful or the market they're trying to address is too crowded (already has too many people offering similar services).
  - freech 9y ago
    Programming getting easier doesn't just mean that fewer or less skilled programmers can build the same thing, it means that things can be build that couldn't be build before. Google wouldn't exist without C++ (as opposed to assembly language). Facebook wouldn't exist without PHP (as opposed to C++).
obiefernandez 9y ago
"Zuckerberg running for president as a Republican candidate in the United States" LOL... he would run as a Democrat, wouldn't he?
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Given that the Republican party has already shown it is vulnerable to hostile takeover by people with just money, brand recognition and no political experience my bet would be he'd run as a Republican. Keep in mind that Trump too in the past leaned Democrat but ran as a Republican.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Keep in mind that Trump too in the past leaned Democrat but ran as a Republican Trump cultivated Democratic political connections as part of being an NYC-based real estate developer, but has been on the political right (and specifically the nativist/nationalist right) for quite a long time. His first Presidential run, which was abandoned early, was in 2000 when he threw his hat in the ring for the Reform Party nomination.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      That's all true. but (and it is only a small 'but'): The Republicans are the party most friendly to big business and very wealthy people, something that Zuckerberg would surely like.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        There's a pretty good case to be made that the dominant role of the neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party makes it the party that is substantively best for big business and the super rich at the moment (when it became dominant, it's economic policies we're not far from those of the dominant faction of the Republican Party—hence the “neoliberal consensus” that used to be frequently discussed—but since then he overlapping nativist/protectivist, social conservative, and religious authoritarian factions have gained more power.)
TekMol 9y ago
If history repeats itself, then some new technology will take Google and Facebook by surprise. And let a new player rise to the top. AI is the obvious elephant in the room here. If in 10 years Apple, Amazon, Tesla or some new startup has the better AI, then this AI will search and present content better. And market it better. And monetize it better. It might also produce its own content. Perfectly customized interactive 3D surround sound content. Mayb it will be some decentralized autonomous organization that lives on a blockchain. Driven by AI, doing its thing. Outside of what a human mind can understand.
- visarga 9y ago
  It is clear to me that AI will be part of the networking stack. AI will stand at the top. Everything will be filtered, ranked and searched by an intelligent agent that runs locally, before it meets the human eyes. I don't think Siri and Google Now will be the most popular AI assistants for long. Surely a local, open source solution will be preferable.
- adrianN 9y ago
  I think the current tech giants stand a pretty good chance of staying ahead of the AI startups. They're soaking up all the PhDs and have astonishing amounts of training data to play around with.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
rst 9y ago
Relics like this exist today -- there are still Gopher servers out there. Current browsers no longer support the protocol, but you can tour the relics through a proxy -- info here: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/ http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/ The links to gopherspace itself are on the upper right ("standard version"/no-javascript); I'm honoring their request not to link to the proxy itself directly.
kolbe 9y ago
The symbolic nature of WWW leading to WW3 would be a little to much for me to handle.
niftich 9y ago
This scenario contains a lot to unpack. Let's try to extract some of the claims: 1. Most websites will get little to no traffic. 2. Consolidation will eventually result in a mere handful of verticals remaining, in the author's opinion, solely Google and Facebook. 3. At first, content framing tactics, like FB Instant Articles and Google AMP, will result in these providers obviating the need for users to navigate outbound links; instead, the content will be surfaced from within the ecosystem. 4. Content providers (i.e. "publishers") go along with the above because in truth they are desperate for revenue. Giving away content for free in exchange for the potential of display ad revenue due to high volume is seen as their only realistic hope for survival, making this a coercive relationship. 5. Some strange political speculation, but, notably, the two giants banning people and services who have presence on the other. Also, independent newspapers get bought out and absorbed. Out of this distillation of claims, #5 is complete baloney more egregious than an industrially-processed slice of knockoff Mortadella; beyond even a fanciful fantasy of how these companies work. Claims #1 through #4, on the other hand, are very astute predictions, or rather, observations, as they're already here. The long tail of websites is pretty long, and most sites indeed get very little traffic even today. One need not look further than the power of communities like HN and Reddit to slashdot all sorts of sites by overwhelming it with legitimate traffic. This brittleness and inability of some sites to scale to momentary demand, along with ISPs forbidding home servers and the risk of malicious denial-of-service means that the original way of self-hosting sites on the Web is largely dead [1], or at the very least, a risky call. This unfortunate fact means you probably want to pay someone to host your site instead. Though there are thousands upon thousands of professional hosting providers, it's a dramatically smaller number than the number of websites; so we're slowly walking up the tree of vertical consolidation. #3 is well-documented, and #4 follows naturally from the tribulations of finding business models that work on the web [2]. I stand by the view that #5 is too much of a leap; willingly excluding potential customers seems like an act of folly -- Home Depot doesn't ban anyone who shops at Lowe's, but instead they'd love to lure them away. Orthodox airlines in the US at time of writing might as well be regarded as quadrupoly: they have suspiciously similar ticket prices for most non-hub destinations, and they have semi-secret programs to offer matching frequent flier status to the topmost tier of most profitable travellers if one wants to jump ship. Nonetheless, there is in fact a real emergent phenomenon in the continued vertical consolidation of content silos. Apple -- mysteriously absent from the author's narrative -- is the exact sort of player whose excellent products, dedicated fanbase, and seeming benevolance will result in the sort of transformations that the author fears: Apple has doubled down on producing original content [3] for its captive ecosystem, following the tactics of Amazon and Netflix, but unlike them, Apple's presence does not extend horizontally to other platforms. In fact, we just had a trending article [4] which covered in-depth the different tactics companies use to achieve reach and retain customers. It's more believable to envision a future similar to what happened to major US television networks: NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and Turner; lots of mergers and intrigue, phases of ownership by movie studios, phases of ownership by seemingly unrelated enterprises that pivoted to holding companies from something else, acquisitions in efforts to form new verticals; and yet despite all this, there's still several of them. They're all deeply vertical now, but their valuations and regulatory pressure keeps them existing side-by-side. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699084 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299230 [3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/16/apple-said-to-be-spending-1-billion-on-original-content-in-2018/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/16/apple-said-to-be-spending-... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15082966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15082966
cerealbad 9y ago
the internet will go the way of the telephone network. what will replace it? a copy of all your favourite people stored on the implant in your brain. the interface will be a waking dream.
zanybear 9y ago
So... everybody starts from the premise that we will still be here in 2050....
- hossbeast 9y ago
  No, that the internet will still be here.

The Web in 2050

333 points by darwhy 9y ago

If I know anything about the future, it doesn't look like the present. The web won't look like it does now in 2050, and neither will the internet. But it might very well be built on webassembly on browsing engines cum operating systems on top of hypervisors on top of verified microkernels, and the web will probably be delivered on top of HTTP/2 on top of TCP/UDP and so on. The layers probably won't change that much.

the8472 9y ago
> The layers probably won't change that much. If someone solves the multicast problem during that time span things might change radically on several layers. And even if not some immutable, content-addressed protocols might make some inroads. SRI is planting the first seeds in that direction.
- sanxiyn 9y ago
  I had high hope for CCNx. Do you know what happened to it?
kowdermeister 9y ago
IPv6 is also a very safe bet.
- hossbeast 9y ago
  But I would also bet IPv4 is still in use.
jcelerier 9y ago
> The web won't look like it does now in 2050, and neither will the internet. we're closer to 2050 than we were from 2017 in 1980 and yet people are still using emacs and telnet.
- YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
  I'd venture to say that few people are using the emacs of 1980, and that telnet is mostly confined to legacy applications (not that it means the point is wholly invalid).
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Do you think that an 1980 emacs user wouldn't be comfortable in a 2017 emacs because it advanced so much, or what's your point?
dmoney 9y ago
It's possible now to run Linux in a web page. How long before every web page has an Linux running in it?

aaron-lebo 9y ago

If things really are so dire in...33 years, then it won't be Facebook or Google's fault, it'll be the fault of hundreds of thousands of hackers who had the technology available and did nothing because everyone knows those two are unbeatable, despite the fact that the tech gets cheaper and more accessible every single day. We've got a long way to go. They're not unbeatable. They're massive goliaths, yes, but they also bloated and slow to adapt, can't focus on any one thing, and don't have consumer loyalty. They can be beaten. Not saying they will, but they can. Side note, Halt and Catch Fire, which has always tried to be technically accurate starts focusing a lot on the early web in season 3 and 4. CERN, NeXTcubes, and related all make an appearance. It's a fun watch if you are interested in that stuff. The pilot starts with them reverse engineering an IBM PC.

odammit 9y ago
That show is great. Really hoping the story arc MacMillian into McAfee. That could get really entertaining.

nafey 9y ago

So guys who will you place your bets on personally I think Google will prevail over FB.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hawkice 9y ago

If you reduce the details of the story into the statement "the future of the web will be driven by anti-trust", I'd probably agree. The _present_ of the web is driven by anti-trust, and there's always more consolidation. Where machine learning, social networks, and advertising have economies of scale, a tolerable future for the web would necessarily involve diseconomies of scale. Personal connection, concierge service, local long-term engagement with communities.

timtas 9y ago
Throughout history, the moment anti-trust enters the picture is the exact moment the supposed monopolist begins its natural collapse.

gaius 9y ago

I remember in the late-90s portals were all the rage, everyone wanted to be the one-stop shop for all their users browsing needs.

hnlmorg 9y ago
Absolutely. Yahoo! used to be a particular favourite of mine. Search, email, chat and games. A great place to hang out and weirdly not that far removed from Facebook. Sure the UI has evolved quite a bit but it's similiar basic services.
- timtas 9y ago
  For a decent chunk of time maybe 1/4 of all internet users thought AOL was the internet.

altotrees 9y ago

I like the idea of "rebooting the web". If things continue in the direction they are going now, I could see many forms of the internet existing. Just as the Darkweb exists, I could see other splinter networks and technologies taking shape as the internet we know now becomes more homogenized, whether it is because of giants like Google and Facebook or government control (oh god pls no) or any other factor. I still fondly remember looking at Nike's newest shoe offerings in 1997, waiting for the photos to download and listening to my dad complain about the phone line being tied up. I looked at my girlfriend the other day in fact, and just went "god, think of how different the internet is now compared to when we were younger. What the hell will it look like in twenty years?" She called me a nerd, but still considered the question. Exciting and sightly terrifying thought to ponder, really.

platz 9y ago
I'd be hard pressed to find examples in history in which they were able to go back to a time before the consolidation took effect.
drostie 9y ago
It's worth remembering that there is an important difference between "the Web" and "the Internet". This is the only way to understand something like when Alan Kay says, "The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." If you're less clear on what this distinction is: HTML+CSS+JS transmitted over HTTP based on domains looked up via DNS -- this is the Web. Things like email and BitTorrent and peer-to-peer networks and older things like Usenet newsgroups have always existed on the Internet parallel to the Web, to say nothing of, say, SSH and ping and other developer-friendly utilities, or newcomers like BitCoin. I've given a chunk of thought to how we might reboot the Web as a new service living on the Internet and I've come away with more questions than answers. What the Web has done extremely well is to convince a bunch of companies that they need to have a Web Server living on the thing and hosting their content. What it has done extremely poorly are these problems which maybe we don't even think about: link-rot, the fact that you can't throw a dime at a YouTube video you liked and trust that the content creator will get 8 cents and YouTube will get 2, the fact that nobody can directly advertise to you, "watch this video and we'll throw a dime at you!", the fact that you can't actually just fire up your browser and start publishing a feed of videos and articles that you like interspersed with a bunch of content you're writing -- you instead need to sign up with some social network or blogging platform and then play by their rules. The problem gets even harder when you think about systematically purging illegal content and discouraging spam and so forth -- indeed the key trait is to be able to say "I want to identify who is holding onto this content and go after them via non-technological enforcement measures" and such. One gets the impression that the Web is a very niche tradeoff in a vast configuration space and that there are many other possibilities -- but it's hard to see one that does something so fundamentally different to the Web that people will instantly be addicted, "THIS is what I want."

talyian 9y ago

The year is 2050. You are reading this comment from a compatibility layer in your open-source browser that translates HTML from the 2010s into Thought-Interface Language 3.2, which was an open standard ratified in 2045 by a global consortium of content and browser developers. Back in the 2010s, web access was peculiarly gated in a dendritic configuration as ISPs provided all the single-points-of-failure interconnections between end users (including both content providers as well as consumers) and the true "internet", a multiway resiliently-routed interconnect of servers. As we know now, extending the peer-to-peer core of the internet down to the consumer has had lasting impact, including breaking up the routing monopolies of the ISPs as well as making it possible for anyone willing to spend a few grand a year on server capacity to host a new peer-to-peer router for nearby Internet users. Many of you may not remember the origins of Google as a "search engine", a monolithic index of "every reachable page on the internet." Such a quaint idea has long since joined even further historic concepts such as Yahoo's "human-curated list of pages on the Internet". Ever since the Searchtorrent protocol was introduced and consumer searches were conducted on one of several competing distributed hash tables across the internet, no one entity has had to shoulder the responsibility of storing all the web content on the internet. This author gladly pays a small monthly fee to a local search cache provider for reliably fast localized caching of search results. The web is here to stay. Remember your history next time you visit the local Homo Sapiens preserve and give thanks to the carbon-based beings that invented the Internet.

QAPereo 9y ago
I think it's more likely that we'll be talking about "Guzzaline" and eating each other.
- gm-conspiracy 9y ago
  Brawndo? It's got electrolytes.
  - neonhomer 9y ago
    It's what plants crave!

csomar 9y ago

I disagree. Cryptocurrencies have shown that the new generation (as well as the old one) can embrace new and decentralized technologies. The decentralized web is already a "successful" idea. The correct implementation for its wide use is not there yet. But it will be there. It is just a matter of time before we have a bigger "dark web", a decentralized web, decentralized payment networks, and still have Google, Facebook, and the likes. As the internet population grows, and as people move to more digital lifestyles; the people won't be limited (or gravitate) to a single portal. Instead, they'll spread over different networks/infrastructures for their different needs. Facebook can still be successful and grow while the decentralized internet happen. The Internet is growing both in number (population) and in use. People today use the Internet to surf, chat, read the news, buy stuff online, book flights and hotels, pay taxes, work, study, find partners, buy drugs, etc...

staltz 9y ago
The internet is growing in users (http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/) and sites (https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve...) BUT this growth means most of it goes to Google and Facebook (see case Latin America: https://www.sandvine.com/resources/global-internet-phenomena/2016/north-america-and-latin-america.html https://www.sandvine.com/resources/global-internet-phenomena... and https://blog.parse.ly/post/2855/facebook-continues-to-beat-google-in-sending-traffic-to-top-publishers/ https://blog.parse.ly/post/2855/facebook-continues-to-beat-g...). Basically the internet grew about 7% in users from 2015 to 2016, but FB/G mobile traffic share in Latin America grew 16%. It's hard to get better statistics, but the statistics we have point to indeed a FB/G domination. As for cryptocurrencies, as long as they are dependent on ISPs, they aren't actually decentralized. They're quite vulnerable, and the only way out is to not depend on ISPs or the whole wired internet to be honest. Blockstream is a good way forward. Basically, the new decentralized web must be wireless-first: http://ssb.staltz.com/view/%25a1xQAO6/UCC370Cq+HcWjEni1ziXH+k3/DVsENl73pM=.sha256 http://ssb.staltz.com/view/%25a1xQAO6/UCC370Cq+HcWjEni1ziXH+...
mynewtb 9y ago
Cryptocurrencies are used for financial speculation, fraud and illegal trade. With only tiny fractions of the cryptocurrency-using fraction of society using them for other purposes. I would not call that nonsense the embrace of a generation.

swiftting 9y ago

"at first joining the AMP bandwagon not realising this was the trojan horse that led to their eventual demise" Hopefully this will not be the result of AMP but interesting take nonetheless.

eponeponepon 9y ago
It seems reasonably clear that it's one of the motivations _behind_ AMP - the result is down to us, in the end.
tyingq 9y ago
Directionally, AMP does make the Google search page start to look more like the semi captive AOL interface of old. Content producers upload stuff to AOL, and pay for things like ads and "AOL keywords" to get an audience. AOL, meanwhile, controls the UI, puts whatever they want in the sidebars, has all the analytics data, etc.

shubhamjain 9y ago

The rebooted decentralised web sounds exciting, but it's hard to deny that there are large number of projects that only Google can carry out. At what point does the dominance becomes irresponsibly large and requires intervention?

rvanmil 9y ago
I think we've recently reached that point with AMP.
hossbeast 9y ago
Hmm, do you have any examples?

triangleman 9y ago

>If you’re over 50 you might just remember the birth of Google, with their famous motto ‘Do No Evil’. I love how people misremember this motto. The original slogan was "Don't be evil" which is quite different and far more subjective to start with. Now they have updated it to "Do the right thing" and you can imagine how easy it is to dance around that. But people seem to think Larry and Sergey were actually trying to be ethically meticulous. Nonsense--the slogan always had the subtle meaning of "Don't be Microsoft-level evil" and it turns out that was not an easy hurdle to clear.

choxi 9y ago
Facebook changed theirs in 2014 from "Move Fast and Break Things" to "Move Fast with Stable Infrastructure". It's funny how they predictably become vaguer and less controversial.
- CGamesPlay 9y ago
  Wait, is that true? I could see the case for less controversial ("breaking things" can't be universally agreeable, right?), but it certainly seems less vague to me. Anyways, the mission was never either of those. It was "make the world more open and connected" and after the last US election changed to "bring people together".
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Funny I thought it was 'more profits for Facebook'.
    - SkyMarshal 9y ago
      '... while performing creepy psychological experiments on our users.'
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        I'm glad to see other people remember that. Unbelievable they got away with that.

mdekkers 9y ago

An aging Richard Stallman throwing his towel into the ring That's when I realised this article was Fake News!

ubertaco 9y ago
Some prefer the more-charitable, longer-lived term "fiction".

romaniv 9y ago

If I was to bet, I would bet that in 2050 the web will be mostly replaced by some kind of VR network with a lot of sound, 3D videos and interactive objects. The web as it is already decays due to tons legacy cruft, insane complexity of doing trivial things, oceans of bad content and hyper-centralization. And all of these things are getting worse every year. VR is our best bet for a clean start.

sebular 9y ago
Whether or not VR becomes massively mainstream depends on whether it can become more standardized, affordable, and most importantly, whether the hardware can be miniaturized. It's clear that we have a long way to go in those departments, but 2050 is still a long time from now-- so it could be possible. But your comment isn't on topic. The article is about predicted changes in how content is owned, distributed, and made profitable. It's about the trend away from decentralization, and how that's going to hurt certain people while benefiting others. You're only thinking about the interface to the web, not the web itself: You might as well be saying, "The only way to fix the decaying internet is this new keyboard I heard is in the early stages of development!" The article's prediction is that the entire web--VR or not--is going to be controlled and owned by Google and Facebook, and because they'll have such total control over information, they'll have a dangerous and unregulated degree of control over the lives of their users Since your response is, "nah, VR is going to give us a clean start", how do you reconcile that with the fact that Google and Facebook are the two biggest players in VR right now? If anything, the way that the "VR revolution" is playing out is just reinforcing what the author is saying. If you buy an Oculus, you're strongly encouraged to connect the device with your Facebook account, and the only way to launch a VR experience with the Oculus is through a custom app store similar to Steam, complete with social media integration and all. VR's current state is looking worse than any other introduction of computer hardware in history. Could you imagine buying a monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, etc. and being forced to associate the device with a social network and app ecosystem? Welcome to your new mouse! To install, please choose from the following: [Express installation (recommended)] [Advanced] Advanced Settings (WARNING: Advanced users only) Share my mouse movements on Mousenet with: [x] Everyone [ ] Friends of friends [ ] Friends only [ ] Just myself
9y ago

hackertux 9y ago

>If you read this far you should probably follow me on twitter

hyperfekt 9y ago

Did I miss the mentioning of any premises that allow this dystopian masturbation? Does he mention anywhere WHY things would happen in this (very unimaginative) way?

freech 9y ago

Servers are only going to get cheaper. Programming is only going to get easier. If anything, things like search engines and social networks are going to become more competitive. If someone has a genius idea for making a better engine, he won't work for google, he'll create his own. Implicit in this fear of centralization is a kaczynskiist belief that "everything that can be invented has been invented". People predicted some company taking over everything forever, and in fact even before the web existed sci-fi-authors imagined a centralized network, were from the servers to the software everything is provided by the government. It's never going to happen.

pascalxus 9y ago
>Servers are only going to get cheaper. Programming is only going to get easier. If anything, things like search engines and social networks are going to become more competitive Programming skill and number of programmers is not a limiting factor to Product and social networking development. In fact, there is a vast oversupply of talent. If you look at the talent to opportunity ratio: it's enormous. Look at product hunt. Dozens of potentially brilliant projects built and released everyday and yet only a tiny tiny percentage will ever be successful. Most fail because, either they've built something that too few people find useful or the market they're trying to address is too crowded (already has too many people offering similar services).
- freech 9y ago
  Programming getting easier doesn't just mean that fewer or less skilled programmers can build the same thing, it means that things can be build that couldn't be build before. Google wouldn't exist without C++ (as opposed to assembly language). Facebook wouldn't exist without PHP (as opposed to C++).

obiefernandez 9y ago

"Zuckerberg running for president as a Republican candidate in the United States" LOL... he would run as a Democrat, wouldn't he?

jacquesm 9y ago
Given that the Republican party has already shown it is vulnerable to hostile takeover by people with just money, brand recognition and no political experience my bet would be he'd run as a Republican. Keep in mind that Trump too in the past leaned Democrat but ran as a Republican.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Keep in mind that Trump too in the past leaned Democrat but ran as a Republican Trump cultivated Democratic political connections as part of being an NYC-based real estate developer, but has been on the political right (and specifically the nativist/nationalist right) for quite a long time. His first Presidential run, which was abandoned early, was in 2000 when he threw his hat in the ring for the Reform Party nomination.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    That's all true. but (and it is only a small 'but'): The Republicans are the party most friendly to big business and very wealthy people, something that Zuckerberg would surely like.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      There's a pretty good case to be made that the dominant role of the neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party makes it the party that is substantively best for big business and the super rich at the moment (when it became dominant, it's economic policies we're not far from those of the dominant faction of the Republican Party—hence the “neoliberal consensus” that used to be frequently discussed—but since then he overlapping nativist/protectivist, social conservative, and religious authoritarian factions have gained more power.)

TekMol 9y ago

If history repeats itself, then some new technology will take Google and Facebook by surprise. And let a new player rise to the top. AI is the obvious elephant in the room here. If in 10 years Apple, Amazon, Tesla or some new startup has the better AI, then this AI will search and present content better. And market it better. And monetize it better. It might also produce its own content. Perfectly customized interactive 3D surround sound content. Mayb it will be some decentralized autonomous organization that lives on a blockchain. Driven by AI, doing its thing. Outside of what a human mind can understand.

visarga 9y ago
It is clear to me that AI will be part of the networking stack. AI will stand at the top. Everything will be filtered, ranked and searched by an intelligent agent that runs locally, before it meets the human eyes. I don't think Siri and Google Now will be the most popular AI assistants for long. Surely a local, open source solution will be preferable.
adrianN 9y ago
I think the current tech giants stand a pretty good chance of staying ahead of the AI startups. They're soaking up all the PhDs and have astonishing amounts of training data to play around with.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

rst 9y ago

Relics like this exist today -- there are still Gopher servers out there. Current browsers no longer support the protocol, but you can tour the relics through a proxy -- info here: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/ http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/ The links to gopherspace itself are on the upper right ("standard version"/no-javascript); I'm honoring their request not to link to the proxy itself directly.

kolbe 9y ago

The symbolic nature of WWW leading to WW3 would be a little to much for me to handle.

niftich 9y ago

This scenario contains a lot to unpack. Let's try to extract some of the claims: 1. Most websites will get little to no traffic. 2. Consolidation will eventually result in a mere handful of verticals remaining, in the author's opinion, solely Google and Facebook. 3. At first, content framing tactics, like FB Instant Articles and Google AMP, will result in these providers obviating the need for users to navigate outbound links; instead, the content will be surfaced from within the ecosystem. 4. Content providers (i.e. "publishers") go along with the above because in truth they are desperate for revenue. Giving away content for free in exchange for the potential of display ad revenue due to high volume is seen as their only realistic hope for survival, making this a coercive relationship. 5. Some strange political speculation, but, notably, the two giants banning people and services who have presence on the other. Also, independent newspapers get bought out and absorbed. Out of this distillation of claims, #5 is complete baloney more egregious than an industrially-processed slice of knockoff Mortadella; beyond even a fanciful fantasy of how these companies work. Claims #1 through #4, on the other hand, are very astute predictions, or rather, observations, as they're already here. The long tail of websites is pretty long, and most sites indeed get very little traffic even today. One need not look further than the power of communities like HN and Reddit to slashdot all sorts of sites by overwhelming it with legitimate traffic. This brittleness and inability of some sites to scale to momentary demand, along with ISPs forbidding home servers and the risk of malicious denial-of-service means that the original way of self-hosting sites on the Web is largely dead [1], or at the very least, a risky call. This unfortunate fact means you probably want to pay someone to host your site instead. Though there are thousands upon thousands of professional hosting providers, it's a dramatically smaller number than the number of websites; so we're slowly walking up the tree of vertical consolidation. #3 is well-documented, and #4 follows naturally from the tribulations of finding business models that work on the web [2]. I stand by the view that #5 is too much of a leap; willingly excluding potential customers seems like an act of folly -- Home Depot doesn't ban anyone who shops at Lowe's, but instead they'd love to lure them away. Orthodox airlines in the US at time of writing might as well be regarded as quadrupoly: they have suspiciously similar ticket prices for most non-hub destinations, and they have semi-secret programs to offer matching frequent flier status to the topmost tier of most profitable travellers if one wants to jump ship. Nonetheless, there is in fact a real emergent phenomenon in the continued vertical consolidation of content silos. Apple -- mysteriously absent from the author's narrative -- is the exact sort of player whose excellent products, dedicated fanbase, and seeming benevolance will result in the sort of transformations that the author fears: Apple has doubled down on producing original content [3] for its captive ecosystem, following the tactics of Amazon and Netflix, but unlike them, Apple's presence does not extend horizontally to other platforms. In fact, we just had a trending article [4] which covered in-depth the different tactics companies use to achieve reach and retain customers. It's more believable to envision a future similar to what happened to major US television networks: NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and Turner; lots of mergers and intrigue, phases of ownership by movie studios, phases of ownership by seemingly unrelated enterprises that pivoted to holding companies from something else, acquisitions in efforts to form new verticals; and yet despite all this, there's still several of them. They're all deeply vertical now, but their valuations and regulatory pressure keeps them existing side-by-side. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699084 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299230 [3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/16/apple-said-to-be-spending-1-billion-on-original-content-in-2018/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/16/apple-said-to-be-spending-... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15082966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15082966

cerealbad 9y ago

the internet will go the way of the telephone network. what will replace it? a copy of all your favourite people stored on the implant in your brain. the interface will be a waking dream.

zanybear 9y ago

So... everybody starts from the premise that we will still be here in 2050....

hossbeast 9y ago
No, that the internet will still be here.