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What centralization? The web isn't centralized. Consumer culture is centralized. Consumer culture on the web is what's failing. Facebook and Google and similar

What centralization? The web isn't centralized. Consumer culture is centralized. Consumer culture on the web is what's failing. Facebook and Google and similar services are not "The Web" and they are not "The Internet" and the people who can't exist outside of those bubbles will burn down with them, so what? The internet will survive it, the web will survive it. These things happen in nature all the time, it's interesting to see it happens online, a non-natural man-built ecosystem, as well.

kerkeslager 9y ago
If net neutrality dies, the web absolutely becomes centralized. Facebook and Google aren't the web, but they will be the web if they're the only ones that can pay to have their data passed over the wire.
- chasote 9y ago
  I'm in full support of net neutrality (as it seems everyone but the telecom companies is yet here we are, but I digress) but I like to think if this "doomsday" scenario were to happen then the outcry would finally be swift and effective in tearing that down for good. People won't accept it because they have already experienced what the open web can be.
- twblalock 9y ago
  Net neutrality would be nice to have, but the way it's been overhyped is silly. The internet developed without it. We've never really had it -- people like to cite a few years before the recent FCC decision as a period of net neutrality, but it had so few effects that the average consumer did not notice it being implemented and did not notice it going away. It certainly didn't prevent anything Google or Facebook wanted to do. If you're worried about centralization, net neutrality won't help much. Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality.
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    > Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality. "crowd out" is a vague term. Maybe they make the most money, but money isn't the only thing that matters. The forums I frequent and the DuckDuckGo are doing just fine, but I'm not sure they would be if net neutrality falls apart completely.
  - 9889095r3jh 9y ago
    >The internet developed without it. We've never really had it We did have it. Defacto net neutrality, enforced by a competetive ISP market. It worked. And once we started to lose that, consumers absolutely did feel the impact. Remember when Comcast throttled bit torrent? >If you're worried about centralization, net neutrality won't help much. Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality. Sure, they can still dominate under net neutrality. It's just significantly easier without it.
    - juliangoldsmith 9y ago
      The Net Neutrality law that was pushed recently did nothing for actual net neutrality, which was already preserved by existing legislation. Also, if these laws were so obviously needed, why did they need to shovel $196M toward promoting them [0]? 0: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/soros-ford-foundation-shovel-196-million-to-net-neutrality-groups-staff-to-white-house/article/2560702 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/soros-ford-foundation-sho...
  - simonh 9y ago
    >...a few years before the recent FCC decision as a period of net neutrality, but it had so few effects that the average consumer did not notice it being implemented. The whole point of net neutrality is that you shouldn't notice it, because you should just be able to use your network connection for whatever you want. In 2005 a Republican appointed FCC commissioner under a Republican president ordered an ISP to stop blocking VOIP services on their network. This is a real thing that happened and I think plenty of people have noticed how useful VOIP and related services like Skype, Facetime, Hangouts, Discord are even if they aren't aware that the ability to use them has only been enabled by regulatory intervention.
wetpaws 9y ago
If we would think in terms of regular, non tech-savvy consumers, it is true, they are pretty much synonyms of the internet. Google is especially ubiquitous in this regard and reminds me a Microsoft in pre-firefox age. If we think of it, the amount of lockdown to google is scary - it's browser, search, mail, navigation, advertisement, all photos and documents and now with AMP to a certain degree the web content itself.
- mseebach 9y ago
  If you ask them to describe the world with their own vocabularies, then yes, those things are "the internet". But if you take away the rest of the internet, these users will absolutely notice, even if they might struggle to correctly articulate what happened.
mindslight 9y ago
"The Web" is commonly understood to be HTTP on top of DNS. These are centralized protocols, in that each resource name entirely depends on a single entity to serve/steward that resource.
- paxy 9y ago
  HTTP on top of TCP, with DNS (also on TCP/UDP) used for resolving domain names.
  - mindslight 9y ago
    TCP isn't involved in naming; HTTP and DNS (or worse, IP) are.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      All they were saying is that TCP and UDP are the transport protocols that DNS uses, not that they're directly involved in name resolution.
tambourine_man 9y ago
An ecosystem needs to reach a minimum threshold to thrive. I don’t know if a web without both companies would meet that requirement.
prophesi 9y ago
We're basically opposed to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet We have "too-big-to-fail" companies running all of the services that most sites and users depend on, which they can shut down at any time with little-to-no repercussions (Google in particular is notorious for this). We've got governments erecting their own firewalls to shut down opposing views. We've got ads, trackers, and biased algorithms that help ensure you stumble upon their sponsored content. Of course this sort of stuff should arise "naturally" by man, but we can do better.
- originalsimba 9y ago
  There's no such thing as "Too Big To Fail" on the internet. There was a period of time during the earlier days when infrastructure was centralized but those days are behind us I've read, and if one major backbone provider were to fail the system could adapt. SaaS providers like Google and Facebook don't matter at all. Their importance has been exaggerated to epic proportions. If Google/Alphabet were to fail tomorrow the Internet would barely notice outside of social conversation. It'd be a curiosity, but the system would adapt. "Some People" might be without E-mail for a few hours, and a lot of E-mail providers would see surges in sales. We can help encourage the survivability by teaching new users of alternatives for search, blogging, following friends and so on.
  - electricEmu 9y ago
    I didn't think banks could be too big to fail. Where exactly would handle, say, just the email? American legislatures would pass their first bipartisan business legislation by the day's end. You can teach all you want to, but the PHB's with the money and power will overrule any moral high ground you're sitting on.
    - originalsimba 9y ago
      "Where exactly would handle, say, just the email?" Don't take personal offense, the idea that you need some corporation to handle your E-mail is an ignorance, one that's reinforced by those very corporations' marketing departments. I've been operating my own E-mail servers for two different domains for pennies per day for years now. It's cheap, it's (relatively) easy, and it's _better_ when you control it yourself. If Gmail were to fail, it would be one of the best things to happen to the world economy.
JKCalhoun 9y ago
If consumer use of the web focuses on a handful of sites, then, effectively, the web is centralized. At least with regard to the article. How to improve/fix? Some random thoughts I have had of late: • Disallow comments on YouTube. What honestly would we lose? • Users can delete their Facebook accounts (I did)
23443463453 9y ago
What centralization? Go start your own social media company and report back on your success going up against F, T, G that have all but not even captured the user base, but also burrowed into society and news and information organizations where they are operating exactly like a totalitarian regime that abuses it's absolute power for control and censorship.
dalbasal 9y ago
The internet is communication technology, and communication technology is network-effect-heavy. The value of "The Web" and "The Internet" is more than proportional to the number of people using it. Email is useful only when the person you are messaging has email. So... If much of the web (by usage) exists on Facebook, much of its value exists on Facebook. That value is under Facebook's control, logorithmically to scale.
- indigochill 9y ago
  >much of its value exists on Facebook This depends on how you define value. If you're talking about advertising revenue, then yes (and bizarrely other services let you authenticate through them, which I still don't understand). But if you're talking about the exchange of practical information, then Facebook's pretty meager and sites with technical documentation or Q&A are much better (for software developers, anyway). I don't believe network effect is one-size-fits-all. Facebook is fine for keeping up with casual acquaintances. But if you want to find a local group with shared interests, then you may have better luck on Meetup. Or if you want to share Q&A with other developers, Stack Overflow is probably better. Each one has its own domain within which it's king.
  - originalsimba 9y ago
    I've found a lot of technical documentation on people's personal blogs. Some bit of code they wrote or some problem they solved. We can socially encourage this kind of approach.
    - indigochill 9y ago
      Yep, that's great too. There is a challenge there, which is finding that information on personal blogs in the first place. That's been solved with search engines so far. I'm curious if a more distributed, network-oriented approach might work. Basically the Bacon number applied to information.
- originalsimba 9y ago
  If people have a means to extract their Facebook posts and publish their content on their own blogs, then that value isn't really under Facebook control. It's a symbiotic relationship, and it's a safe bet that if Facebook were to make the wrong moves, the users would simply leave. Indeed that's been happening in recent months over privacy concerns and other things.
ForHackernews 9y ago
That's not true. Large percentages of websites run on AWS hardware and a small number of big CDN providers. It is centralized.

kerkeslager 9y ago

If net neutrality dies, the web absolutely becomes centralized. Facebook and Google aren't the web, but they will be the web if they're the only ones that can pay to have their data passed over the wire.

chasote 9y ago
I'm in full support of net neutrality (as it seems everyone but the telecom companies is yet here we are, but I digress) but I like to think if this "doomsday" scenario were to happen then the outcry would finally be swift and effective in tearing that down for good. People won't accept it because they have already experienced what the open web can be.
twblalock 9y ago
Net neutrality would be nice to have, but the way it's been overhyped is silly. The internet developed without it. We've never really had it -- people like to cite a few years before the recent FCC decision as a period of net neutrality, but it had so few effects that the average consumer did not notice it being implemented and did not notice it going away. It certainly didn't prevent anything Google or Facebook wanted to do. If you're worried about centralization, net neutrality won't help much. Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  > Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality. "crowd out" is a vague term. Maybe they make the most money, but money isn't the only thing that matters. The forums I frequent and the DuckDuckGo are doing just fine, but I'm not sure they would be if net neutrality falls apart completely.
- 9889095r3jh 9y ago
  >The internet developed without it. We've never really had it We did have it. Defacto net neutrality, enforced by a competetive ISP market. It worked. And once we started to lose that, consumers absolutely did feel the impact. Remember when Comcast throttled bit torrent? >If you're worried about centralization, net neutrality won't help much. Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality. Sure, they can still dominate under net neutrality. It's just significantly easier without it.
  - juliangoldsmith 9y ago
    The Net Neutrality law that was pushed recently did nothing for actual net neutrality, which was already preserved by existing legislation. Also, if these laws were so obviously needed, why did they need to shovel $196M toward promoting them [0]? 0: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/soros-ford-foundation-shovel-196-million-to-net-neutrality-groups-staff-to-white-house/article/2560702 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/soros-ford-foundation-sho...
- simonh 9y ago
  >...a few years before the recent FCC decision as a period of net neutrality, but it had so few effects that the average consumer did not notice it being implemented. The whole point of net neutrality is that you shouldn't notice it, because you should just be able to use your network connection for whatever you want. In 2005 a Republican appointed FCC commissioner under a Republican president ordered an ISP to stop blocking VOIP services on their network. This is a real thing that happened and I think plenty of people have noticed how useful VOIP and related services like Skype, Facetime, Hangouts, Discord are even if they aren't aware that the ability to use them has only been enabled by regulatory intervention.

wetpaws 9y ago

If we would think in terms of regular, non tech-savvy consumers, it is true, they are pretty much synonyms of the internet. Google is especially ubiquitous in this regard and reminds me a Microsoft in pre-firefox age. If we think of it, the amount of lockdown to google is scary - it's browser, search, mail, navigation, advertisement, all photos and documents and now with AMP to a certain degree the web content itself.

mseebach 9y ago
If you ask them to describe the world with their own vocabularies, then yes, those things are "the internet". But if you take away the rest of the internet, these users will absolutely notice, even if they might struggle to correctly articulate what happened.

mindslight 9y ago

"The Web" is commonly understood to be HTTP on top of DNS. These are centralized protocols, in that each resource name entirely depends on a single entity to serve/steward that resource.

paxy 9y ago
HTTP on top of TCP, with DNS (also on TCP/UDP) used for resolving domain names.
- mindslight 9y ago
  TCP isn't involved in naming; HTTP and DNS (or worse, IP) are.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    All they were saying is that TCP and UDP are the transport protocols that DNS uses, not that they're directly involved in name resolution.

tambourine_man 9y ago

An ecosystem needs to reach a minimum threshold to thrive. I don’t know if a web without both companies would meet that requirement.

prophesi 9y ago

We're basically opposed to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet We have "too-big-to-fail" companies running all of the services that most sites and users depend on, which they can shut down at any time with little-to-no repercussions (Google in particular is notorious for this). We've got governments erecting their own firewalls to shut down opposing views. We've got ads, trackers, and biased algorithms that help ensure you stumble upon their sponsored content. Of course this sort of stuff should arise "naturally" by man, but we can do better.

originalsimba 9y ago
There's no such thing as "Too Big To Fail" on the internet. There was a period of time during the earlier days when infrastructure was centralized but those days are behind us I've read, and if one major backbone provider were to fail the system could adapt. SaaS providers like Google and Facebook don't matter at all. Their importance has been exaggerated to epic proportions. If Google/Alphabet were to fail tomorrow the Internet would barely notice outside of social conversation. It'd be a curiosity, but the system would adapt. "Some People" might be without E-mail for a few hours, and a lot of E-mail providers would see surges in sales. We can help encourage the survivability by teaching new users of alternatives for search, blogging, following friends and so on.
- electricEmu 9y ago
  I didn't think banks could be too big to fail. Where exactly would handle, say, just the email? American legislatures would pass their first bipartisan business legislation by the day's end. You can teach all you want to, but the PHB's with the money and power will overrule any moral high ground you're sitting on.
  - originalsimba 9y ago
    "Where exactly would handle, say, just the email?" Don't take personal offense, the idea that you need some corporation to handle your E-mail is an ignorance, one that's reinforced by those very corporations' marketing departments. I've been operating my own E-mail servers for two different domains for pennies per day for years now. It's cheap, it's (relatively) easy, and it's _better_ when you control it yourself. If Gmail were to fail, it would be one of the best things to happen to the world economy.

JKCalhoun 9y ago

If consumer use of the web focuses on a handful of sites, then, effectively, the web is centralized. At least with regard to the article. How to improve/fix? Some random thoughts I have had of late: • Disallow comments on YouTube. What honestly would we lose? • Users can delete their Facebook accounts (I did)

23443463453 9y ago

What centralization? Go start your own social media company and report back on your success going up against F, T, G that have all but not even captured the user base, but also burrowed into society and news and information organizations where they are operating exactly like a totalitarian regime that abuses it's absolute power for control and censorship.

dalbasal 9y ago

The internet is communication technology, and communication technology is network-effect-heavy. The value of "The Web" and "The Internet" is more than proportional to the number of people using it. Email is useful only when the person you are messaging has email. So... If much of the web (by usage) exists on Facebook, much of its value exists on Facebook. That value is under Facebook's control, logorithmically to scale.

indigochill 9y ago
>much of its value exists on Facebook This depends on how you define value. If you're talking about advertising revenue, then yes (and bizarrely other services let you authenticate through them, which I still don't understand). But if you're talking about the exchange of practical information, then Facebook's pretty meager and sites with technical documentation or Q&A are much better (for software developers, anyway). I don't believe network effect is one-size-fits-all. Facebook is fine for keeping up with casual acquaintances. But if you want to find a local group with shared interests, then you may have better luck on Meetup. Or if you want to share Q&A with other developers, Stack Overflow is probably better. Each one has its own domain within which it's king.
- originalsimba 9y ago
  I've found a lot of technical documentation on people's personal blogs. Some bit of code they wrote or some problem they solved. We can socially encourage this kind of approach.
  - indigochill 9y ago
    Yep, that's great too. There is a challenge there, which is finding that information on personal blogs in the first place. That's been solved with search engines so far. I'm curious if a more distributed, network-oriented approach might work. Basically the Bacon number applied to information.
originalsimba 9y ago
If people have a means to extract their Facebook posts and publish their content on their own blogs, then that value isn't really under Facebook control. It's a symbiotic relationship, and it's a safe bet that if Facebook were to make the wrong moves, the users would simply leave. Indeed that's been happening in recent months over privacy concerns and other things.

ForHackernews 9y ago

That's not true. Large percentages of websites run on AWS hardware and a small number of big CDN providers. It is centralized.