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The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and netwo

The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. The issue is that when someone attempts to do that kind of thing, they get sued and they end up owing BigTechCo millions of dollars. [0] An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one. [0] https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures

cwyers 8y ago
The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that the e-mail you're sending isn't garbage). And that's pretty much the story across the board. The old Internet was overwhelmed by bad actors who would ruin everything. Facebook and Twitter house a lot of awful stuff. But can you imagine how bad it would be if we were all still using USENET and IRC?
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  I liked Usenet and IRC. It would make the internet great again.
  - zzo38computer 8y ago
    I still use IRC. I run my own email server (and haven't had problems so far). There are more protocols than just SMTP and HTTPS. (I even sometimes make up new ones, although sometimes the existing ones will do, even the ones that aren't so common.) And, yes I agree, it would make the internet great again.
- buovjaga 8y ago
  IRC is still evolving: https://github.com/ircv3 https://github.com/ircv3 https://irc.com/ https://irc.com/
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  NNTP (USENET) is fast, scalable and very practical. I wish it was popular instead of random set of forums, mailing lists and reddits.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    It is also overrun by people who use it to share large binary files of copyrighted material, and spammers, and so on and so forth.
    - Teckla 8y ago
      One way to mitigate spam on Usenet is moderated newsgroups. Another way might be something similar to ad-blockers for web browsers.
- ska 8y ago
  The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. Was it that, or was it that the open internet was proving more difficult to monetize? Knock on effects on resources thrown at UX may be relevant.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    It's not about UX, it's about how awful people are. Hacker News is an amazing place, and it's not because of the UX, which is certainly of a piece with the Old Internet. It's because there are people who put a lot of effort into making it a not a giant cesspool. And even then, it can be incredibly difficult to discuss some topics here because discussion becomes overrun by bad actors. If you want to get a sense of what the Internet would be like without an amazing amount of curation, go read the comments on basically any story run on a local newspaper or TV station, where they don't have the resources to do content moderation. Read up on the people who get PTSD having to filter content off Facebook so that an unsuspecting user doesn't run across child porn or a snuff film. The walled gardens exist because the places outside of the walls are <em>awful.</em> And they're a lot more awful if you exist outside of the band of college-to-middle-aged white men who makes up the bulk of the people who experienced the old Internet or who post here on HN. If you're in a lot of more socially vulnerable positions, Twitter is far more a fenced garden than a walled garden. But that fence is still a lot more protection than you'd get on a platform that doesn't have to do that kind of moderation to be viable to advertisers. Monetizing the Internet has had a lot of knock-on effects, but one of those effects is that it's really really hard to monetize open neo-Naziism and a lot of other awful things, so the big players clean up their platforms. Recent years have shown that it's easy to monetize a lot of racist dog-whistling, though. It's not perfect. But an alternative to what we have now needs to start from a point of how do you reduce harassment and social harms, not ignoring how the big commercial players have made things better than they were before.
    - indigochill 8y ago
      >not ignoring how the big commercial players have made things better than they were before. In my book, they're moderately worse. I entered the internet around the time of free web forums, where anyone could run one for any reason. I moderated a couple moderately sized ones, mostly oriented around computer games. Overall it wasn't too bad. Certainly nothing compared to what I've seen in larger communities. I suspect the larger the community, the worse the garbage. But the main reason I say commercial players have made it worse is that they've also commercialized content moderation. Which is to say, they employ people to sit at a desk looking at the absolute worst humanity has to offer for 8 straight hours a day for barely better than minimum wage. That's like a job straight out of Black Mirror. Forum moderation, by contrast, was/is a volunteer position. You were only in it for as long as you chose to be, and you could leave at any time without any effect on your livelihood. So I'd argue the "community watch" model of amateur forum moderators was closer to the greater good than the commercial walled gardens.
- int_19h 8y ago
  I find that self-regulating communities are much better at it than large platforms with lengthy EULAs written by lawyers. So yeah, if the people I cared about were on UseNet and IRC, I'd switch back to them in an instant.
- krageon 8y ago
  "mindbogglingly huge" is an incredible overstatement. It's not easy to deal with malicious e-mails, but it's also not some unattainable end-goal that only a huge corporation can achieve. A single very motivated person can do it with significant effort, or a small team (3-4) people can do it with average effort (in the setup phase. Maintenance is a 1-2 people affair, and not even fulltime).
dasyatidprime 8y ago
> The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. Is this still true when “telling who's a ‘robot’” is such a common thing to have happen? For instance, I've heard of at least one major platform both sending back quite a lot of UI telemetry and considering third-party clients a violation of their ToS; I haven't heard of strong action being taken yet. (I'm avoiding naming them both because I'm operating partly on hearsay and because I'm more interested in the general question.) Hasn't bigtech had a lot of time and motivation to advance “how to detect people who are using some weird software to talk to us”? Simpler forms of technical barriers, like with the AIM protocol, were defeated in the past, but it seems like massively upgraded data backchannels, machine learning algorithms, and the new normality of silent automatic updates all the time might strongly favor a centralized defender. Plus IIRC the CableCARD wars didn't go so great, and there were presumably a lot of people motivated to save money on expensive TV packages, whereas risking losing access to all your friends for having slightly better control over something that's notionally “free” anyway sounds like a harder sell. I don't think it's easy to defeat “socially required tech” + “automatic updates” + “machine learning” at all.
comex 8y ago
Eh. I sympathize, but if you were to implement the same as a client-side app rather than a hosted service, AFAIK there's little history or legal precedent for shutting such a thing down. Well, there was the kerfuffle between Microsoft and Google over Windows Phone access to YouTube, but other than that... Admittedly, a client-side app might not be allowed into walled-garden app stores, limiting its reach if targeting mobile operating systems. Still, mobile isn't everything. I find it strange that after the long history of multi-protocol IM clients back when it was still called "IM", there are so few attempts to do the same for modern protocols. I think the barriers are partly technical – e.g. better encryption/obfuscation, more features and faster pace of changes making it harder to keep up. But even that can't explain everything: many APIs are not obfuscated at all, and many services can be boiled down to pretty simple functionality. Part of it, I think, must be social – like people aren't even aware that it's a possibility, or worth spending effort on.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zbentley 8y ago
> The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream If the legal barrier went away, and someone surmounted the "unserious" (which I doubt) technical barriers to doing that, then the content providers would go out of business. That's arguably a good thing, but I suspect many people would disagree. The problem is the profit motive and financing model for what consumers want, not the degree of decentralization. Google didn't screw up the internet; people did, by preferring what Google offers.
stcredzero 8y ago
The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet as used by many, many people consists of a few centralized walled gardens. Walled gardens also exist because of network effects. An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one. Perhaps it's a social one as well.

cwyers 8y ago

The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that the e-mail you're sending isn't garbage). And that's pretty much the story across the board. The old Internet was overwhelmed by bad actors who would ruin everything. Facebook and Twitter house a lot of awful stuff. But can you imagine how bad it would be if we were all still using USENET and IRC?

scottlocklin 8y ago
I liked Usenet and IRC. It would make the internet great again.
- zzo38computer 8y ago
  I still use IRC. I run my own email server (and haven't had problems so far). There are more protocols than just SMTP and HTTPS. (I even sometimes make up new ones, although sometimes the existing ones will do, even the ones that aren't so common.) And, yes I agree, it would make the internet great again.
buovjaga 8y ago
IRC is still evolving: https://github.com/ircv3 https://github.com/ircv3 https://irc.com/ https://irc.com/
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
NNTP (USENET) is fast, scalable and very practical. I wish it was popular instead of random set of forums, mailing lists and reddits.
- cwyers 8y ago
  It is also overrun by people who use it to share large binary files of copyrighted material, and spammers, and so on and so forth.
  - Teckla 8y ago
    One way to mitigate spam on Usenet is moderated newsgroups. Another way might be something similar to ad-blockers for web browsers.
ska 8y ago
The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. Was it that, or was it that the open internet was proving more difficult to monetize? Knock on effects on resources thrown at UX may be relevant.
- cwyers 8y ago
  It's not about UX, it's about how awful people are. Hacker News is an amazing place, and it's not because of the UX, which is certainly of a piece with the Old Internet. It's because there are people who put a lot of effort into making it a not a giant cesspool. And even then, it can be incredibly difficult to discuss some topics here because discussion becomes overrun by bad actors. If you want to get a sense of what the Internet would be like without an amazing amount of curation, go read the comments on basically any story run on a local newspaper or TV station, where they don't have the resources to do content moderation. Read up on the people who get PTSD having to filter content off Facebook so that an unsuspecting user doesn't run across child porn or a snuff film. The walled gardens exist because the places outside of the walls are <em>awful.</em> And they're a lot more awful if you exist outside of the band of college-to-middle-aged white men who makes up the bulk of the people who experienced the old Internet or who post here on HN. If you're in a lot of more socially vulnerable positions, Twitter is far more a fenced garden than a walled garden. But that fence is still a lot more protection than you'd get on a platform that doesn't have to do that kind of moderation to be viable to advertisers. Monetizing the Internet has had a lot of knock-on effects, but one of those effects is that it's really really hard to monetize open neo-Naziism and a lot of other awful things, so the big players clean up their platforms. Recent years have shown that it's easy to monetize a lot of racist dog-whistling, though. It's not perfect. But an alternative to what we have now needs to start from a point of how do you reduce harassment and social harms, not ignoring how the big commercial players have made things better than they were before.
  - indigochill 8y ago
    >not ignoring how the big commercial players have made things better than they were before. In my book, they're moderately worse. I entered the internet around the time of free web forums, where anyone could run one for any reason. I moderated a couple moderately sized ones, mostly oriented around computer games. Overall it wasn't too bad. Certainly nothing compared to what I've seen in larger communities. I suspect the larger the community, the worse the garbage. But the main reason I say commercial players have made it worse is that they've also commercialized content moderation. Which is to say, they employ people to sit at a desk looking at the absolute worst humanity has to offer for 8 straight hours a day for barely better than minimum wage. That's like a job straight out of Black Mirror. Forum moderation, by contrast, was/is a volunteer position. You were only in it for as long as you chose to be, and you could leave at any time without any effect on your livelihood. So I'd argue the "community watch" model of amateur forum moderators was closer to the greater good than the commercial walled gardens.
int_19h 8y ago
I find that self-regulating communities are much better at it than large platforms with lengthy EULAs written by lawyers. So yeah, if the people I cared about were on UseNet and IRC, I'd switch back to them in an instant.
krageon 8y ago
"mindbogglingly huge" is an incredible overstatement. It's not easy to deal with malicious e-mails, but it's also not some unattainable end-goal that only a huge corporation can achieve. A single very motivated person can do it with significant effort, or a small team (3-4) people can do it with average effort (in the setup phase. Maintenance is a 1-2 people affair, and not even fulltime).

dasyatidprime 8y ago

> The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. Is this still true when “telling who's a ‘robot’” is such a common thing to have happen? For instance, I've heard of at least one major platform both sending back quite a lot of UI telemetry and considering third-party clients a violation of their ToS; I haven't heard of strong action being taken yet. (I'm avoiding naming them both because I'm operating partly on hearsay and because I'm more interested in the general question.) Hasn't bigtech had a lot of time and motivation to advance “how to detect people who are using some weird software to talk to us”? Simpler forms of technical barriers, like with the AIM protocol, were defeated in the past, but it seems like massively upgraded data backchannels, machine learning algorithms, and the new normality of silent automatic updates all the time might strongly favor a centralized defender. Plus IIRC the CableCARD wars didn't go so great, and there were presumably a lot of people motivated to save money on expensive TV packages, whereas risking losing access to all your friends for having slightly better control over something that's notionally “free” anyway sounds like a harder sell. I don't think it's easy to defeat “socially required tech” + “automatic updates” + “machine learning” at all.

comex 8y ago

Eh. I sympathize, but if you were to implement the same as a client-side app rather than a hosted service, AFAIK there's little history or legal precedent for shutting such a thing down. Well, there was the kerfuffle between Microsoft and Google over Windows Phone access to YouTube, but other than that... Admittedly, a client-side app might not be allowed into walled-garden app stores, limiting its reach if targeting mobile operating systems. Still, mobile isn't everything. I find it strange that after the long history of multi-protocol IM clients back when it was still called "IM", there are so few attempts to do the same for modern protocols. I think the barriers are partly technical – e.g. better encryption/obfuscation, more features and faster pace of changes making it harder to keep up. But even that can't explain everything: many APIs are not obfuscated at all, and many services can be boiled down to pretty simple functionality. Part of it, I think, must be social – like people aren't even aware that it's a possibility, or worth spending effort on.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

zbentley 8y ago

> The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream If the legal barrier went away, and someone surmounted the "unserious" (which I doubt) technical barriers to doing that, then the content providers would go out of business. That's arguably a good thing, but I suspect many people would disagree. The problem is the profit motive and financing model for what consumers want, not the degree of decentralization. Google didn't screw up the internet; people did, by preferring what Google offers.

stcredzero 8y ago

The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet as used by many, many people consists of a few centralized walled gardens. Walled gardens also exist because of network effects. An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one. Perhaps it's a social one as well.