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I'm going to take a cynical stand and claim that the internet as the greybeards envisioned decades ago is just not going to happen. Or perhaps happened for a sh

• canidiarus 7y ago
  The 'Internet' is working as intended. The issue is how HTTP is used and its availability in most consumer devices. Regulation is required, but won't occur with a US congress that is pro-business and anti-consumer. California could regulate companies within its borders, but it would stand to lose that sweet tax revenue on shares and RSU's when they move to a different state.
  • imiric 7y ago
    > The 'Internet' is working as intended. The issue is how HTTP is used and its availability in most consumer devices. I partly put the blame on late 90s web developers for this. Instead of developing web /browsers/, the industry should've built web /communicators/ (one would think Netscape could've figured this out). That is, we should've been using tools that make publishing content on the web as easy as consuming content[1]. If that mindset had been cultivated then and we had user friendly tools to support it, public mentality about sharing content would be different, and after years of improvement we might have a more balanced internet today where each user has full control over their data. Unfortunately, we built web browsers for consumption only, the advertising industry took hold of our business models, which naturally created silos that grew richer and more powerful. We can build and have built better tools, but the inertia of how things work today makes it difficult for alternative platforms to take off. It still makes no sense to me that we use powerful computers to run web clients that send data somewhere on the internet where it is served for me, when the computer I'm using can serve this data just fine (assuming some infrastructure is in place to handle this). [1]: This is something Opera attempted much later in 2009 with Unite (https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands/ https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands...), but abandoned it shortly later. I imagine they were missing a lot of network infrastructure and it being too confusing for end-users to make this a success. Are there previous attempts of this in a consumer browser?
• tomxor 7y ago
  > Any new kind of "internet" that depends on traditional infrastructure that is under the control of states/corporations will end up being exactly like the one we have now. There is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise, decentralised or federated versions of all kinds of things on the web exist, and work, today... Just no one uses them of course. The problem is none of these ideas seem to be able to obtain dominance, because that's not in their nature, that is in the nature of capitalism at the deep end, and it already has a grasp on the things that most decentralised tech is trying to replace. The exceptions are decentralised tech that has no corporate competition, e.g bittorrent. I think that's a very useful observation, it's a classic "make a better horse" scenario, it's difficult to see the future when you are focused on present technology - I think the way to make the centralised web obsolete is not to merely decentralise the existing manifestation of it, but to make something entirely, fundamentally different, because corporations don't innovate in that dimension, so they can't compete, and can't dominate early enough to monopolize it.
  • throwaway8879 7y ago
    I agree with you, especially on the bit about making something entirely and fundamentally different. I do see an alternative that the tech-savvy will flock to, perhaps they already have by deleting social media etc. How do you get the rest of the internet population to care about using an alternative that respects their privacy though? And it's not just privacy on the internet, but in meatspace too. Thankfully I'm still from a part of the world that hasn't gone completely digital, but there are annoying advances like absolutely needing a phone to have a bank account. Or having my face scanned for certain things.
    • tomxor 7y ago
      > How do you get the rest of the internet population to care about using an alternative that respects their privacy though? You don't. What I mean is that problems like privacy, censorship, centralized control etc, can all be solved with technology. And although you can't get everyone to care enough to switch to a facebook alternative, you can get everyone to "switch" to something completely new that makes facebook irrelevant, that breakthrough concept in combination with decentralization and privacy built in from the start means there is no "switch" to a competitor, it's just a "new thing". It's all a bit vauge, but if it wasn't, it would already exist... and maybe there is no better alternative to social networks, perhaps this is it, and perhaps it's just a phase that society has to push through. But I have hope that there are better things, more fucking exciting things than scrolling through pictures of other peoples food and holidays that we have yet to dream of that will simultaneously make facebook as irrelevant as chemistry made alchemy.
• AlexandrB 7y ago
  This kind of repetition is inevitable because there's no technological solution to systemic social problems. An internet like the greybeards envisioned would require changes to our political and economic systems to remove (or at least lessen) the incentives to muck it all up in service of money or power.
  • hombre_fatal 7y ago
    There’s also just human nature in general, like our penchant for outrage and world-view confirmation.