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How did it go so wrong - the same way it did go wrong with many other tools - people used them to better themselves at the cost of others. > We could try to pu

How did it go so wrong - the same way it did go wrong with many other tools - people used them to better themselves at the cost of others. > We could try to push the internet back toward its ethical roots. However, it would be a complex challenge requiring a joint effort by interested parties — which means pretty much everyone. That "everyone" also includes bad actors.

shadowgovt 7y ago
Exactly. The "ethical" roots people imagine weren't actually the roots of the Internet; they were an ideal that was hypothetically possible (but in hindsight, probably assumed too much human virtue atop an infrastructure built around assumed trustable nodes). The actual roots of the Internet would be to kick most users off and keep individual nodes behind locked doors controlled by a joint military-industrial-education confederation of separate institutions with overlapping goals. Privacy was assumed close to nil at several of those institutions. That's a non-starter for building a system that can serve all people on the planet, so it's not the right approach. There is no way back; the only way is forward, informed by the past, but recognizing the weaknesses of its origins as well as its strengths.
tinus_hn 7y ago
The problem is that ‘everyone’ also includes the general public which mostly consists of consumers that don’t care.
tossAfterUsing 7y ago
> ethical roots weren't they all working for the .mil?
- dleslie 7y ago
  Some with more degrees of separation than others, yes. Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley" is a satisfactory history of that era, up to the near-present, albeit with a clear political perspective.
- jslabovitz 7y ago
  No. There were plenty of us there who were accidental visitors, curious kids who found ourselves in this interesting world. Kleinrock mentions this briefly in the original article, but there was a high degree of trust and optimism on the early internet, and if one was technically inclined and a little outgoing and generally a good egg, it wasn't hard to get an account somewhere. When I first logged into MIT-ITS around 1982, coming in over dialup as a teenager calling a modem bank near the Pentagon, the login-failed message said something like, "Sorry, that username does not exist. Would you like an account?" It was RMS himself who gifted me (and a lot of others) a free account for the asking. It's a hard thing to explain to people who weren't there -- I think this is why so many people in this thread see Kleinrock as naive or worse. My girlfriend never believes me when I try to explain the early internet; it seems an impossibility to her, as if I was talking about some pre-historic hunter/gatherer culture.
zpallin 7y ago
Sounds like what we need is a way to curb the actions of these bad actors.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Exactly. The "ethical" roots people imagine weren't actually the roots of the Internet; they were an ideal that was hypothetically possible (but in hindsight, probably assumed too much human virtue atop an infrastructure built around assumed trustable nodes). The actual roots of the Internet would be to kick most users off and keep individual nodes behind locked doors controlled by a joint military-industrial-education confederation of separate institutions with overlapping goals. Privacy was assumed close to nil at several of those institutions. That's a non-starter for building a system that can serve all people on the planet, so it's not the right approach. There is no way back; the only way is forward, informed by the past, but recognizing the weaknesses of its origins as well as its strengths.

tinus_hn 7y ago

The problem is that ‘everyone’ also includes the general public which mostly consists of consumers that don’t care.

tossAfterUsing 7y ago

> ethical roots weren't they all working for the .mil?

dleslie 7y ago
Some with more degrees of separation than others, yes. Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley" is a satisfactory history of that era, up to the near-present, albeit with a clear political perspective.
jslabovitz 7y ago
No. There were plenty of us there who were accidental visitors, curious kids who found ourselves in this interesting world. Kleinrock mentions this briefly in the original article, but there was a high degree of trust and optimism on the early internet, and if one was technically inclined and a little outgoing and generally a good egg, it wasn't hard to get an account somewhere. When I first logged into MIT-ITS around 1982, coming in over dialup as a teenager calling a modem bank near the Pentagon, the login-failed message said something like, "Sorry, that username does not exist. Would you like an account?" It was RMS himself who gifted me (and a lot of others) a free account for the asking. It's a hard thing to explain to people who weren't there -- I think this is why so many people in this thread see Kleinrock as naive or worse. My girlfriend never believes me when I try to explain the early internet; it seems an impossibility to her, as if I was talking about some pre-historic hunter/gatherer culture.

zpallin 7y ago

Sounds like what we need is a way to curb the actions of these bad actors.