17 ms·

The Centralized Internet Is Inevitable

192 points by undefined1 6y ago

zalkota 6y ago
Ethereum..
Supermancho 6y ago
> the authority of Western newspapers was forever reduced. Nope. Twitter's was expanded. These are not the same thing. > China has its Great Firewall and Russia has its “Internet Iron Curtain.” But democracies differ only in how quickly, and under what narratives, they adopt similar measures. because we say so (I guess they forgot to add this last bit)
- pdonis 6y ago
  > Twitter's was expanded. I'm not sure that's actually true. Twitter did not stop the spreading of the information it suppressed (the author of this article knew perfectly well what that information was, after all). It just made people route around Twitter to get the information. The more people realize that they need to route around Twitter to get the information they want (just as they now route around traditional journalists to get the information they want), the more Twitter's authority is reduced just as the authority of traditional journalists was reduced. I think the author of the article has not sufficiently considered this aspect.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - notJim 6y ago
    > I think the author of the article has not sufficiently considered this aspect. I agree, but are we talking about this because it's the first time it's happened for such a high profile story in the US? Will we still be talking about it the third or fourth time it happens?
    - input_sh 6y ago
      No, because their own policy team said that they've made a mistake on how they've handled it and that they have no plans to do that in the future: https://mobile.twitter.com/vijaya/status/1316923557268652033 https://mobile.twitter.com/vijaya/status/1316923557268652033
      - sieabahlpark 6y ago
        Then stop enforcing it? They're clearly not sorry because the NYP is still blocked.
qsort 6y ago
Why should centralisation and decentralisation be mutually exclusive? The author makes an excellent point that many things in our society are centralised for the better (police, infrastructure, etc.), but the entire point of those who oppose excess of centralisation online is that people should be able to choose for themselves. There's enough room for both types of services.
- foobarian 6y ago
  Is police really a good example? It's highly distributed on city/town level.
  - notJim 6y ago
    That's true, and arguably bad, because the result is that accountability and reform occur on the local level, where there are inevitably fewer resources for oversight.
    - ksdale 6y ago
      The most centralized "police" in the US in the form of the FBI or the DHS or what have you aren't exactly models of accountability though...
      - notJim 6y ago
        And yet I know far more about their scandals and failings than I do of the keystone cops running my local police. And activists in my city have been in the streets for months, and there has been very little reform of the local police.
        bigbubba 6y ago
        In both cases, we don't know how much we don't know. The abuses of both that we aren't aware of are hard to account for, so I don't see there being a clear answer to this matter.
        6y ago
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
The Internet is an uneven playing field - each individual human mind trying to find optimal behaviours against centralised ranks of programmers and algorithms picking them off one by one. But there is hope - we need to build agents that are designed and regulated to act in our best interests - and operate in a world where certain practises get banned - for example should the price for a given item on an e-commerce site fluctuate each visit making price comparison shopping all but impossible? Should facebook be required to publish the feed in machine readable format so my phone can ignore most of it and let me know if there is anything i want to read by my rules ?
- beprogrammed 6y ago
  Agreed, software agents acting in our best interests is the way forward. BYOI bring your own interface.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  Basically, you have described RSS feeds and/or email. I presume the issue is that most non-technical people are simply incapable of consuming content that comes without a front-end like Facebook.
  - magicsmoke 6y ago
    I'm reminded of the factoid that hunter-gatherers and nomads were healthier, stronger, and had more varied diets and lifestyles than farmers living under the thumb of centralized states, which begs the question of why farmers didn't just leave their fields behind and escape into the wilderness. A key part of the puzzle is probably that it takes significant skill and knowledge to forage off the land, while farming takes considerably less skill and more grunt labor. Humans shifted from a small population of hunter-gathers to a large population of taxable and conscriptable farmers-from-birth that forced nomads out into marginal lands where farmers couldn't survive. It seems that the internet is going through a similar dynamic. Highly skilled tech wizards that can roll their own equipment will continue to exist at the fringes, but the mass of less skilled and centrally manipulated users will dictate the momentum of the internet going forwards, much like how highly populated agricultural states became the dominant historical force based on their sheer mass and numbers.
notJim 6y ago
I really like this article, and especially the calling into question that smaller/decentralized is always better. I've had the intuition for a while that decentralization is sort of a hope of end-running around power structures, but as the article hints at, the power structures don't really go away, they just becoming less legible. Think about the failings of holocracy, or tyranny of structurelessness, or even the way framework-less software projects tend to end up with ad-hoc, buggy frameworks implemented in them. In other words, the structure is there, you've just reduced your ability to influence it.
- Glench 6y ago
  A fine criticism but I always see people cite "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" and not Reinventing Organizations, a book documenting 12 >50 people companies that run successfully in non-hierarchical ways: https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/pay-what-feels-right.html https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/pay-what-feels-righ...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
intended 6y ago
Completely agree. Amazing what was unthinkable in the early days and optimism of the net, has been replaced by near dystopia. It seems that New tech has an advantage over the incumbents when 1) The early population of users is all experts or hackers of some sort (so diversity of use cases is low) 2) the regulators, are in no way or form able to project force, because they simply cannot recruit people as fast as new tech firms. Eventually, the tech firms start hitting various frontiers, either slowing down, or failing and ejecting workers. New classes of workers catch up, and government projects start getting built. Once the Frontier advantages disappear - the extra degrees of freedom new firms enjoyed get captured or shared with other powers, and become common place. Unless you find new degrees of freedom (With market/rule disrupting power) are found, the new dominant firms and the old political powers will start acting on each other. This is where we are. The thought of a centralized net is pretty troubling, especially where it will end up as tech develops. It has only been 20 years since 2000 and web 2.0. There are countries which don't know that Facebook isn't the internet.
- oblio 6y ago
  Well, it's only a dystopia if you want freedom over prosperity. Turns out, most people want prosperity and the only reason they actually want freedom is because they're afraid lack of freedom blocks their attempts at prosperity. The internet doesn't (yet) actually interfere with freedom in this sense, so few people care, and I suspect many of them are on this forum.
  - cryptica 6y ago
    You can't have prosperity without freedom. What you're describing is a sure path to slavery; which is inescapable poverty. The minute you lose all bargaining power, you become a slave. Employees of corporations who think that less freedom leads to more prosperity may feel protected now but the minute that your master no longer needs your support, you will become one of the victims. In all of history, people who live in free countries have always had the upper hand over those who live in oppressed countries. If your country becomes an oppressed country, many of the rich people (the best among them) will leave and they will bring their money along with them to a free country. Most rich people don't want to live in an oppressed country. They simply don't like to see misery. I'm betting on island nations with relatively small populations.
Zigurd 6y ago
The Post story is a bad example for being an outlier. The same story was rejected by numerous other press outlets for being a likely fraud. It is only remarkable in the the Post, over the objections of several of their own journalists, decided to print an extraordinarily dubious story that has crumbled under scrutiny. The article is disingenuous: "One wonders why Twitter staff didn’t respect the traditional privileges of journalists." No, one does not wonder. The story collapsed as quickly as every news outlet, including Fox News, that rejected it had supposed it would. This is not a story of journalism being manhandled by big bad tech. This is the story of Twitter going along with journalistic standards and not allowing a false story to propagate.
- notJim 6y ago
  > This is the story of Twitter going along with journalistic standards But why, the Post is in fact a newspaper. Why do you want Twitter (which is not a newspaper) to make editorial decisions about what gets published or not, rather than actual newspapers?
  - jgeada 6y ago
    Because Twitter, as a US corporation, has free speech rights. This allows to say whatever it wants and enforce whatever community standards it wants on the content in their network. In purely business terms, it is probably in their long-term best interests not to go along with the alt-right disinformation campaign. The internet is littered with the corpses of companies that catered to that vile crowd.
    - notJim 6y ago
      I'm not asking why Twitter was allowed to do that, I am well aware that Twitter is a private company, believe it or not. I'm asking you want them to do that. Why are we better off if Jack Dorsey decides what articles people read?
      - jgeada 6y ago
        Yes, I do want curating from most of my news sources. Nobody(a) has the time do do full background checks on all the stories we read. That curation of relevancy and truth was one of the most important functions of newspapers and it is good that it is appearing in the online variants. There will always be the unfiltered version out somewhere, the internet is not centralized. (a) yes, some people will lie and claim to be able to research and determine the "truth" all they read themselves. Dunning-Kruger has something to say to those people.
commandlinefan 6y ago
Well, the author is talking about the "mainstream internet" that most people think of: we used to have to point out that the internet wasn't the same thing as the world wide web, now we have to point out that it isn't the same thing as facebook, twitter and amazon. There's nothing inevitable about a centralized internet technologically: packet-switched networking is by it's nature decentralized. However, my pipe dream of someday seeing a truly decentralized mesh network that nobody can ever control or censor gets less hopeful every day - not because it's technically infeasible, but because it would require more people to get on board than I believe people have the will for.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  Indeed. There are dozens if not hundreds of people consistently working on decentralized tools that fit the current laws/social climate. Not even China can fully centralize the actual internet, so what hope does anyone else?
  - q3k 6y ago
    China doesn't have to control/centralize all of the internet - just enough that the vast majority of people cannot access content that cannot be policed. VPNs still very much work and are used by tech savvy there - but they are effectively useless for most people, thereby just making them not attractive.
    - konjin 6y ago
      VPNs are the dumb persons idea of a secure internet. You've just sold all your secrets to a third party. Tor is a slightly better solution, but again, not by much. You're hoping that a randomly chosen VPN will not have an interest in what you're looking at and that the two VPNs behind it are owned by someone else so they can't correlate the metadata.
      - q3k 6y ago
        I know. I've never advocated for using VPN providers as a valid way to get Internet privacy.
golemotron 6y ago
Centralization is inevitable. Scale-free networks grow hubs through preferential attachment. The hubs are the center(s). Basic network science. Read Albert-László Barabási for details.
- sjy 6y ago
  Thanks for the reference. ‘Emergence of scaling in random networks’ (1999) seems like a good starting point, and the author is sharing a copy of the version printed in Science on his website: https://barabasi.com/f/67.pdf https://barabasi.com/f/67.pdf
- boomlinde 6y ago
  Is it Albert-László Barabási's conclusion that centralization is inevitable?
  - golemotron 6y ago
    There are different kinds of inevitable. In systems with preferential attachmnent dynamics, hubs grow. You can break them up, but growth (and centralization) is the natural tendency barring any other force. Barabasi doesn't form conclusions on this, he shows the math and articulates the process.
    - boomlinde 6y ago
      I don't know what different kinds of "inevitable" exist, but I take it to mean unavoidable; inescapable. In that sense, that there is a natural tendency barring any other force towards centralization doesn't mean that it's inevitable.
username3 6y ago
Moderation on Facebook and Twitter can be solved by letting us choose our own moderators and moderation rules. Twitter has a toggle for obscene material. Give us a toggle for misinformation.
- mattowen_uk 6y ago
  Because that works so well on Reddit. /s
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    If reddit allowed you to select a "personal mod team" that you followed, it'd be different. Instead mods can ban individuals and remove content. I think GP is suggesting something more like: > I want RT/Fox/CNN/MSNBC/NYPost/Wapo/NYTimes/LATimes/etc. Twitter, vetted by their teams. Allow me to filter Twitter's content based on the input of my preferred "trusted" moderator. This largely removes Twitter from the equation. They remain a platform for content, and others get to choose which content they interact with either freely (without moderation) or under their choice of moderation.
- kypro 6y ago
  This assume the push for more "moderation" comes from the users of these services. I'd argue the push for moderation isn't coming from the users, but from various government and media organisations who want to control what information the public is consuming. They have no interest in you being able to click a button and see media outlets reporting on the wrong things. Personally I believe we need regulation that require these platforms to allow users to opt-out of moderation and timeline manipulation. But again, this assumes those in power have an interest in freedom of speech which isn't the case.
- hawkoy 6y ago
  Aether does this. You can choose your own moderator. https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  The problem is mismatched incentives. There's no reason for Facebook or Twitter to let you hide content that wastes your time when they profit from wasting your time (a better word for "engagement"). Remove the "engagement" revenue source (or make it unprofitable due to liability, regulation regarding privacy, etc) and most problems with centralized social media will go away (centralization isn't actually that big of an issue - plenty of things we use on a daily basis are centralized and it's not causing any issues as long as incentives are aligned).
generationP 6y ago
I'm finding it rather unlikely that decentralized institutions like blogs, forums (the PHPbb kind, not subreddits), personal websites will disappear as a class. What has been happening is that people have taken the parts of their communication that does not require such tools into the more convenient walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit -- commercial entities that (for perfectly valid commercial reasons) focus on the 80% of communications that they can service with 20% of the work. If these behemoths were really trying to become universal content archives, they'd behave very differently. I don't think they're losing any sleep over the existence of 4chan, Dreamwidth or Simple Machines Forum; it's a different world, and not one they could easily make any money in. They have centralized the internet to the extent that helps making them money and no step further. I wouldn't be surprised if states start playing this game, but if government IT so far has been any indication, the results won't last long. Most likely, servers in rogue countries will be used for all sufficiently hot potatoes (just as Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are operating from Russia but used all over the world), whereas the rest of online activity that doesn't fit well into the big walled gardens will keep happening semi-anonymously as it is now. Governments will probably keep downloading and hoarding everything, but this has been going on for years and everyone just adapted. Downloading is but a first step on the long road to controlling (and, unlike the former, the latter cannot easily be automated). Encryption bans will be undermined in practice by steganography, surveillance by fake data, and censorship by various forms of illegibilization. I'm not saying it will be a great world to live in...
- jlokier 6y ago
  > into the more convenient walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit I don't think "convenience" explains it. Take for example talking with the local group of emergency food delivery volunteers. I picked that example because if you really need to talk with them, it's not optional. I can't avoid Facebook to do that. It's not a convenience issue. The local group is on Facebook, so I have to use Facebook to achieve my task. There isn't a "less convenient" alternative for me to use, if I need to talk to those people as a group. I could try phoning someone in the group, or emailing. That might get something to happen. But it won't let me achieve the basic task, which is to communicate with a particular group of people, i.e. all of them identified by some common interest. The alternatives will just let me talk to one person who is connected to the group, with a different effect. Well, that's just my side. But can we say the reason the group is on Facebook is due to convenience for the people who created the group? It's arguable, but I think probably not any more. Most likely, the group was formed on Facebook because the people forming it were already on Facebook due to similar network effect pressures for other things they got involved in at some time, and for this new group, if they picked a different platform, a lot of people they want to reach wouldn't have the same level of access to the service they aim to provide. The task for them was to pick a platform lots of local people could realistically join. If they had picked some forum on a private domain, or even a mailing list these days, realistically it wouldn't have been as effective for the service they are aiming to provide locally. So it's network effects over many layers, and I don't think it's accurate to sum that up as convenience any more.
luthfur 6y ago
Decades ago, the average person considered AOL as the "internet". Today it's Facebook/Google etc. In between these two swings of the pendulum we had periods of diverse, distributed, innovation. Remember the browser wars? Web 2.0? My point is that the pendulum will swing away again. It's already happening. Blogging, podcasts and a long-tail of businesses that are not Facebook or Google are thriving. In some sense they never went away in the first place. In the coming years, this long-tail is likely to garner a lot more attention than it has so far.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  > In between these two swings of the pendulum we had periods of diverse, distributed, innovation. Remember the browser wars? Web 2.0? You're "remembering" a pendulum that did not ever exist. The online services like AOL became web portals like...AOL and really only died out as social media sites like MySpace and later Facebook replaced them for the "average" user. There was no magical utopian era where Web 2.0 darlings dominated either in terms of users or raw traffic over portals or social media sites. The non-existent pendulum isn't swinging the other day. Outside of a few niches blogging is a ridiculous amount of SEO spam and content farms. While some podcasts seem to do well I sure come across a lot of dead ones. It certainly looks like a lot of "podcasts" are moving to YouTube and the like for better monetization if they didn't just start as a YouTube channel. Maybe blogs and podcasts will somehow find a way to thrive but right now it looks like they're just trying to game algorithms rather than make good content. Since that's how they get paid I can't exactly fault bloggers or podcasters for doing it but it's far from the Platonic ideal of either medium.
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    You're conflating producing content with getting paid. I remember a time when you could find blogs that were actually interesting, and people banded together to form communities, and no one was getting paid for it. The problem here is that, thanks to Twitter, YouTube, et. al., everyone has a megaphone now, and it's just almost impossible to find the good stuff in all the dreck now. And anyone who rises to a level of notice on one of these "platforms" starts putting their good stuff behind paywalls these days.
gabereiser 6y ago
I'll be honest and say I lost interest in the article when they made the assumption that Twitter is a news platform. It's not, regardless of what Jack Dorsey says to courts or the US senate. Same for Facebook. These aren't "news platforms" so they can justify their abhorrent behavior, they are vanity communication platforms that have little to no moderation and now that they are starting to moderate their platform from misinformation, the right cries violation of "Freedom of Speech". Freedom of Speech only goes so far as to limit what people can tell you you can say. You can say anything you want. But to say it, or post it, once said, is no longer under your control but society's.
ColanR 6y ago
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that the Internet is decentralized, and in a far more fault-tolerant fashion than the meshnet-of-the-day. The fact that anyone can fire up a server and make it accessible to anyone else on the Internet should be indicative of that. Maybe what we mean when we say we want a 'decentralized internet' is implicitly, that we want the popular nodes of the Internet Graph to be decentralized. That would be nice. But I think we could realize that right now, the Internet is comprised of a ton of competing protocols, and as long as there's a translation interface that enables cross-communication, the internet will remain decentralized. That's impressive resillience. Kudos to the designers. It seems to me that what would actually bring the most benefit to the structure of the Internet would be long-range wireless communication. Basically, the ability to use HAM radio to bypass ISPs. That would bring about a sea change in how the Internet is structured.
- q3k 6y ago
  How would these people using (HAM) radio links to provide Internet access be, in the long term, different from existing ISPs?
  - ColanR 6y ago
    I don't think they necessarily would be - but they're another option, and they're harder to block since there isn't a cable to physically cut.
    - q3k 6y ago
      Who physically cuts provider fiber as a way to intentionally censor or sabotage the Internet?
      - ColanR 6y ago
        Undersea cables get cut occasionally, fiber gets disconnected...s##t happens. I'm not even talking about anything intentional. Edit. But to answer your question, some activists in the middle east have some stories to tell you. It doesn't have to be literally cut, state mandated filtering works too. Good luck jamming a HAM radio set.
phkahler 6y ago
>> There is a long-standing collective dream of independent digital republics and empowered, autonomous, self-educated individuals. Well that's what twitter, facebook and the rest are. They're just not small and they're not republics.
Thorentis 6y ago
Lots of comments about internet infrastructure being decentralised. In my opinion, there is a difference between decentralised architecture and decentralised control. For instance, a single company could deploy a decentralised system. It may suit their use case better, be more fault tolerant, whatever. But they still control all of it. If they want to take the system down, there's nothing about it being decentralised that prevents them from doing that. The same thing happens with decentralised internet services. Yes, many services are decentralised. But it ends up being easier letting a small number of groups control the majority of the nodes. This is just centralisation with extra steps. Take Cloudflare for instance. It's decentralised, there are servers everywhere, it makes the internet for resilient and faster. But if Cloudflare decided it wanted to take a piece of content down, they could do so right away (cache times notwithstanding). Solving the centralised control problem is very different to creating good decentralised architectures. Most tech people focus on the latter and think in doing so they have solved the former (they haven't).
sjy 6y ago
The author of this article, Samo Burja, also gave a great lecture in 2018 called “Civilization: Institutions, Knowledge and the Future” (https://youtu.be/OiNmTVThNEY https://youtu.be/OiNmTVThNEY) which was mentioned in Jon Blow’s popular 2019 talk on software complexity, “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” (https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk). Burja’s talk is worth watching if you’re interested in his analysis of technology and history over an even longer period, and it provides some context for his remarks at the end of the article about intellectual institutions and the benefits of centralisation.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
> On Wednesday, October 14th, Twitter locked the accounts of a White House press secretary and the New York Post, one of America’s largest tabloid newspapers. The accounts shared a story the Post ran on leaked emails which seemingly implicate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son in corruption. When users tried to share the story publicly or privately, they found a message informing them that their tweets could not be sent. Chinese users of Twitter mused on the feeling of déjà vu, as links to corruption stories sometimes vanish on Chinese social media apps like WeChat as well. For a moment, the paths of the Chinese and American internets once more converged. This is just preposterous. On the one hand: a widely used but private corporation decided to block certain accounts and links on its service, because it doubted the truthfulness of what was being posted. The extent to which the decision by said corporation is in keeping with the interests of its governing state is unclear, and could be argued several different ways. Meanwhile, numerous other services and media talk about the same topic blocked by the corporation, both broadcast media and internet-based media (and those that span both). On the other hand: a national government removes and blocks posts on certain topics. No services accessible via normal means within the jurisdiction of said government carry any material related to any of these topics. Access to information about them requires relatively specialized network access. No broadcast/mass media ever carry items regarding these topics. How can any sane person even suggest that there is any kind of equivalency between these two things? The only thing that connects these two stories are the scale of use of Twitter. If Joes Weekly Blog (jwb.wordpress.foo) or some similarly obscure network context chose to block anyone from the NY Post or links to it in the comment section of their blog, who would write an article about that? So why does the scale of Twitter, rather than its fundamental nature, allow an otherwise apparently intelligent individual to equate Twitter's behavior with that of the Chinese government?
olah_1 6y ago
I think Activity Pub would work well if the federation servers were run by real towns / cities / states. One of the things that I like about Movim[1] is that the servers that are currently running it are literally just named after countries. If my town can uses tax money to run a server for all residents, I think that's pretty cool. It feels more subsidiary. It maintains some amount of connection to the real world while also providing a genuine service. It feels more like a road or trash pick up service. [1]: https://movim.eu/#try https://movim.eu/#try
lfmunoz4 6y ago
I wonder what would happen if an Chinese company decided to block content from it's government's press secretary.
syndacks 6y ago
I have no idea what this is about after reading the first 3 paragraphs, so I stopped reading.
awinter-py 6y ago
> Hardware backdoors have been mandated by the U.S. and now the Chinese governments hmm -- the US source here is from 2015 about 'plans' and the the china source is about a discredited bloomberg article
hyperion2 6y ago
Organized, coordinated power with talent and capital behind it seems to win, and this maps onto the centralized vs. decentralized distinction fairly well. I don't disagree. But in the conclusion, the author talks about finding ways to conceive of a positive future, or what a positive centralized internet looks like, and I'm having a hard time doing so. To me, the more the internet centralizes, the more likely we get extremes. This means Good Judgment Internet Regime, and it also means Exponential Stasi Regime. I guess we'll see. Anyone have ideas here?
dotcoma 6y ago
And it has been here for more than a decade already.
crazypython 6y ago
It is missing one crucial truth that dispels the thesis: The fact that a social network does not need to be owned by one entity for everyone on it to be able to interact with each other. See Federation[0], federated social networks like Mastodon[1], PeerTube[2], Pleroma: where you have an account on a Mastodon "instance" (computer), but you can talk to anyone speaking the same protocol, ActivityPub[3]. A Mastodon account can follow PeerTube accounts and Pleroma accounts. And no one controls all Mastodon servers, your Mastodon server is controlled by your server administrator. The author does not seem to understand the internet fundamentally. Email is an example of a federated communications protocol. [0]: https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/ [1]: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ [2]: https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ [3]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
- dawg- 6y ago
  The next question: should we force Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. to submit their platforms to open protocols the same way Mastodon is? Maybe the answer isn't getting everyone to use Mastodon; maybe it's using anti-trust law to force the big centralized companies to operate more like parts of a federated system.
gumby 6y ago
I thought this was going to be about BGP, DNS, and the root certificates. The actual topic (twitter and a few other random websites) is far less interesting.
December_Stars 6y ago
It is missing one crucial truth that dispels the thesis: The fact that a social network does not need to be owned by one entity for everyone on it to be able to interact with each other. See Federation[0], federated social networks like Mastodon[1], PeerTube[2], Pleroma: where you have an account on a Mastodon "instance" (computer), but you can talk to anyone speaking the same protocol, ActivityPub[3]. A Mastodon account can follow PeerTube accounts and Pleroma accounts. And no one controls all Mastodon servers, your Mastodon server is controlled by your server administrator. The author does not seem to understand the internet fundamentally. Email is an example of a federated communications protocol. [0]: https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/ [1]: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ [2]: https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ [3]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
mikewarot 6y ago
Everyone knows about network effects. Nobody thinks about the security of the users. None of our computers are secure, we all know that. We won't click on links to unfamiliar sites, or open unexpected attachments. There is safety in sticking to stuff that is centrally moderated in terms of just plain malware, if not politics or decency.
anderspitman 6y ago
> The dreamers of the decentralized internet now place their hopes in blockchain technology, which promises to break governments’ control of currency and the tech giants’ control of the internet. Many intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and investors, from Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz to World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, have staked their reputation, careers, and plans on this vision. The article linked for Tim Berners-Lee talks about Solid[0]. Lumping that in with cryptocurrencies is a bit much, unless I'm missing something. [0]: https://inrupt.com/solid https://inrupt.com/solid
PHGamer 6y ago
the world is balkanizing , he is wrong. its just right now certain players are dominent. 4chan has the least censorship of platforms right now and is probably the closest to global platform you can get. all others have to align some what with their countries origins. twitter vs president is just an internal dispute.
Barrin92 6y ago
I'd probably go even further than the author. Not only is the internet a centralising technology but virtually all technology is centralising. Ted Kaczynski was a little bit crazy but not wrong, technology with its facilitation of scale, interdependence, relationships across space and time and creation of division of labour and complexity creates hierarchies and the need for organisation. The places on earth that are distinctly free of centralisation are places that are in the literal sense of the word primitive. However unlike Ted and like the author I don't think this is a negative thing. I never understood the sentiment by Barlow mentioned in the article, I just thought it's juvenile. Most people when faced with the decision of living in the frontier town with a gunfight next to your house or suburb where the garbage truck comes every morning chose the latter and I don't blame them
- Tepix 6y ago
  I can think of plenty of technologies that are decentralising.
known 6y ago
Sometimes a divided internet is better than a hopeless one;
ricardo81 6y ago
Think lawmakers and operating within the law can be untangled as a separate topic, part of the problem appearing is that the platforms are now using their own set of rules. This becomes a problem when the platforms are essentially the gateways for the mainstream to access information. The early days of the web had a bit of 'build it and they will come'- if you had something interesting it would eventually get seen and linked to. Now you have to 'pay to play'. There are numerous stats about how much % per dollar goes to Facebook and Google when advertising. If you don't pay, you're much, much less likely to be seen. The platforms are in a position of power and perhaps regulation can curtail that power. We are essentially looking at the information on the web via a lens that the platforms and their algos provide, and there aren't that many dominant platforms to provide the number of perspectives we perhaps need. It's easier than ever to get content online thanks to the likes of Wordpress, but harder than ever to get people to see it. Most webmasters who have an inkling of some information about SEO are too scared to link out in fear of receiving a penalty from Google. Now social media platforms are acting as the Internet police. This kind of thinking stifles the way the web was supposed to work.
a_imho 6y ago
The internet is not that important.
zathrus_writer 6y ago
I seriously wished this was posted by a one "Agent Smith" :-D
nazgulnarsil 6y ago
I lay all of this at the feet of email not evolving into the use cases people have.

192 points by undefined1 6y ago

Ethereum..

> the authority of Western newspapers was forever reduced. Nope. Twitter's was expanded. These are not the same thing. > China has its Great Firewall and Russia has its “Internet Iron Curtain.” But democracies differ only in how quickly, and under what narratives, they adopt similar measures. because we say so (I guess they forgot to add this last bit)

pdonis 6y ago
> Twitter's was expanded. I'm not sure that's actually true. Twitter did not stop the spreading of the information it suppressed (the author of this article knew perfectly well what that information was, after all). It just made people route around Twitter to get the information. The more people realize that they need to route around Twitter to get the information they want (just as they now route around traditional journalists to get the information they want), the more Twitter's authority is reduced just as the authority of traditional journalists was reduced. I think the author of the article has not sufficiently considered this aspect.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- notJim 6y ago
  > I think the author of the article has not sufficiently considered this aspect. I agree, but are we talking about this because it's the first time it's happened for such a high profile story in the US? Will we still be talking about it the third or fourth time it happens?
  - input_sh 6y ago
    No, because their own policy team said that they've made a mistake on how they've handled it and that they have no plans to do that in the future: https://mobile.twitter.com/vijaya/status/1316923557268652033 https://mobile.twitter.com/vijaya/status/1316923557268652033
    - sieabahlpark 6y ago
      Then stop enforcing it? They're clearly not sorry because the NYP is still blocked.

qsort 6y ago

Why should centralisation and decentralisation be mutually exclusive? The author makes an excellent point that many things in our society are centralised for the better (police, infrastructure, etc.), but the entire point of those who oppose excess of centralisation online is that people should be able to choose for themselves. There's enough room for both types of services.

foobarian 6y ago
Is police really a good example? It's highly distributed on city/town level.
- notJim 6y ago
  That's true, and arguably bad, because the result is that accountability and reform occur on the local level, where there are inevitably fewer resources for oversight.
  - ksdale 6y ago
    The most centralized "police" in the US in the form of the FBI or the DHS or what have you aren't exactly models of accountability though...
    - notJim 6y ago
      And yet I know far more about their scandals and failings than I do of the keystone cops running my local police. And activists in my city have been in the streets for months, and there has been very little reform of the local police.
      - bigbubba 6y ago
        In both cases, we don't know how much we don't know. The abuses of both that we aren't aware of are hard to account for, so I don't see there being a clear answer to this matter.
      - 6y ago

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

The Internet is an uneven playing field - each individual human mind trying to find optimal behaviours against centralised ranks of programmers and algorithms picking them off one by one. But there is hope - we need to build agents that are designed and regulated to act in our best interests - and operate in a world where certain practises get banned - for example should the price for a given item on an e-commerce site fluctuate each visit making price comparison shopping all but impossible? Should facebook be required to publish the feed in machine readable format so my phone can ignore most of it and let me know if there is anything i want to read by my rules ?

beprogrammed 6y ago
Agreed, software agents acting in our best interests is the way forward. BYOI bring your own interface.
fxtentacle 6y ago
Basically, you have described RSS feeds and/or email. I presume the issue is that most non-technical people are simply incapable of consuming content that comes without a front-end like Facebook.
- magicsmoke 6y ago
  I'm reminded of the factoid that hunter-gatherers and nomads were healthier, stronger, and had more varied diets and lifestyles than farmers living under the thumb of centralized states, which begs the question of why farmers didn't just leave their fields behind and escape into the wilderness. A key part of the puzzle is probably that it takes significant skill and knowledge to forage off the land, while farming takes considerably less skill and more grunt labor. Humans shifted from a small population of hunter-gathers to a large population of taxable and conscriptable farmers-from-birth that forced nomads out into marginal lands where farmers couldn't survive. It seems that the internet is going through a similar dynamic. Highly skilled tech wizards that can roll their own equipment will continue to exist at the fringes, but the mass of less skilled and centrally manipulated users will dictate the momentum of the internet going forwards, much like how highly populated agricultural states became the dominant historical force based on their sheer mass and numbers.

notJim 6y ago

I really like this article, and especially the calling into question that smaller/decentralized is always better. I've had the intuition for a while that decentralization is sort of a hope of end-running around power structures, but as the article hints at, the power structures don't really go away, they just becoming less legible. Think about the failings of holocracy, or tyranny of structurelessness, or even the way framework-less software projects tend to end up with ad-hoc, buggy frameworks implemented in them. In other words, the structure is there, you've just reduced your ability to influence it.

Glench 6y ago
A fine criticism but I always see people cite "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" and not Reinventing Organizations, a book documenting 12 >50 people companies that run successfully in non-hierarchical ways: https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/pay-what-feels-right.html https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/pay-what-feels-righ...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

intended 6y ago

Completely agree. Amazing what was unthinkable in the early days and optimism of the net, has been replaced by near dystopia. It seems that New tech has an advantage over the incumbents when 1) The early population of users is all experts or hackers of some sort (so diversity of use cases is low) 2) the regulators, are in no way or form able to project force, because they simply cannot recruit people as fast as new tech firms. Eventually, the tech firms start hitting various frontiers, either slowing down, or failing and ejecting workers. New classes of workers catch up, and government projects start getting built. Once the Frontier advantages disappear - the extra degrees of freedom new firms enjoyed get captured or shared with other powers, and become common place. Unless you find new degrees of freedom (With market/rule disrupting power) are found, the new dominant firms and the old political powers will start acting on each other. This is where we are. The thought of a centralized net is pretty troubling, especially where it will end up as tech develops. It has only been 20 years since 2000 and web 2.0. There are countries which don't know that Facebook isn't the internet.

oblio 6y ago
Well, it's only a dystopia if you want freedom over prosperity. Turns out, most people want prosperity and the only reason they actually want freedom is because they're afraid lack of freedom blocks their attempts at prosperity. The internet doesn't (yet) actually interfere with freedom in this sense, so few people care, and I suspect many of them are on this forum.
- cryptica 6y ago
  You can't have prosperity without freedom. What you're describing is a sure path to slavery; which is inescapable poverty. The minute you lose all bargaining power, you become a slave. Employees of corporations who think that less freedom leads to more prosperity may feel protected now but the minute that your master no longer needs your support, you will become one of the victims. In all of history, people who live in free countries have always had the upper hand over those who live in oppressed countries. If your country becomes an oppressed country, many of the rich people (the best among them) will leave and they will bring their money along with them to a free country. Most rich people don't want to live in an oppressed country. They simply don't like to see misery. I'm betting on island nations with relatively small populations.

Zigurd 6y ago

The Post story is a bad example for being an outlier. The same story was rejected by numerous other press outlets for being a likely fraud. It is only remarkable in the the Post, over the objections of several of their own journalists, decided to print an extraordinarily dubious story that has crumbled under scrutiny. The article is disingenuous: "One wonders why Twitter staff didn’t respect the traditional privileges of journalists." No, one does not wonder. The story collapsed as quickly as every news outlet, including Fox News, that rejected it had supposed it would. This is not a story of journalism being manhandled by big bad tech. This is the story of Twitter going along with journalistic standards and not allowing a false story to propagate.

notJim 6y ago
> This is the story of Twitter going along with journalistic standards But why, the Post is in fact a newspaper. Why do you want Twitter (which is not a newspaper) to make editorial decisions about what gets published or not, rather than actual newspapers?
- jgeada 6y ago
  Because Twitter, as a US corporation, has free speech rights. This allows to say whatever it wants and enforce whatever community standards it wants on the content in their network. In purely business terms, it is probably in their long-term best interests not to go along with the alt-right disinformation campaign. The internet is littered with the corpses of companies that catered to that vile crowd.
  - notJim 6y ago
    I'm not asking why Twitter was allowed to do that, I am well aware that Twitter is a private company, believe it or not. I'm asking you want them to do that. Why are we better off if Jack Dorsey decides what articles people read?
    - jgeada 6y ago
      Yes, I do want curating from most of my news sources. Nobody(a) has the time do do full background checks on all the stories we read. That curation of relevancy and truth was one of the most important functions of newspapers and it is good that it is appearing in the online variants. There will always be the unfiltered version out somewhere, the internet is not centralized. (a) yes, some people will lie and claim to be able to research and determine the "truth" all they read themselves. Dunning-Kruger has something to say to those people.

commandlinefan 6y ago

Well, the author is talking about the "mainstream internet" that most people think of: we used to have to point out that the internet wasn't the same thing as the world wide web, now we have to point out that it isn't the same thing as facebook, twitter and amazon. There's nothing inevitable about a centralized internet technologically: packet-switched networking is by it's nature decentralized. However, my pipe dream of someday seeing a truly decentralized mesh network that nobody can ever control or censor gets less hopeful every day - not because it's technically infeasible, but because it would require more people to get on board than I believe people have the will for.

joshspankit 6y ago
Indeed. There are dozens if not hundreds of people consistently working on decentralized tools that fit the current laws/social climate. Not even China can fully centralize the actual internet, so what hope does anyone else?
- q3k 6y ago
  China doesn't have to control/centralize all of the internet - just enough that the vast majority of people cannot access content that cannot be policed. VPNs still very much work and are used by tech savvy there - but they are effectively useless for most people, thereby just making them not attractive.
  - konjin 6y ago
    VPNs are the dumb persons idea of a secure internet. You've just sold all your secrets to a third party. Tor is a slightly better solution, but again, not by much. You're hoping that a randomly chosen VPN will not have an interest in what you're looking at and that the two VPNs behind it are owned by someone else so they can't correlate the metadata.
    - q3k 6y ago
      I know. I've never advocated for using VPN providers as a valid way to get Internet privacy.

golemotron 6y ago

Centralization is inevitable. Scale-free networks grow hubs through preferential attachment. The hubs are the center(s). Basic network science. Read Albert-László Barabási for details.

sjy 6y ago
Thanks for the reference. ‘Emergence of scaling in random networks’ (1999) seems like a good starting point, and the author is sharing a copy of the version printed in Science on his website: https://barabasi.com/f/67.pdf https://barabasi.com/f/67.pdf
boomlinde 6y ago
Is it Albert-László Barabási's conclusion that centralization is inevitable?
- golemotron 6y ago
  There are different kinds of inevitable. In systems with preferential attachmnent dynamics, hubs grow. You can break them up, but growth (and centralization) is the natural tendency barring any other force. Barabasi doesn't form conclusions on this, he shows the math and articulates the process.
  - boomlinde 6y ago
    I don't know what different kinds of "inevitable" exist, but I take it to mean unavoidable; inescapable. In that sense, that there is a natural tendency barring any other force towards centralization doesn't mean that it's inevitable.

username3 6y ago

Moderation on Facebook and Twitter can be solved by letting us choose our own moderators and moderation rules. Twitter has a toggle for obscene material. Give us a toggle for misinformation.

mattowen_uk 6y ago
Because that works so well on Reddit. /s
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  If reddit allowed you to select a "personal mod team" that you followed, it'd be different. Instead mods can ban individuals and remove content. I think GP is suggesting something more like: > I want RT/Fox/CNN/MSNBC/NYPost/Wapo/NYTimes/LATimes/etc. Twitter, vetted by their teams. Allow me to filter Twitter's content based on the input of my preferred "trusted" moderator. This largely removes Twitter from the equation. They remain a platform for content, and others get to choose which content they interact with either freely (without moderation) or under their choice of moderation.
kypro 6y ago
This assume the push for more "moderation" comes from the users of these services. I'd argue the push for moderation isn't coming from the users, but from various government and media organisations who want to control what information the public is consuming. They have no interest in you being able to click a button and see media outlets reporting on the wrong things. Personally I believe we need regulation that require these platforms to allow users to opt-out of moderation and timeline manipulation. But again, this assumes those in power have an interest in freedom of speech which isn't the case.
hawkoy 6y ago
Aether does this. You can choose your own moderator. https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/
Nextgrid 6y ago
The problem is mismatched incentives. There's no reason for Facebook or Twitter to let you hide content that wastes your time when they profit from wasting your time (a better word for "engagement"). Remove the "engagement" revenue source (or make it unprofitable due to liability, regulation regarding privacy, etc) and most problems with centralized social media will go away (centralization isn't actually that big of an issue - plenty of things we use on a daily basis are centralized and it's not causing any issues as long as incentives are aligned).

generationP 6y ago

I'm finding it rather unlikely that decentralized institutions like blogs, forums (the PHPbb kind, not subreddits), personal websites will disappear as a class. What has been happening is that people have taken the parts of their communication that does not require such tools into the more convenient walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit -- commercial entities that (for perfectly valid commercial reasons) focus on the 80% of communications that they can service with 20% of the work. If these behemoths were really trying to become universal content archives, they'd behave very differently. I don't think they're losing any sleep over the existence of 4chan, Dreamwidth or Simple Machines Forum; it's a different world, and not one they could easily make any money in. They have centralized the internet to the extent that helps making them money and no step further. I wouldn't be surprised if states start playing this game, but if government IT so far has been any indication, the results won't last long. Most likely, servers in rogue countries will be used for all sufficiently hot potatoes (just as Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are operating from Russia but used all over the world), whereas the rest of online activity that doesn't fit well into the big walled gardens will keep happening semi-anonymously as it is now. Governments will probably keep downloading and hoarding everything, but this has been going on for years and everyone just adapted. Downloading is but a first step on the long road to controlling (and, unlike the former, the latter cannot easily be automated). Encryption bans will be undermined in practice by steganography, surveillance by fake data, and censorship by various forms of illegibilization. I'm not saying it will be a great world to live in...

jlokier 6y ago
> into the more convenient walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit I don't think "convenience" explains it. Take for example talking with the local group of emergency food delivery volunteers. I picked that example because if you really need to talk with them, it's not optional. I can't avoid Facebook to do that. It's not a convenience issue. The local group is on Facebook, so I have to use Facebook to achieve my task. There isn't a "less convenient" alternative for me to use, if I need to talk to those people as a group. I could try phoning someone in the group, or emailing. That might get something to happen. But it won't let me achieve the basic task, which is to communicate with a particular group of people, i.e. all of them identified by some common interest. The alternatives will just let me talk to one person who is connected to the group, with a different effect. Well, that's just my side. But can we say the reason the group is on Facebook is due to convenience for the people who created the group? It's arguable, but I think probably not any more. Most likely, the group was formed on Facebook because the people forming it were already on Facebook due to similar network effect pressures for other things they got involved in at some time, and for this new group, if they picked a different platform, a lot of people they want to reach wouldn't have the same level of access to the service they aim to provide. The task for them was to pick a platform lots of local people could realistically join. If they had picked some forum on a private domain, or even a mailing list these days, realistically it wouldn't have been as effective for the service they are aiming to provide locally. So it's network effects over many layers, and I don't think it's accurate to sum that up as convenience any more.

luthfur 6y ago

Decades ago, the average person considered AOL as the "internet". Today it's Facebook/Google etc. In between these two swings of the pendulum we had periods of diverse, distributed, innovation. Remember the browser wars? Web 2.0? My point is that the pendulum will swing away again. It's already happening. Blogging, podcasts and a long-tail of businesses that are not Facebook or Google are thriving. In some sense they never went away in the first place. In the coming years, this long-tail is likely to garner a lot more attention than it has so far.

giantrobot 6y ago
> In between these two swings of the pendulum we had periods of diverse, distributed, innovation. Remember the browser wars? Web 2.0? You're "remembering" a pendulum that did not ever exist. The online services like AOL became web portals like...AOL and really only died out as social media sites like MySpace and later Facebook replaced them for the "average" user. There was no magical utopian era where Web 2.0 darlings dominated either in terms of users or raw traffic over portals or social media sites. The non-existent pendulum isn't swinging the other day. Outside of a few niches blogging is a ridiculous amount of SEO spam and content farms. While some podcasts seem to do well I sure come across a lot of dead ones. It certainly looks like a lot of "podcasts" are moving to YouTube and the like for better monetization if they didn't just start as a YouTube channel. Maybe blogs and podcasts will somehow find a way to thrive but right now it looks like they're just trying to game algorithms rather than make good content. Since that's how they get paid I can't exactly fault bloggers or podcasters for doing it but it's far from the Platonic ideal of either medium.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  You're conflating producing content with getting paid. I remember a time when you could find blogs that were actually interesting, and people banded together to form communities, and no one was getting paid for it. The problem here is that, thanks to Twitter, YouTube, et. al., everyone has a megaphone now, and it's just almost impossible to find the good stuff in all the dreck now. And anyone who rises to a level of notice on one of these "platforms" starts putting their good stuff behind paywalls these days.

gabereiser 6y ago

I'll be honest and say I lost interest in the article when they made the assumption that Twitter is a news platform. It's not, regardless of what Jack Dorsey says to courts or the US senate. Same for Facebook. These aren't "news platforms" so they can justify their abhorrent behavior, they are vanity communication platforms that have little to no moderation and now that they are starting to moderate their platform from misinformation, the right cries violation of "Freedom of Speech". Freedom of Speech only goes so far as to limit what people can tell you you can say. You can say anything you want. But to say it, or post it, once said, is no longer under your control but society's.

ColanR 6y ago

I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that the Internet is decentralized, and in a far more fault-tolerant fashion than the meshnet-of-the-day. The fact that anyone can fire up a server and make it accessible to anyone else on the Internet should be indicative of that. Maybe what we mean when we say we want a 'decentralized internet' is implicitly, that we want the popular nodes of the Internet Graph to be decentralized. That would be nice. But I think we could realize that right now, the Internet is comprised of a ton of competing protocols, and as long as there's a translation interface that enables cross-communication, the internet will remain decentralized. That's impressive resillience. Kudos to the designers. It seems to me that what would actually bring the most benefit to the structure of the Internet would be long-range wireless communication. Basically, the ability to use HAM radio to bypass ISPs. That would bring about a sea change in how the Internet is structured.

q3k 6y ago
How would these people using (HAM) radio links to provide Internet access be, in the long term, different from existing ISPs?
- ColanR 6y ago
  I don't think they necessarily would be - but they're another option, and they're harder to block since there isn't a cable to physically cut.
  - q3k 6y ago
    Who physically cuts provider fiber as a way to intentionally censor or sabotage the Internet?
    - ColanR 6y ago
      Undersea cables get cut occasionally, fiber gets disconnected...s##t happens. I'm not even talking about anything intentional. Edit. But to answer your question, some activists in the middle east have some stories to tell you. It doesn't have to be literally cut, state mandated filtering works too. Good luck jamming a HAM radio set.

phkahler 6y ago

>> There is a long-standing collective dream of independent digital republics and empowered, autonomous, self-educated individuals. Well that's what twitter, facebook and the rest are. They're just not small and they're not republics.

Thorentis 6y ago

Lots of comments about internet infrastructure being decentralised. In my opinion, there is a difference between decentralised architecture and decentralised control. For instance, a single company could deploy a decentralised system. It may suit their use case better, be more fault tolerant, whatever. But they still control all of it. If they want to take the system down, there's nothing about it being decentralised that prevents them from doing that. The same thing happens with decentralised internet services. Yes, many services are decentralised. But it ends up being easier letting a small number of groups control the majority of the nodes. This is just centralisation with extra steps. Take Cloudflare for instance. It's decentralised, there are servers everywhere, it makes the internet for resilient and faster. But if Cloudflare decided it wanted to take a piece of content down, they could do so right away (cache times notwithstanding). Solving the centralised control problem is very different to creating good decentralised architectures. Most tech people focus on the latter and think in doing so they have solved the former (they haven't).

sjy 6y ago

The author of this article, Samo Burja, also gave a great lecture in 2018 called “Civilization: Institutions, Knowledge and the Future” (https://youtu.be/OiNmTVThNEY https://youtu.be/OiNmTVThNEY) which was mentioned in Jon Blow’s popular 2019 talk on software complexity, “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” (https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk). Burja’s talk is worth watching if you’re interested in his analysis of technology and history over an even longer period, and it provides some context for his remarks at the end of the article about intellectual institutions and the benefits of centralisation.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

> On Wednesday, October 14th, Twitter locked the accounts of a White House press secretary and the New York Post, one of America’s largest tabloid newspapers. The accounts shared a story the Post ran on leaked emails which seemingly implicate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son in corruption. When users tried to share the story publicly or privately, they found a message informing them that their tweets could not be sent. Chinese users of Twitter mused on the feeling of déjà vu, as links to corruption stories sometimes vanish on Chinese social media apps like WeChat as well. For a moment, the paths of the Chinese and American internets once more converged. This is just preposterous. On the one hand: a widely used but private corporation decided to block certain accounts and links on its service, because it doubted the truthfulness of what was being posted. The extent to which the decision by said corporation is in keeping with the interests of its governing state is unclear, and could be argued several different ways. Meanwhile, numerous other services and media talk about the same topic blocked by the corporation, both broadcast media and internet-based media (and those that span both). On the other hand: a national government removes and blocks posts on certain topics. No services accessible via normal means within the jurisdiction of said government carry any material related to any of these topics. Access to information about them requires relatively specialized network access. No broadcast/mass media ever carry items regarding these topics. How can any sane person even suggest that there is any kind of equivalency between these two things? The only thing that connects these two stories are the scale of use of Twitter. If Joes Weekly Blog (jwb.wordpress.foo) or some similarly obscure network context chose to block anyone from the NY Post or links to it in the comment section of their blog, who would write an article about that? So why does the scale of Twitter, rather than its fundamental nature, allow an otherwise apparently intelligent individual to equate Twitter's behavior with that of the Chinese government?

olah_1 6y ago

I think Activity Pub would work well if the federation servers were run by real towns / cities / states. One of the things that I like about Movim[1] is that the servers that are currently running it are literally just named after countries. If my town can uses tax money to run a server for all residents, I think that's pretty cool. It feels more subsidiary. It maintains some amount of connection to the real world while also providing a genuine service. It feels more like a road or trash pick up service. [1]: https://movim.eu/#try https://movim.eu/#try

lfmunoz4 6y ago

I wonder what would happen if an Chinese company decided to block content from it's government's press secretary.

syndacks 6y ago

I have no idea what this is about after reading the first 3 paragraphs, so I stopped reading.

awinter-py 6y ago

> Hardware backdoors have been mandated by the U.S. and now the Chinese governments hmm -- the US source here is from 2015 about 'plans' and the the china source is about a discredited bloomberg article

hyperion2 6y ago

Organized, coordinated power with talent and capital behind it seems to win, and this maps onto the centralized vs. decentralized distinction fairly well. I don't disagree. But in the conclusion, the author talks about finding ways to conceive of a positive future, or what a positive centralized internet looks like, and I'm having a hard time doing so. To me, the more the internet centralizes, the more likely we get extremes. This means Good Judgment Internet Regime, and it also means Exponential Stasi Regime. I guess we'll see. Anyone have ideas here?

dotcoma 6y ago

And it has been here for more than a decade already.

crazypython 6y ago

It is missing one crucial truth that dispels the thesis: The fact that a social network does not need to be owned by one entity for everyone on it to be able to interact with each other. See Federation[0], federated social networks like Mastodon[1], PeerTube[2], Pleroma: where you have an account on a Mastodon "instance" (computer), but you can talk to anyone speaking the same protocol, ActivityPub[3]. A Mastodon account can follow PeerTube accounts and Pleroma accounts. And no one controls all Mastodon servers, your Mastodon server is controlled by your server administrator. The author does not seem to understand the internet fundamentally. Email is an example of a federated communications protocol. [0]: https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/ [1]: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ [2]: https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ [3]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

dawg- 6y ago
The next question: should we force Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. to submit their platforms to open protocols the same way Mastodon is? Maybe the answer isn't getting everyone to use Mastodon; maybe it's using anti-trust law to force the big centralized companies to operate more like parts of a federated system.

gumby 6y ago

I thought this was going to be about BGP, DNS, and the root certificates. The actual topic (twitter and a few other random websites) is far less interesting.

December_Stars 6y ago

mikewarot 6y ago

Everyone knows about network effects. Nobody thinks about the security of the users. None of our computers are secure, we all know that. We won't click on links to unfamiliar sites, or open unexpected attachments. There is safety in sticking to stuff that is centrally moderated in terms of just plain malware, if not politics or decency.

anderspitman 6y ago

> The dreamers of the decentralized internet now place their hopes in blockchain technology, which promises to break governments’ control of currency and the tech giants’ control of the internet. Many intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and investors, from Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz to World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, have staked their reputation, careers, and plans on this vision. The article linked for Tim Berners-Lee talks about Solid[0]. Lumping that in with cryptocurrencies is a bit much, unless I'm missing something. [0]: https://inrupt.com/solid https://inrupt.com/solid

PHGamer 6y ago

the world is balkanizing , he is wrong. its just right now certain players are dominent. 4chan has the least censorship of platforms right now and is probably the closest to global platform you can get. all others have to align some what with their countries origins. twitter vs president is just an internal dispute.

Barrin92 6y ago

I'd probably go even further than the author. Not only is the internet a centralising technology but virtually all technology is centralising. Ted Kaczynski was a little bit crazy but not wrong, technology with its facilitation of scale, interdependence, relationships across space and time and creation of division of labour and complexity creates hierarchies and the need for organisation. The places on earth that are distinctly free of centralisation are places that are in the literal sense of the word primitive. However unlike Ted and like the author I don't think this is a negative thing. I never understood the sentiment by Barlow mentioned in the article, I just thought it's juvenile. Most people when faced with the decision of living in the frontier town with a gunfight next to your house or suburb where the garbage truck comes every morning chose the latter and I don't blame them

Tepix 6y ago
I can think of plenty of technologies that are decentralising.

known 6y ago

Sometimes a divided internet is better than a hopeless one;

ricardo81 6y ago

Think lawmakers and operating within the law can be untangled as a separate topic, part of the problem appearing is that the platforms are now using their own set of rules. This becomes a problem when the platforms are essentially the gateways for the mainstream to access information. The early days of the web had a bit of 'build it and they will come'- if you had something interesting it would eventually get seen and linked to. Now you have to 'pay to play'. There are numerous stats about how much % per dollar goes to Facebook and Google when advertising. If you don't pay, you're much, much less likely to be seen. The platforms are in a position of power and perhaps regulation can curtail that power. We are essentially looking at the information on the web via a lens that the platforms and their algos provide, and there aren't that many dominant platforms to provide the number of perspectives we perhaps need. It's easier than ever to get content online thanks to the likes of Wordpress, but harder than ever to get people to see it. Most webmasters who have an inkling of some information about SEO are too scared to link out in fear of receiving a penalty from Google. Now social media platforms are acting as the Internet police. This kind of thinking stifles the way the web was supposed to work.

a_imho 6y ago

The internet is not that important.

zathrus_writer 6y ago

I seriously wished this was posted by a one "Agent Smith" :-D

nazgulnarsil 6y ago

I lay all of this at the feet of email not evolving into the use cases people have.