11 ms·

Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History

142 points by Amorymeltzer 6y ago

zeroz 6y ago
> Germany and France attacked Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. after U.S. President Donald Trump was shut off from the social media platforms, in an extension of Europe’s battle with big tech. German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions, saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private technology companies. > Rights like the freedom of speech “can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature — not according to a corporate decision.” As much as I support this pure democratic view of Angela Merkel, and as much as I hope Ben Thompson is right with his Internet 3.0 "Return of technology" and "open protocols" idea to have a counterweight to big corp, I think it's really difficult to escape Internet 2.0 economics. e.g. EU Cookie law - Good intention and poor implementation. Whatsapp vs. X - We all on HN know, we want better, but network effects are really strong.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Merkel's view might be interpreted as pro-free speech at a glance, but the corollary of what she's saying is that no single entity should wield as much power as Facebook, Twitter, and Google at all. It's to be interpreted in the sense that additional legislative weight should be put behind disrupting the quasi-monopolistic dominance of these entities.
  - kodah 6y ago
    Having followed Angela Merkel's comments in the past I did not read her comments as "pro free speech". I read them as a concern about power. What happened this week, in the long term, will likely be looked on poorly by history.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      > What happened this week, in the long term, will likely be looked on poorly by history. It might well be, but it's worth keeping in mind that this isn't mutually exclusive with what happened last week. I don't just mean the armed insurrection in the Capitol with the tacit support of a sitting president who lost his re-election bid; I mean that, for a full week, no government agency even made an official statement about that insurrection. The real story of January 2021 may well be that private companies have stepped in to take action not merely because they could, but because the government refused to do so. While I share Ben Thompson's discomfort at private entities having this kind of power over the public sphere, the even more uncomfortable truth is that we -- both (primarily American) citizenry and (primarily American) government -- have ceded that power to them.
      - kodah 6y ago
        > but because the government refused to do so. This is just narrative. Immediately after the Capitol riots people were trying to create narratives that the FBI and Capitol Hill police intentionally didn't do their job. That turned out not to be true, as the piece by Brian Stelter showed. This reasoning seems to be a further manipulated form of that. I would not expect the American government to be making public statements. Generally it's the president that addresses the public and obviously in this case he didn't.
        chipotle_coyote 6y ago
        s/just narrative/plain statement of fact/ I didn't mention the FBI or the Capitol Police. There was an armed attack on Congress while it was in session and the federal government has not made an official public statement about it. Maybe you think there's nothing remotely weird about that. I do. Maybe you think no other administration would have had multiple briefings from law enforcement by now. I don't.
        kodah 6y ago
        > Maybe you think there's nothing remotely weird about that. I do. Maybe you think no other administration would have had multiple briefings from law enforcement by now. I don't. I do not. I would expect that in any terrorist incident, like 9/11 or others, that the President would be orchestrating a response. Clearly the President has been implicated in these things so that's not going to happen. You have Congress preparing impeachment documents and the FBI has responded to journalists, many of which created immediately hostile narratives about law enforcement. I do not know what else you're expecting them to do at this point. If I were the FBI I would not be saying anything either. I'd have agents out in the field collecting evidence and arresting people, getting the story and having them turn in their coconspirators. If you make some sort of statement it prompts them to destroy evidence.
  - qsort 6y ago
    > It's to be interpreted in the sense that additional legislative weight should be put behind disrupting the quasi-monopolistic dominance of these entities. I tend to agree with your read, i.e. this has nothing to do with freedom-of-speech type issues and everything to do with Germany (and Europe more generally) positioning themselves against Big Tech; my only question is why now. I'd love nothing more than to see Facebook/Twitter take a beating, but in this particular case there isn't really any strong argument that the government should have intervened and prevented Twitter from blocking Trump. Is this just an extreme case of carpe diem?
- qsort 6y ago
  > As much as I support this pure democratic view Honestly I really struggle to see why this would even be 'democratic'. There's a pretty strong and convincing argument that it would be better if Twitter hadn't blocked Trump, but the notion that the government should be allowed to force at gunpoint a private entity to amplify speech that such entity disagrees with doesn't strike me as particularly democratic. I get it, Twitter bad, I agree. But the implications of this idea are frankly much scarier than any "corporate decision" will ever be.
  - zeroz 6y ago
    With constitutionality free speech the government shouldn't be allowed to force a private entity to amplify or censor speech. And don't get me wrong. I was happy about the ban in this moment. On the other hand I wouldn't like to give all moderation power to private entities alone. If not opportune with current business model, company ethics are quickly changed (e.g. don't be evil). As long as you have small decentralized shops and platforms that's ok. With concentration of power a private company nearly acts like a utility. Maybe some kind of neutral and elected ethics committee could help large private platforms to maintain transparent and democratic standards. Would they have blocked him even earlier?
    - qsort 6y ago
      > With concentration of power a private company nearly acts like a utility. I agree this is a problem. I believe the more rational way to solve it is to break the monopoly, i.e. using antitrust powers more aggressively and letting the market decide, rather than having some committee decide what's kosher. > elected Holy cow please no. I'm willing to believe you have the best of intentions, but anything elected would 100% become a stupid political game from day one. And even if it didn't, popular votes on issues that potentially impact individual rights are a terrible idea: if 51% of the public votes $VERY_BAD_THING, do we have to go along with it? We enshrine fundamental rights in constitutions precisely because we don't want them to be endangered by the current political wind.
  - piaste 6y ago
    > the notion that the government should be allowed to force at gunpoint a private entity to amplify speech that such entity disagrees with doesn't strike me as particularly democratic. "Private entity" is a very broad category that encompasses everything from individual citizens/entrepreneurs to trillion-dollar multinational corporations with armies of shareholders, lobbyists, and lawyers. I think there are plenty of scenarios where the law should discriminate between the latter and the former, and this is one of them.
- greatgib 6y ago
  This is the usual hypocrisy of european politicians. Things are ok and not problematic when it is them that do it because they have the power. But when they are the subjects of similar things, then they don't like and want to have this power for them. There is a very good and ironic example of that in France: The former president Nicolas Sarkozy created and pushed a lot of nefarious 'security' laws when he was president. For example, the possibility for police to monitor phone calls without a warrant and things like that. To critics, he was replying that the state is 'trustful' and that only bad people could fear for their privacy. Back now, a few years later, police wiretapped a phone line that he opened under a fake name to secretly discuss about another police investigation that is currently targeting him and he allegedly used this line to abuse of authority and try to get insider knowledge from law officials in exchange for a special position. At his trial and in medias, he cried everywhere that it is unfair and abused that his phone lines could have been wiretapped like that to provide evidences against him. Like if he is a victim and not the person that pushed these bad security laws against the population despite a lot of critics of people concerned by freedom and privacy topics.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I don’t know that I’d call it hypocrisy. Most European politicians who’ve commented on this seem to be expressing a strong, principled view that the state is on top and nobody should be allowed to exercise power over it. This sounds strange to a lot of us in the US, where we don’t generally believe the government deserves special respect, but it’s our attitude that’s atypical from a global perspective.
    - greatgib 6y ago
      I can understand that from far you could have this impression that they have good will and for them "the state is on top and nobody should be allowed to exercise power over it". But make no mistake, this is just communication/propaganda and what makes me say that it is hypocrisy. Politics here are champions of double talk. Despite pretending to be democracies, a lot of leaders are now trying to grab the maximum power and undermine citizen decision power. For example, in France, normally the President and government is just here to execute the laws decided by the national assembly. But in the past decade, majority members of the national assembly are now in a party whose purpose is to "support the president" and so, you could be excluded if you would not vote like the president want you to. Also, more and more the government decide new laws unilaterally, sometimes in secret or after secret negotiations with lobbies, and will do everything needed to force the assembly to approve it. Sometimes it is just pressure, sometimes it is manipulations like presenting multiple time the same law, even if it is rejected, until it will pass. Or a present it at a specific time, like at night when there are other events, so that opposition will not have time to come to vote. They are also more frequently using anti democratic tools when they can't manage to have their law to pass, like something call 49.1 that enact a law without vote of the national assembly. And lastly, we have seen the case a lot with "fake news" and "hate speech", where governement or governement member will spread "fake news" or send bad "hate" messages. But when you have breaking news of bad behavior of them, then they will pretend that it is "fake news"/"hate" message, and that the state should be able to censor that. In this regard, they are very similar to Trump. To give one last example, during the first part of the covid crisis, the government knew that they did not have enough mask, because of bad management, and instead of telling the truth, they said that pharmacy were not allowed to sell them, because people would not know how to use them and that they are useless to deal with the covid. Later the proof was given that they were voluntarily lying.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  I don't see a way out of this that doesn't include government-funded technology services. If Twitter is a free speech platform to be used by the people, there is no way to exercise that consistently without violating Twitter's rights. I know the US built a public postal service because we saw mail delivery as a requirement for a functioning country. Is the infrastructure necessary to run an Internet now falling into the same category? And not just the cables, but the routing technology, hosting technology, etc. More like AWS than Comcast. Where is the line, other than for protected classes?
  - bcheung 6y ago
    I would much rather see something more decentralized. It seems like politics is increasingly looking like whichever party is in power uses their power to get more power. There is definitely an argument to be made that the Internet is so much ingrained in society that denying people Internet access is like denying people access to grocery stores and electricity.
- qu-everything 6y ago
  Fuck lawmakers. it's their platform, they can ban whoever break their TOS.
  - galuggus 6y ago
    Do you think you shops should be allowed to refuse service to anyone they want to?
    - qu-everything 6y ago
      if they break rules, yes
      - dominotw 6y ago
        they can come up with whatever "rules" they want. So its superfluous to say "if they break rules" .
        oscargrouch 6y ago
        To give more context to this: imagine a seller that defines as a rule to discriminate clients by their skin color. The rule of the law prevents we get back to the rule of the jungle which resorts to the more powerful actors forcing their will against all others.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    > Fuck lawmakers. you are against anti trust, anti labor, anti discrimination laws that were passed by "lawmakers" . I pray this thinking doesn't go mainstream.
zpeti 6y ago
Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. They just can't move as quickly, or deliver good enough products. What I think internet 3.0 will be is websites and services segregated politically, just like the media is. Just like we have CNN and Fox, we will have Twitter and [Parler?] Facebook and Rightbook. It will take time to build. But the assault on half the country will result in the market taking care of this. Just like parler almost did. (It's not clear exactly what Ben means by his internet 3.0, his article could be interpreted this way as he says "decentralised".)
- seneca 6y ago
  > non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. They just can't move as quickly, or deliver good enough products. How do you reconcile that statement with the absolute dominance of Linux? I don't think they this is universally true. Maybe with the qualification "... for consumer products". I think the rest of your comment is probably, sadly, accurate.
  - geodel 6y ago
    Seems to me Linux success is largely due to commercial vendors developing many features as aggressively as they would do for closed source products. If it were just engineers working gratis on saturday afternoon Linux wouldn't be where it is today.
    - dgb23 6y ago
      Isn't that an argument for it being free and open? Whether contributors get paid is orthogonal to freedom and openness. It's hard to imagine what would have happened if there was no GNU Linux, Apache, SQLite... [insert gigantic list of open source technology that almost everyone in our field relies on].
- mkr-hn 6y ago
  I think the events of the last week will give a boost to things like ActivityPub. It has over a million active users, and two of the big projects (Mastodon and PeerTube) came out of EU countries. They have their problems, but if I were an official looking to reduce dependence on the US, that's where I would start.
eternalban 6y ago
> The place we compute shifted from a central location to anywhere; the time in which we compute shifted from batch processes to continuous computing. An interesting case of a true statement that is (imo) actually turning facts upside down. Yes, it is true, "the place" where we access information and computing services is now "anywhere", since we carry a jazzed-up dumb terminal in our pockets. All computation is now actually happening in central systems called "clouds". This was Larry Ellision's vision as articulated in late 90s. The kicker of the analysis is this: What is notable is that the current environment appears to be the logical endpoint of all of these changes: from batch-processing to continuous computing, from a terminal in a different room to a phone in your pocket, from a tape drive to data centers all over the globe. In this view the personal computer/on-premises server era was simply a stepping stone between two ends of a clearly defined range. Centralized clouds are not the "logical" conclusion of what happened in the 80s and 90s. Personal computing was precisely that: Personal. Your machine, your code. My personal speculative understanding of this transitional period in history of computing is that PC caught the policy makers by surprise. What we have now with clouds was the vision of IBM in 60s and early 70s. The 'black swan' of PC, which was coincidental with public cryptographic breakthroughs (PGP), placed serious obstacles in terms of projected policy goals, which certainly included considerations pertaining to sensitive national security capabilites, such as dissemination of information, and ad-hoc network communication. (Raise your hand if you remember clipper chip efforts, for example). So yes, the "range" was "clearly defined" per policy recommendations coming out of think-tanks, then PC happened and we spent 2 decades watching the co-option of the PC champions by Big Tech and SV money, and now we're treated to convenient "this is where we were supposed to be folks!" narratives. Try again.
- the-dude 6y ago
  Raises hand :-) But the point I wanted to make was : making web requests is batch-processing. These are short-lived executions of code and it does not matter if the process dies at the end. It can be restarted for every web/batch-request. Which is something fundamentally different than an application ( video-editor, game etc ).
  - eternalban 6y ago
da_big_ghey 6y ago
> Companies, meanwhile, will note the fate of Parler. This is one of the most significant things that I've already seen. Many discussions in the past few days about how this represents a business risk. E-mails from providers about TOS updates, some even saying that if a client gets caught up in something or indicted, we get kicked. Many similar stories from others; companies starting to invest in at least making their tech multi-cloud or multi-cloud-ready. This may drive a shift from cloud computing as well: it's more difficult to shut off a company that runs its own data center.
- Abhinav2000 6y ago
  Thing is, cloud computing is actually quite expensive. There's a reason why Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM are all lining up to grab a piece of the pie. Yes there are economies of scale which means overall the cost should be lower, but once you factor in profit margins, I'm not sure. The main benefit is definitely not requiring as much technical acumen or teams to build your infrastructure, but as more skilled workers enter the labour force, I think that too will start to get marginalised to some degree and teams will shift back to having their own IT departments. Just a guess. I personally hate the cloud, way too expensive for me and the design choices they do are geared towards profit maximisation and not building a partnership with customers where both win. E.g. so many different modules, each with limited functionality...when I can just run my own virtual server and do everything myself much better
  - dominotw 6y ago
    > but as more skilled workers enter the labour force, I think that too will start to get marginalised to some degree and teams will shift back to having their own IT departments I am not sure if this would the case though. Why would an employer use skilled workers to do something mundane like setting up a kubernetes cluster vs something that actually differentiate their own business from others.
    - dcolkitt 6y ago
      Large and established businesses hire high-paid high-skilled workers to coordinate their legal affairs, maintain their accounting, manage their public image, and control their finances. None of those things are part of the core business or product differentiation. Yet large corporate orgs still expend enormous amounts of resources on those activities. In fact in most companies the second highest-paid executive is the COO, which pretty much just means the guy in charge of all non-core activities. I think the simple answer is that most corporates are highly risk averse. Being in startup culture blinds you to this. Startups are comfortable with existential threats in the background, because they're constantly on the verge of failure anyway. They might neglect their liability, public image, or cloud TOS risk. Fast innovation in the core product is a far higher priority for a hypergrowth startup. In contrast, large and mature organizations are going to be extremely sensitive even to small risks. The typical large company is slow-growing but highly profitable. The number one priority is to avoid killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Think of the most conservative, bean-counting , button-down loan officer in suburban Topeka. Once "Cloud TOS Risk" enters the business lexicon, said beancounter is likely going to insist that the company in question has a plan, before releasing the tens of millions in loan refinancing that modern corporate America relies on in their leverage capital structures. It doesn't matter how big of an actual risk is. These processes are driven by "check-the-box" CYA theatre.
danrl 6y ago
You have to have a really weird business model or otherwise borderline content to risk getting kicked off from AWS. Sure, a risk for businesses to track, but surely a very low risk (with admittedly high impact).
- deleted 6y ago
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- user22 6y ago
  I think the test is pretty straight forward and is basically an issue of risk and is not really directly related to the internet. If having anything to do with X creates the perception of Y being liable for any legal and civil improprieties, then Y will dissolve any of its relationships with X. <my take> For the parler case, Amazon didn't want to be held responsible for hosting content that (maybe) caused the problems in that nations capital, and certainly doesn't want to be held responsible for any future content/actions. I think this can be justified by preservation of shareholder value. </my take>
- rhino369 6y ago
  We don't know what the line is going to be going forward. If it is refusal to take down calls for violence or other illegal content--well that seems pretty fair to me. But we should be skeptical of what exactly big tech will do this power going forward.
deleted 6y ago
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BGthaOG 6y ago
A though on the author's words: > Megalothymia is “the desire to be recognized as superior to other people”, and “can be manifest both in the tyrant who invades and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven”; successful liberal democracies channel this desire into fields like entrepreneurship or competition, including electoral politics. Trump can be described as someone who has megalothymia, wielding his money and more recently politics to assert his perception of himself as 'superior'. This, along with what I opine is blindness of the heart, leveraging this megalothymia as a tool to worship his ego. These recent days, a number of tech companies, of course made up of people, flexed back when they felt their reasoning outweighed the risks of such a decision. Is this tyranny from these powerful people (Companies et al.)? And thus we are seeing folks (Trump & Companies et al.) taste each others tyranny, taking turns? Or are companies et al. simply claiming a piece of that same echelon Trump claims for himself, as an act of fighting back against a tyrant? Or some third or fourth option... etc.
stronglikedan 6y ago
It's time to make political viewpoints a protected class in the US. Tyrants silence dissenters, not the other way around.
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  That is an impossibly broad category. Anything could be construed as political in one way or another. This would result in no one being allowed to remove anyone at all from their property or platform.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  I cannot help but suspect that such a move would go down in history books as the reigning champion of Reasonable-Sounding Laws With Terrible Consequences.
- deleted 6y ago
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RhodoYolo 6y ago
This brings up the question - What is the role of government? Ensure contracts are upheld, to harm bad actors (via prison, fines, etc.) and to protect us from foreign invasion. so, where did that fall apart in our current American system and what can we do to save our democracy? As the article has hinted at, regulation has gotten too esoteric for a bipartisan split in congress. When you have almost 500 people arguing about the use of SPACS for going public, limits on PPE loan, rights of citizens and business in regard to the pandemic, etc. etc. John adams said 'God forbid we be 20 years from [..] a rebellion.' We as Americans need a bit more of a centralized system and move a bit more towards an oligarchy. Same things that plagued the roman republic (Bipartisan politics) are plaguing our system. Augustus' answer? bring it down to him and 30 other people who where the most important people from each 'area' and the only thing that gave him more power than the rest was the fact the he was the only member who didn't rotate. Otherwise, it still came down to voting albeit with a forum that allowed for open discussion without rambling into nonsense and listing to 500 people say the same thing over and over. Eth can uphold contracts
- osgovernment 6y ago
  I for one have been a huge fan of platforms like Kubernetes, because at least they abstract the cloud away from specific providers to some degree. Had they additionally used IPFS for storage, switching cloud providers wouldn't be much of a burden at all. Most enterprises building redundancy also have to think of what happens if one of their cloud providers go offline. The problem is that many companies are so invested in AWS that they don't know anything else. Many companies are building their entire IT around AWS. In that regard, unless we create legislation that requires unified APIs and an open standard for cloud services; then we are going to have to start treating cloud providers like utilities. I supported Twitter kicking Trump off its platform. I think AWS kicking Parler off is practically crossing the line, and that legislation needs to be made to tell cloud providers that they need to create an open standard for their services or be considered an essential utility.
bumbada 6y ago
Centralization works for a reason: It makes prices go down. For a company like Google, Twitter or Facebook it matters very little if they have 100, 1.000 million users or 2.000, or 3.000. Most of the cost is in salaries and the salaries are the same because the technology is scalable. Once they have the market of hundreds or billions of users, almost nobody can compete with them because even paying enormous salaries the price per user is very small. The problem with decentralization is that they don't have scale, so it is a serious problem just paying a single engineer salary.
- f430 6y ago
  They were built in the early days of computing but now our smartphones are far more powerful than desktops of 5 to 10 years ago. Moore's law suggests that this trend will continue (unless purposefully downgrading performance to increase repurchases) and with 6G coming, we shouldn't need to be so dependent on the classic datacenter-client architecture wich is the very source of FANG's power. The new Internet and decentralization completely shifts this power-balance towards the masses. It is democratization of our data instead of being arbitraged by FANG who pay pennies on the dollar to resell it to others.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Is there any significance that he chose "Internet 3.0" rather than "Web 3.0". I think it is important to distinguish between websites/broadcast SMS (Facebook, Twitter), hosting providers (AWS, GCP) and "app stores" (Apple, Google). I hope readers understand the differences. Here is a thought experiment: How large of an audience, i.e., how many daily visitors, does a website need to have before an act of banning a contributor becomes a free speech issue. What is that magic number, the threshhold over which the website comes to be perceived as a home for "free speech". Most websites fall below this threshhold. For example, journalists, bloggers, politicians, etc. do not debate hellbanning on HN as a free speech issue. What is this number. Or is it something else.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  > For example, we do not debate hellbanning on HN as a free speech issue. You clearly don't have showdead marked. There are persistent (and, I should say, entirely incoherent) complaints about speech suppression in the gray comments at the bottom of many threads (often still riddled with the slurs that actually got the user banned).
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
    Point taken. I will have to enable showdead and see what I'm missing. However that is not what was meant by "we". I have edited the comment to be more clear.
- jacobr1 6y ago
  > Is there any significance that he chose "Internet 3.0" rather than "Web 3.0". I think so, the closing point of the article is that we are due for a return to decentralization, even if that is spurred on in the short-term by "competing centralized solutions." The primitives required to run distributed/federated services that can compete with the big web giants probably aren't there just yet, but they are starting to emerge. With cloud hosting providers, K8s is a big step forward, because you can deploy an open-source system end-to-end an arbitrary cloud k8s platform. Part of the pain of switching to more open alternatives in the past has been managing operational deployments which this begins to address. Blockchain technologies, for all their misuse and hype have brought us some interesting innovations such as the InterPlanetary File System (which probably isn't going anywhere but is a start). None of this is better than the current crop of closed system, compare Diaspora to Facebook for example, but we have the start. But you can only have the "Web" applications he envisions if you have the "distributed internet substrate."
RGamma 6y ago
To be fair, concerning Western civilisations it's the North Americans who have become the most crazy; always have been quirky, but in the past decade ever more so. Turbocapitalism might have something to do with it... Always worth remembering, that sane societies with sane institutions and conduct exist. One has to consider the "human element" if one wants to keep it that way.
devmunchies 6y ago
I would like to see a rise in decentralized services, but it's not possible while Apple and Google's curated stores are the only way to install apps on a smart phone. As soon as you can install an app from a file like you can on desktop, then we can have some real progress. I'm thinking of Apple saying "we won't let you download that app" for my macbook. How did we let them have that power on mobile computing?
- kiwidrew 6y ago
  It's still perfectly possible (for now) to use an alternative app store like F-Droid on Android phones. It requires sideloading an .apk (literally "install an app from a file") and jumping through a couple hoops (basically: changing your security settings to allow installing apps from a file) to get started, but it's not an insurmountable barrier. Apple is of course a totally different story, as their devices are 100% locked down walled gardens where Apple is the sole arbiter of what software you're allowed to install. It continues to astound me that a substantial number of HN users see absolutely nothing wrong with this.
- MR4D 6y ago
  > it's not possible while Apple and Google's curated stores are the only way to install apps I disagree. We have DNS, email, and HTTP. That's a pretty capable set of distributed protocols that have been on those phones since the beginning. The stores are not a problem here (although they are in other ways); rather, there is a lack of apps that people want to use, or perhaps a lack of people using those apps. I use Riot (now Element), which uses the Matrix protocol across all my iDevices, and it runs just as well as on my Mac. but hardly anyone I know is on it. It's much more private of a solution that WhatsApp, and although not as refined, it works pretty darn well for my use cases.
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    If we're talking about technical feasibility, then you're right, it's possible to compete with the app store with the web browser. However, the masses don't care about technology and protocols. It's about convenience and motivation. Any extra step will decrease adoption and engagement on the whole. All things being equal, if it takes any more energy to do something then, statistically, it will be done less.

142 points by Amorymeltzer 6y ago

> Germany and France attacked Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. after U.S. President Donald Trump was shut off from the social media platforms, in an extension of Europe’s battle with big tech. German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions, saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private technology companies. > Rights like the freedom of speech “can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature — not according to a corporate decision.” As much as I support this pure democratic view of Angela Merkel, and as much as I hope Ben Thompson is right with his Internet 3.0 "Return of technology" and "open protocols" idea to have a counterweight to big corp, I think it's really difficult to escape Internet 2.0 economics. e.g. EU Cookie law - Good intention and poor implementation. Whatsapp vs. X - We all on HN know, we want better, but network effects are really strong.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
Merkel's view might be interpreted as pro-free speech at a glance, but the corollary of what she's saying is that no single entity should wield as much power as Facebook, Twitter, and Google at all. It's to be interpreted in the sense that additional legislative weight should be put behind disrupting the quasi-monopolistic dominance of these entities.
- kodah 6y ago
  Having followed Angela Merkel's comments in the past I did not read her comments as "pro free speech". I read them as a concern about power. What happened this week, in the long term, will likely be looked on poorly by history.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    > What happened this week, in the long term, will likely be looked on poorly by history. It might well be, but it's worth keeping in mind that this isn't mutually exclusive with what happened last week. I don't just mean the armed insurrection in the Capitol with the tacit support of a sitting president who lost his re-election bid; I mean that, for a full week, no government agency even made an official statement about that insurrection. The real story of January 2021 may well be that private companies have stepped in to take action not merely because they could, but because the government refused to do so. While I share Ben Thompson's discomfort at private entities having this kind of power over the public sphere, the even more uncomfortable truth is that we -- both (primarily American) citizenry and (primarily American) government -- have ceded that power to them.
    - kodah 6y ago
      > but because the government refused to do so. This is just narrative. Immediately after the Capitol riots people were trying to create narratives that the FBI and Capitol Hill police intentionally didn't do their job. That turned out not to be true, as the piece by Brian Stelter showed. This reasoning seems to be a further manipulated form of that. I would not expect the American government to be making public statements. Generally it's the president that addresses the public and obviously in this case he didn't.
      - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
        s/just narrative/plain statement of fact/ I didn't mention the FBI or the Capitol Police. There was an armed attack on Congress while it was in session and the federal government has not made an official public statement about it. Maybe you think there's nothing remotely weird about that. I do. Maybe you think no other administration would have had multiple briefings from law enforcement by now. I don't.
        kodah 6y ago
        > Maybe you think there's nothing remotely weird about that. I do. Maybe you think no other administration would have had multiple briefings from law enforcement by now. I don't. I do not. I would expect that in any terrorist incident, like 9/11 or others, that the President would be orchestrating a response. Clearly the President has been implicated in these things so that's not going to happen. You have Congress preparing impeachment documents and the FBI has responded to journalists, many of which created immediately hostile narratives about law enforcement. I do not know what else you're expecting them to do at this point. If I were the FBI I would not be saying anything either. I'd have agents out in the field collecting evidence and arresting people, getting the story and having them turn in their coconspirators. If you make some sort of statement it prompts them to destroy evidence.
- qsort 6y ago
  > It's to be interpreted in the sense that additional legislative weight should be put behind disrupting the quasi-monopolistic dominance of these entities. I tend to agree with your read, i.e. this has nothing to do with freedom-of-speech type issues and everything to do with Germany (and Europe more generally) positioning themselves against Big Tech; my only question is why now. I'd love nothing more than to see Facebook/Twitter take a beating, but in this particular case there isn't really any strong argument that the government should have intervened and prevented Twitter from blocking Trump. Is this just an extreme case of carpe diem?
qsort 6y ago
> As much as I support this pure democratic view Honestly I really struggle to see why this would even be 'democratic'. There's a pretty strong and convincing argument that it would be better if Twitter hadn't blocked Trump, but the notion that the government should be allowed to force at gunpoint a private entity to amplify speech that such entity disagrees with doesn't strike me as particularly democratic. I get it, Twitter bad, I agree. But the implications of this idea are frankly much scarier than any "corporate decision" will ever be.
- zeroz 6y ago
  With constitutionality free speech the government shouldn't be allowed to force a private entity to amplify or censor speech. And don't get me wrong. I was happy about the ban in this moment. On the other hand I wouldn't like to give all moderation power to private entities alone. If not opportune with current business model, company ethics are quickly changed (e.g. don't be evil). As long as you have small decentralized shops and platforms that's ok. With concentration of power a private company nearly acts like a utility. Maybe some kind of neutral and elected ethics committee could help large private platforms to maintain transparent and democratic standards. Would they have blocked him even earlier?
  - qsort 6y ago
    > With concentration of power a private company nearly acts like a utility. I agree this is a problem. I believe the more rational way to solve it is to break the monopoly, i.e. using antitrust powers more aggressively and letting the market decide, rather than having some committee decide what's kosher. > elected Holy cow please no. I'm willing to believe you have the best of intentions, but anything elected would 100% become a stupid political game from day one. And even if it didn't, popular votes on issues that potentially impact individual rights are a terrible idea: if 51% of the public votes $VERY_BAD_THING, do we have to go along with it? We enshrine fundamental rights in constitutions precisely because we don't want them to be endangered by the current political wind.
- piaste 6y ago
  > the notion that the government should be allowed to force at gunpoint a private entity to amplify speech that such entity disagrees with doesn't strike me as particularly democratic. "Private entity" is a very broad category that encompasses everything from individual citizens/entrepreneurs to trillion-dollar multinational corporations with armies of shareholders, lobbyists, and lawyers. I think there are plenty of scenarios where the law should discriminate between the latter and the former, and this is one of them.
greatgib 6y ago
This is the usual hypocrisy of european politicians. Things are ok and not problematic when it is them that do it because they have the power. But when they are the subjects of similar things, then they don't like and want to have this power for them. There is a very good and ironic example of that in France: The former president Nicolas Sarkozy created and pushed a lot of nefarious 'security' laws when he was president. For example, the possibility for police to monitor phone calls without a warrant and things like that. To critics, he was replying that the state is 'trustful' and that only bad people could fear for their privacy. Back now, a few years later, police wiretapped a phone line that he opened under a fake name to secretly discuss about another police investigation that is currently targeting him and he allegedly used this line to abuse of authority and try to get insider knowledge from law officials in exchange for a special position. At his trial and in medias, he cried everywhere that it is unfair and abused that his phone lines could have been wiretapped like that to provide evidences against him. Like if he is a victim and not the person that pushed these bad security laws against the population despite a lot of critics of people concerned by freedom and privacy topics.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I don’t know that I’d call it hypocrisy. Most European politicians who’ve commented on this seem to be expressing a strong, principled view that the state is on top and nobody should be allowed to exercise power over it. This sounds strange to a lot of us in the US, where we don’t generally believe the government deserves special respect, but it’s our attitude that’s atypical from a global perspective.
  - greatgib 6y ago
    I can understand that from far you could have this impression that they have good will and for them "the state is on top and nobody should be allowed to exercise power over it". But make no mistake, this is just communication/propaganda and what makes me say that it is hypocrisy. Politics here are champions of double talk. Despite pretending to be democracies, a lot of leaders are now trying to grab the maximum power and undermine citizen decision power. For example, in France, normally the President and government is just here to execute the laws decided by the national assembly. But in the past decade, majority members of the national assembly are now in a party whose purpose is to "support the president" and so, you could be excluded if you would not vote like the president want you to. Also, more and more the government decide new laws unilaterally, sometimes in secret or after secret negotiations with lobbies, and will do everything needed to force the assembly to approve it. Sometimes it is just pressure, sometimes it is manipulations like presenting multiple time the same law, even if it is rejected, until it will pass. Or a present it at a specific time, like at night when there are other events, so that opposition will not have time to come to vote. They are also more frequently using anti democratic tools when they can't manage to have their law to pass, like something call 49.1 that enact a law without vote of the national assembly. And lastly, we have seen the case a lot with "fake news" and "hate speech", where governement or governement member will spread "fake news" or send bad "hate" messages. But when you have breaking news of bad behavior of them, then they will pretend that it is "fake news"/"hate" message, and that the state should be able to censor that. In this regard, they are very similar to Trump. To give one last example, during the first part of the covid crisis, the government knew that they did not have enough mask, because of bad management, and instead of telling the truth, they said that pharmacy were not allowed to sell them, because people would not know how to use them and that they are useless to deal with the covid. Later the proof was given that they were voluntarily lying.
TameAntelope 6y ago
I don't see a way out of this that doesn't include government-funded technology services. If Twitter is a free speech platform to be used by the people, there is no way to exercise that consistently without violating Twitter's rights. I know the US built a public postal service because we saw mail delivery as a requirement for a functioning country. Is the infrastructure necessary to run an Internet now falling into the same category? And not just the cables, but the routing technology, hosting technology, etc. More like AWS than Comcast. Where is the line, other than for protected classes?
- bcheung 6y ago
  I would much rather see something more decentralized. It seems like politics is increasingly looking like whichever party is in power uses their power to get more power. There is definitely an argument to be made that the Internet is so much ingrained in society that denying people Internet access is like denying people access to grocery stores and electricity.
qu-everything 6y ago
Fuck lawmakers. it's their platform, they can ban whoever break their TOS.
- galuggus 6y ago
  Do you think you shops should be allowed to refuse service to anyone they want to?
  - qu-everything 6y ago
    if they break rules, yes
    - dominotw 6y ago
      they can come up with whatever "rules" they want. So its superfluous to say "if they break rules" .
      - oscargrouch 6y ago
        To give more context to this: imagine a seller that defines as a rule to discriminate clients by their skin color. The rule of the law prevents we get back to the rule of the jungle which resorts to the more powerful actors forcing their will against all others.
- dominotw 6y ago
  > Fuck lawmakers. you are against anti trust, anti labor, anti discrimination laws that were passed by "lawmakers" . I pray this thinking doesn't go mainstream.

zpeti 6y ago

Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. They just can't move as quickly, or deliver good enough products. What I think internet 3.0 will be is websites and services segregated politically, just like the media is. Just like we have CNN and Fox, we will have Twitter and [Parler?] Facebook and Rightbook. It will take time to build. But the assault on half the country will result in the market taking care of this. Just like parler almost did. (It's not clear exactly what Ben means by his internet 3.0, his article could be interpreted this way as he says "decentralised".)

seneca 6y ago
> non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. They just can't move as quickly, or deliver good enough products. How do you reconcile that statement with the absolute dominance of Linux? I don't think they this is universally true. Maybe with the qualification "... for consumer products". I think the rest of your comment is probably, sadly, accurate.
- geodel 6y ago
  Seems to me Linux success is largely due to commercial vendors developing many features as aggressively as they would do for closed source products. If it were just engineers working gratis on saturday afternoon Linux wouldn't be where it is today.
  - dgb23 6y ago
    Isn't that an argument for it being free and open? Whether contributors get paid is orthogonal to freedom and openness. It's hard to imagine what would have happened if there was no GNU Linux, Apache, SQLite... [insert gigantic list of open source technology that almost everyone in our field relies on].
mkr-hn 6y ago
I think the events of the last week will give a boost to things like ActivityPub. It has over a million active users, and two of the big projects (Mastodon and PeerTube) came out of EU countries. They have their problems, but if I were an official looking to reduce dependence on the US, that's where I would start.

eternalban 6y ago

> The place we compute shifted from a central location to anywhere; the time in which we compute shifted from batch processes to continuous computing. An interesting case of a true statement that is (imo) actually turning facts upside down. Yes, it is true, "the place" where we access information and computing services is now "anywhere", since we carry a jazzed-up dumb terminal in our pockets. All computation is now actually happening in central systems called "clouds". This was Larry Ellision's vision as articulated in late 90s. The kicker of the analysis is this: What is notable is that the current environment appears to be the logical endpoint of all of these changes: from batch-processing to continuous computing, from a terminal in a different room to a phone in your pocket, from a tape drive to data centers all over the globe. In this view the personal computer/on-premises server era was simply a stepping stone between two ends of a clearly defined range. Centralized clouds are not the "logical" conclusion of what happened in the 80s and 90s. Personal computing was precisely that: Personal. Your machine, your code. My personal speculative understanding of this transitional period in history of computing is that PC caught the policy makers by surprise. What we have now with clouds was the vision of IBM in 60s and early 70s. The 'black swan' of PC, which was coincidental with public cryptographic breakthroughs (PGP), placed serious obstacles in terms of projected policy goals, which certainly included considerations pertaining to sensitive national security capabilites, such as dissemination of information, and ad-hoc network communication. (Raise your hand if you remember clipper chip efforts, for example). So yes, the "range" was "clearly defined" per policy recommendations coming out of think-tanks, then PC happened and we spent 2 decades watching the co-option of the PC champions by Big Tech and SV money, and now we're treated to convenient "this is where we were supposed to be folks!" narratives. Try again.

the-dude 6y ago
Raises hand :-) But the point I wanted to make was : making web requests is batch-processing. These are short-lived executions of code and it does not matter if the process dies at the end. It can be restarted for every web/batch-request. Which is something fundamentally different than an application ( video-editor, game etc ).
- eternalban 6y ago

da_big_ghey 6y ago

> Companies, meanwhile, will note the fate of Parler. This is one of the most significant things that I've already seen. Many discussions in the past few days about how this represents a business risk. E-mails from providers about TOS updates, some even saying that if a client gets caught up in something or indicted, we get kicked. Many similar stories from others; companies starting to invest in at least making their tech multi-cloud or multi-cloud-ready. This may drive a shift from cloud computing as well: it's more difficult to shut off a company that runs its own data center.

Abhinav2000 6y ago
Thing is, cloud computing is actually quite expensive. There's a reason why Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM are all lining up to grab a piece of the pie. Yes there are economies of scale which means overall the cost should be lower, but once you factor in profit margins, I'm not sure. The main benefit is definitely not requiring as much technical acumen or teams to build your infrastructure, but as more skilled workers enter the labour force, I think that too will start to get marginalised to some degree and teams will shift back to having their own IT departments. Just a guess. I personally hate the cloud, way too expensive for me and the design choices they do are geared towards profit maximisation and not building a partnership with customers where both win. E.g. so many different modules, each with limited functionality...when I can just run my own virtual server and do everything myself much better
- dominotw 6y ago
  > but as more skilled workers enter the labour force, I think that too will start to get marginalised to some degree and teams will shift back to having their own IT departments I am not sure if this would the case though. Why would an employer use skilled workers to do something mundane like setting up a kubernetes cluster vs something that actually differentiate their own business from others.
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    Large and established businesses hire high-paid high-skilled workers to coordinate their legal affairs, maintain their accounting, manage their public image, and control their finances. None of those things are part of the core business or product differentiation. Yet large corporate orgs still expend enormous amounts of resources on those activities. In fact in most companies the second highest-paid executive is the COO, which pretty much just means the guy in charge of all non-core activities. I think the simple answer is that most corporates are highly risk averse. Being in startup culture blinds you to this. Startups are comfortable with existential threats in the background, because they're constantly on the verge of failure anyway. They might neglect their liability, public image, or cloud TOS risk. Fast innovation in the core product is a far higher priority for a hypergrowth startup. In contrast, large and mature organizations are going to be extremely sensitive even to small risks. The typical large company is slow-growing but highly profitable. The number one priority is to avoid killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Think of the most conservative, bean-counting , button-down loan officer in suburban Topeka. Once "Cloud TOS Risk" enters the business lexicon, said beancounter is likely going to insist that the company in question has a plan, before releasing the tens of millions in loan refinancing that modern corporate America relies on in their leverage capital structures. It doesn't matter how big of an actual risk is. These processes are driven by "check-the-box" CYA theatre.

danrl 6y ago

You have to have a really weird business model or otherwise borderline content to risk getting kicked off from AWS. Sure, a risk for businesses to track, but surely a very low risk (with admittedly high impact).

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user22 6y ago
I think the test is pretty straight forward and is basically an issue of risk and is not really directly related to the internet. If having anything to do with X creates the perception of Y being liable for any legal and civil improprieties, then Y will dissolve any of its relationships with X. <my take> For the parler case, Amazon didn't want to be held responsible for hosting content that (maybe) caused the problems in that nations capital, and certainly doesn't want to be held responsible for any future content/actions. I think this can be justified by preservation of shareholder value. </my take>
rhino369 6y ago
We don't know what the line is going to be going forward. If it is refusal to take down calls for violence or other illegal content--well that seems pretty fair to me. But we should be skeptical of what exactly big tech will do this power going forward.

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BGthaOG 6y ago

A though on the author's words: > Megalothymia is “the desire to be recognized as superior to other people”, and “can be manifest both in the tyrant who invades and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven”; successful liberal democracies channel this desire into fields like entrepreneurship or competition, including electoral politics. Trump can be described as someone who has megalothymia, wielding his money and more recently politics to assert his perception of himself as 'superior'. This, along with what I opine is blindness of the heart, leveraging this megalothymia as a tool to worship his ego. These recent days, a number of tech companies, of course made up of people, flexed back when they felt their reasoning outweighed the risks of such a decision. Is this tyranny from these powerful people (Companies et al.)? And thus we are seeing folks (Trump & Companies et al.) taste each others tyranny, taking turns? Or are companies et al. simply claiming a piece of that same echelon Trump claims for himself, as an act of fighting back against a tyrant? Or some third or fourth option... etc.

stronglikedan 6y ago

It's time to make political viewpoints a protected class in the US. Tyrants silence dissenters, not the other way around.

dwaltrip 6y ago
That is an impossibly broad category. Anything could be construed as political in one way or another. This would result in no one being allowed to remove anyone at all from their property or platform.
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
I cannot help but suspect that such a move would go down in history books as the reigning champion of Reasonable-Sounding Laws With Terrible Consequences.
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RhodoYolo 6y ago

This brings up the question - What is the role of government? Ensure contracts are upheld, to harm bad actors (via prison, fines, etc.) and to protect us from foreign invasion. so, where did that fall apart in our current American system and what can we do to save our democracy? As the article has hinted at, regulation has gotten too esoteric for a bipartisan split in congress. When you have almost 500 people arguing about the use of SPACS for going public, limits on PPE loan, rights of citizens and business in regard to the pandemic, etc. etc. John adams said 'God forbid we be 20 years from [..] a rebellion.' We as Americans need a bit more of a centralized system and move a bit more towards an oligarchy. Same things that plagued the roman republic (Bipartisan politics) are plaguing our system. Augustus' answer? bring it down to him and 30 other people who where the most important people from each 'area' and the only thing that gave him more power than the rest was the fact the he was the only member who didn't rotate. Otherwise, it still came down to voting albeit with a forum that allowed for open discussion without rambling into nonsense and listing to 500 people say the same thing over and over. Eth can uphold contracts

osgovernment 6y ago
I for one have been a huge fan of platforms like Kubernetes, because at least they abstract the cloud away from specific providers to some degree. Had they additionally used IPFS for storage, switching cloud providers wouldn't be much of a burden at all. Most enterprises building redundancy also have to think of what happens if one of their cloud providers go offline. The problem is that many companies are so invested in AWS that they don't know anything else. Many companies are building their entire IT around AWS. In that regard, unless we create legislation that requires unified APIs and an open standard for cloud services; then we are going to have to start treating cloud providers like utilities. I supported Twitter kicking Trump off its platform. I think AWS kicking Parler off is practically crossing the line, and that legislation needs to be made to tell cloud providers that they need to create an open standard for their services or be considered an essential utility.

bumbada 6y ago

Centralization works for a reason: It makes prices go down. For a company like Google, Twitter or Facebook it matters very little if they have 100, 1.000 million users or 2.000, or 3.000. Most of the cost is in salaries and the salaries are the same because the technology is scalable. Once they have the market of hundreds or billions of users, almost nobody can compete with them because even paying enormous salaries the price per user is very small. The problem with decentralization is that they don't have scale, so it is a serious problem just paying a single engineer salary.

f430 6y ago
They were built in the early days of computing but now our smartphones are far more powerful than desktops of 5 to 10 years ago. Moore's law suggests that this trend will continue (unless purposefully downgrading performance to increase repurchases) and with 6G coming, we shouldn't need to be so dependent on the classic datacenter-client architecture wich is the very source of FANG's power. The new Internet and decentralization completely shifts this power-balance towards the masses. It is democratization of our data instead of being arbitraged by FANG who pay pennies on the dollar to resell it to others.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Is there any significance that he chose "Internet 3.0" rather than "Web 3.0". I think it is important to distinguish between websites/broadcast SMS (Facebook, Twitter), hosting providers (AWS, GCP) and "app stores" (Apple, Google). I hope readers understand the differences. Here is a thought experiment: How large of an audience, i.e., how many daily visitors, does a website need to have before an act of banning a contributor becomes a free speech issue. What is that magic number, the threshhold over which the website comes to be perceived as a home for "free speech". Most websites fall below this threshhold. For example, journalists, bloggers, politicians, etc. do not debate hellbanning on HN as a free speech issue. What is this number. Or is it something else.

InitialLastName 6y ago
> For example, we do not debate hellbanning on HN as a free speech issue. You clearly don't have showdead marked. There are persistent (and, I should say, entirely incoherent) complaints about speech suppression in the gray comments at the bottom of many threads (often still riddled with the slurs that actually got the user banned).
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  Point taken. I will have to enable showdead and see what I'm missing. However that is not what was meant by "we". I have edited the comment to be more clear.
jacobr1 6y ago
> Is there any significance that he chose "Internet 3.0" rather than "Web 3.0". I think so, the closing point of the article is that we are due for a return to decentralization, even if that is spurred on in the short-term by "competing centralized solutions." The primitives required to run distributed/federated services that can compete with the big web giants probably aren't there just yet, but they are starting to emerge. With cloud hosting providers, K8s is a big step forward, because you can deploy an open-source system end-to-end an arbitrary cloud k8s platform. Part of the pain of switching to more open alternatives in the past has been managing operational deployments which this begins to address. Blockchain technologies, for all their misuse and hype have brought us some interesting innovations such as the InterPlanetary File System (which probably isn't going anywhere but is a start). None of this is better than the current crop of closed system, compare Diaspora to Facebook for example, but we have the start. But you can only have the "Web" applications he envisions if you have the "distributed internet substrate."

RGamma 6y ago

To be fair, concerning Western civilisations it's the North Americans who have become the most crazy; always have been quirky, but in the past decade ever more so. Turbocapitalism might have something to do with it... Always worth remembering, that sane societies with sane institutions and conduct exist. One has to consider the "human element" if one wants to keep it that way.

devmunchies 6y ago

I would like to see a rise in decentralized services, but it's not possible while Apple and Google's curated stores are the only way to install apps on a smart phone. As soon as you can install an app from a file like you can on desktop, then we can have some real progress. I'm thinking of Apple saying "we won't let you download that app" for my macbook. How did we let them have that power on mobile computing?

kiwidrew 6y ago
It's still perfectly possible (for now) to use an alternative app store like F-Droid on Android phones. It requires sideloading an .apk (literally "install an app from a file") and jumping through a couple hoops (basically: changing your security settings to allow installing apps from a file) to get started, but it's not an insurmountable barrier. Apple is of course a totally different story, as their devices are 100% locked down walled gardens where Apple is the sole arbiter of what software you're allowed to install. It continues to astound me that a substantial number of HN users see absolutely nothing wrong with this.
MR4D 6y ago
> it's not possible while Apple and Google's curated stores are the only way to install apps I disagree. We have DNS, email, and HTTP. That's a pretty capable set of distributed protocols that have been on those phones since the beginning. The stores are not a problem here (although they are in other ways); rather, there is a lack of apps that people want to use, or perhaps a lack of people using those apps. I use Riot (now Element), which uses the Matrix protocol across all my iDevices, and it runs just as well as on my Mac. but hardly anyone I know is on it. It's much more private of a solution that WhatsApp, and although not as refined, it works pretty darn well for my use cases.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  If we're talking about technical feasibility, then you're right, it's possible to compete with the app store with the web browser. However, the masses don't care about technology and protocols. It's about convenience and motivation. Any extra step will decrease adoption and engagement on the whole. All things being equal, if it takes any more energy to do something then, statistically, it will be done less.