4 ms·

Net neutrality seems like an irrelevant discussion now to anyone interested in "radical" internet models (read: anything that's not deeply entrenched in the cli

Net neutrality seems like an irrelevant discussion now to anyone interested in "radical" internet models (read: anything that's not deeply entrenched in the client-server paradigm). Why should we care about the battles between corporate titans over how they treat each other? Frankly, I hope the ISPs and carriers are able to squeeze them, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

__MatrixMan__ 6y ago
Does it? I'm interested in radical internet models. I worry that without net neutrality we're on a gradual slippery slope towards an internet whose "slow lane" goes away entirely and I have to apply for a permit so that my IPFS node can be appropriately prioritized.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Maybe it is not so radical. The original, pre-web internet was not client-server. Each end of the connection potentially had something the other wanted. IMO, that's a truer representation of the real world. Today's internet is entirely web and mobile app centric, as if the world is nothing more than a feedlot, with only a small number of large-scale "farmers". https://github.com/google/differential-privacy/blob/main/examples/cc/README.md https://github.com/google/differential-privacy/blob/main/exa...
- gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
  ironically, what you describe today happened because those central points were the ones producing the content (portals) that everyone wanted. Now that users produce the content, they kept the distribution and revenue model (i.e. you go to the central places and they sell you to advertisers) but they have zero cost for content since everyone is a producer and consumer, which was the use case for the non-centralized portals in the first place.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
    An astute observation. In an ideal "web" (as imagined in the 1990's), every business might have a website, there would be news sources[1], and many nerds would have websites, but beyond that, to the non-nerd, after a while, it's not very interesting. Despite what people once might have thought in the early-mid 90's, every living person is not going to create their own website. (Or even a blog, as people thought in the 2000's). The web is finite and that is bad news for search engines.[2] UGC and "social media" have been a way for certain companies to mask this truth. 1. As I remember it, news was one of the early internet centralisation points. As dial-up telephone charges were expensive, we patiently waited for someone at a large university to download the news and forward it. I am not a great source of internet history, others will may correct me here, but one of the largest operations like this, downloading Usenet news and making it available, ended up becoming what some called the first "ISP". That was UUNet. The takeway from this footnote is that "news" showed to be an early centralisation point, high traffic. Everyone wants "the news". 2. The trend today with Google and Bing, and those who use their feeds, is to limit the number of unique search results any user can retrieve. Around 250-300 max but with many searches one is lucky to get 50-100. The search engines are trying to market themselves as a way to "get answers" instead of a way to discover what websites exist on the web today. We all know what this looks like on Google and Bing. The companies place their own "web properties" in the results, i.e., many of the "results" are links to the companies own servers, and they scrape other websites to provide "instant" answers. The user never leaves the search results page, never even visits another website. DDG, following the lead of Google, calls this "instant answers" and "zero-click info". This statement from DDG sums up the present day popular search engines: "When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links." source: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... (Personally I do want "just links". I have written scripts to get them.) It is up to the reader to decide whether this is intentional or not, but either way, unlike in the 1990's and early 2000's, search engines are limiting how much of the web users can actually "see" at one time. Regardless of intent, that is the effect. If, hypothetically, the web was not growing very much, no one could detect that using a search engine. The web today is portrayed by search engines as some sort of oracle that can provide answers. For easy questions, sure. For more difficult ones, we can fabricate answers but that does not mean they are good ones. Than add in "AI" hype. What happens when people lose all critical thinking ability. They just accept the oracle's answer as "good enough". We can already see this happenig with young people. You can end up with a Wizard of Oz scenario, but no one ever discovers the tiny man behind the curtain. The truth is that the web is still a motley collection of websites, along with some very large "walled gardens" of UGC that draw the lion's share of daily traffic.
Strongylodon 6y ago
>Why should we care about the battles between corporate titans over how they treat each other?... the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You should read a bit about the cold war in my opinion. This logic can burn you.
noizejoy 6y ago
> the enemy of my enemy is my friend My analogy is more: When the giant dinosaurs are fighting amongst themselves, us little mammals can scurry about and survive :-)
arcticbull 6y ago
Well, until proven otherwise, the answer to that question is: centralization and trust is a huge efficiency optimization. Just look at how wildly inefficient Bitcoin is as compared to all other forms of ... well anything. The reason we see such centralization is because it represents a huge saving in energy, in time, in money. That market incentive will continue to exist into the future. Even if alternative strategies take hold, there will be a massive market for centralized solutions - they will serve the majority of the population - so we will need to make this push one way or the other for that faction to be well served. If that ever changes, we can stop the fight. To do so now is, to say the least, premature.
- kortilla 6y ago
  Centralization and trust are orthogonal. You can have p2p networks without worrying about giant distributed consensus protocols like Bitcoin.
teddyh 6y ago
“The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less” — Maxim 29, The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries (https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Ma...)
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  Yes but the enema of my enemy . . .
- kortilla 6y ago
  The point of the saying is to help you realize that the enemy of your enemy has at least one shared incentive, which can be very useful. It doesn’t mean you literally become their friend.
mathgorges 6y ago
Can you help me understand what you mean by '"radical" internet models'? My brain isn't sure if you're talking about: 1) Things which disrupt HTTP like IPFS 2) Things which disrupt entrenched ISPs like Starlink or 5g internet; or 3) Both
the8472 6y ago
Have we already forgotten the times when ISPs selectively throttled bittorrent?
- eppp 6y ago
  ISPs use QoS for voice too, that means everything is technically throttled based on network congestion.
api 6y ago
What makes you think P2P will be unaffected by traffic shaping? If anything I could see sites that pay getting prioritization far above edge to edge traffic.

__MatrixMan__ 6y ago

Does it? I'm interested in radical internet models. I worry that without net neutrality we're on a gradual slippery slope towards an internet whose "slow lane" goes away entirely and I have to apply for a permit so that my IPFS node can be appropriately prioritized.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Maybe it is not so radical. The original, pre-web internet was not client-server. Each end of the connection potentially had something the other wanted. IMO, that's a truer representation of the real world. Today's internet is entirely web and mobile app centric, as if the world is nothing more than a feedlot, with only a small number of large-scale "farmers". https://github.com/google/differential-privacy/blob/main/examples/cc/README.md https://github.com/google/differential-privacy/blob/main/exa...

gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
ironically, what you describe today happened because those central points were the ones producing the content (portals) that everyone wanted. Now that users produce the content, they kept the distribution and revenue model (i.e. you go to the central places and they sell you to advertisers) but they have zero cost for content since everyone is a producer and consumer, which was the use case for the non-centralized portals in the first place.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  An astute observation. In an ideal "web" (as imagined in the 1990's), every business might have a website, there would be news sources[1], and many nerds would have websites, but beyond that, to the non-nerd, after a while, it's not very interesting. Despite what people once might have thought in the early-mid 90's, every living person is not going to create their own website. (Or even a blog, as people thought in the 2000's). The web is finite and that is bad news for search engines.[2] UGC and "social media" have been a way for certain companies to mask this truth. 1. As I remember it, news was one of the early internet centralisation points. As dial-up telephone charges were expensive, we patiently waited for someone at a large university to download the news and forward it. I am not a great source of internet history, others will may correct me here, but one of the largest operations like this, downloading Usenet news and making it available, ended up becoming what some called the first "ISP". That was UUNet. The takeway from this footnote is that "news" showed to be an early centralisation point, high traffic. Everyone wants "the news". 2. The trend today with Google and Bing, and those who use their feeds, is to limit the number of unique search results any user can retrieve. Around 250-300 max but with many searches one is lucky to get 50-100. The search engines are trying to market themselves as a way to "get answers" instead of a way to discover what websites exist on the web today. We all know what this looks like on Google and Bing. The companies place their own "web properties" in the results, i.e., many of the "results" are links to the companies own servers, and they scrape other websites to provide "instant" answers. The user never leaves the search results page, never even visits another website. DDG, following the lead of Google, calls this "instant answers" and "zero-click info". This statement from DDG sums up the present day popular search engines: "When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links." source: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... (Personally I do want "just links". I have written scripts to get them.) It is up to the reader to decide whether this is intentional or not, but either way, unlike in the 1990's and early 2000's, search engines are limiting how much of the web users can actually "see" at one time. Regardless of intent, that is the effect. If, hypothetically, the web was not growing very much, no one could detect that using a search engine. The web today is portrayed by search engines as some sort of oracle that can provide answers. For easy questions, sure. For more difficult ones, we can fabricate answers but that does not mean they are good ones. Than add in "AI" hype. What happens when people lose all critical thinking ability. They just accept the oracle's answer as "good enough". We can already see this happenig with young people. You can end up with a Wizard of Oz scenario, but no one ever discovers the tiny man behind the curtain. The truth is that the web is still a motley collection of websites, along with some very large "walled gardens" of UGC that draw the lion's share of daily traffic.

Strongylodon 6y ago

>Why should we care about the battles between corporate titans over how they treat each other?... the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You should read a bit about the cold war in my opinion. This logic can burn you.

noizejoy 6y ago

> the enemy of my enemy is my friend My analogy is more: When the giant dinosaurs are fighting amongst themselves, us little mammals can scurry about and survive :-)

arcticbull 6y ago

Well, until proven otherwise, the answer to that question is: centralization and trust is a huge efficiency optimization. Just look at how wildly inefficient Bitcoin is as compared to all other forms of ... well anything. The reason we see such centralization is because it represents a huge saving in energy, in time, in money. That market incentive will continue to exist into the future. Even if alternative strategies take hold, there will be a massive market for centralized solutions - they will serve the majority of the population - so we will need to make this push one way or the other for that faction to be well served. If that ever changes, we can stop the fight. To do so now is, to say the least, premature.

kortilla 6y ago
Centralization and trust are orthogonal. You can have p2p networks without worrying about giant distributed consensus protocols like Bitcoin.

teddyh 6y ago

“The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less” — Maxim 29, The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries (https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Ma...)

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
Yes but the enema of my enemy . . .
kortilla 6y ago
The point of the saying is to help you realize that the enemy of your enemy has at least one shared incentive, which can be very useful. It doesn’t mean you literally become their friend.

mathgorges 6y ago

Can you help me understand what you mean by '"radical" internet models'? My brain isn't sure if you're talking about: 1) Things which disrupt HTTP like IPFS 2) Things which disrupt entrenched ISPs like Starlink or 5g internet; or 3) Both

the8472 6y ago

Have we already forgotten the times when ISPs selectively throttled bittorrent?

eppp 6y ago
ISPs use QoS for voice too, that means everything is technically throttled based on network congestion.

api 6y ago

What makes you think P2P will be unaffected by traffic shaping? If anything I could see sites that pay getting prioritization far above edge to edge traffic.