9 ms·

Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?

116 points by simonpure 6y ago

sgt101 6y ago
This is an interesting idea, but can people help me by posting examples of the type of crypto contract underpinned service that a16z are talking about?
bartmika 6y ago
- "As long as technology has a global reach, someone will have the world in the palm of his hand. If not Bob Page, then Everett, Dowd..." -Tracer Tong from Deus Ex (2000)
nexthash 6y ago
Whoever controls the Internet accumulates enormous power. This is evident in things such as the enormous salaries of software engineers, social media's influence on public opinion, and Trump being able to stir his devotees to attack the US Capitol. I like the optimism of this piece - decentralized tech can revolutionize the Internet's cloud-based economy - but I would caution falling into the same hubris that technologists felt in the early 2000s about Big Tech. FAANG does not want to give up its immense power on the Internet, and there will always be somebody looking for ways to co-opt it if we move into a decentralized Internet economy.
jph 6y ago
Much of the groundwork for the internet and open software happened in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to influxes of government funding, including at many universities and research organizations. I advocate for government funding for public good internet software, because the societal benefit can be so high, and the only alternative so far is monopoly-equivalent companies such as FAANG. In the United States, and in many other countries, there's plenty of precedence for government funding for public libraries, public broadcasting, public transportation, etc.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > Much of the groundwork for the internet and open software happened in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to influxes of government funding, including at many universities and research organizations. Sure, that’s one part of it. Then it was industry that came in and made it all useful. A significant portion of open source contributions to Linux are from people working for industry. Most of the advancements to make routing scale, etc were driven by the likes of Cisco, AT&T, etc.
- skywhopper 6y ago
  Yeah, plus those folks actually had problems to solve and things to invent. These days 99.99% of VC projects and the stuff coming out of most tech giants is just throwing obscene amounts of money at creating new problems that no one knew they had, hoping some of it will stick and fund the next round of waste.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  You mention FAANG but don't forget Bell Labs which was also supported by a giant monopooy at the time, so that supports your theory too.
young_unixer 6y ago
We desperately need a decent desktop operating system. After that basic need is satisfied, fixing the problems in the upper layers will be easier in comparison. To develop any kind of software, you need to do so in a desktop operating system, so it's important for it to be reliable and usable. I think the only viable way to achieve this is to create a Linux-based OS. Not another Linux distribution, but something consistent and well thought out and that solves the problems that no one in the Linux space wants to solve right now.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  What problems are those?
  - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
    Not having a keyboard-like pop-up app that can work inside all other apps that's half speech-to-text processor, half emoji picker, like you have on mobile except having it on desktop. And a way to run all Windows software flawlessly. And making KDE the default DE because it's the best one. And Wayland feature parity. And another packaging format that's like Flatpak and AppImage, except the best of both combined into one, that everyone uses from now on instead of any of the others. And something about how good Macbook trackpads are.
  - young_unixer 6y ago
    1. We need a clear separation between system programs and application programs, so that a user can install the latest version of Python without it ever colliding with the outdated version of Python that the OS uses internally. The user shouldn't even need to be aware of the existence of the other Python. 2. The default way to install third-party application software shouldn't depend on repositories or servers. It should be based on installing files, just like on Windows. The OS should define a stable format for the OS to install, update and uninstall these files. Additionally, a permission system like Android's could be a good idea. 3. We need a desktop environment that's visually appealing and has a good UX. 4. We need centralized, thorough and official user documentation about the OS, so that the user doesn't need to browse random forums and wikis in order to learn how to use some piece of the OS. Note that this documentation is about the OS, not about third party software. And this documentation should be distinct from the developer's documentation. 5. Consistency. The user shouldn't need to learn 10 different config file formats or inconsistent command flags across the system in order to configure it.
pattusk 6y ago
I find this article naively optimistic (which may be unsurprising given how much Andreessen Horowitz is invested in the crypto space). I don't see how anybody can delude themselves to think that blockchain is about giving control back to the users, or that it is somehow democratic. Just look at the distribution of the supply for any token. You'll have the top 1% of wallets controlling > 80% of the supply. Dev keeping half the supply to themselves. Even airdrops to users like Uniswap did don't prevent someone from buying up most of the supply. Crypto and governance tokens give you plutocracy, not democracy. And that's not even mentioning the issue around access to the code (see Blockstream)
- undefined1 6y ago
  I'm curious what you all think about Nano? No ICO, no fees, no mining. https://nano.org/ https://nano.org/
- wyager 6y ago
  Power law distributions are inevitable and necessary in organic scale-free networks. Any change to a scale-free system that would make it no longer obey a power law would also render it useless. Democracy (uniform distribution of some resource) only makes sense in narrow contexts. In any financial system, a uniform resource distribution is highly unstable and will stabilize to a power law distribution in the absence of massive deadweight loss inducing distortions. This is completely independent of whether or not some shitcoin uses a scammy premine or some other initial allocation strategy.
walrus01 6y ago
It's unclear to me if the person who wrote "who controls the Internet" has ever interacted with core internet infrastructure at the router, BGP, major transit and transport service provider ISP level. I find it very hard to take seriously prognostication from persons who've never been responsible for even a small sized ASN. Persons I do take seriously when they prognosticate on the future of the Internet: The individuals responsible for some of the most important RFCs of the past 20 years. The people who have the equivalent of 'enable' on core routers of gargantuan ISPs, and on much smaller ISPs doing very special things in the world like last-mile 1Gbps symmetric FTTH. Persons recognized in the community of individuals associated with RIPE, ARIN, APNIC, AFRINIC, etc and the various special interest regional network operator groups, as having a high degree of network engineering acumen.
- istorical 6y ago
  Isn't it possible to keep tracing things back to a more base layer beyond what you've described though? It's kind of arbitrary to draw the line any particular place. Like I could write "it's unclear to me if the person who wrote 'interacted with core internet infrastructure at the router, BGP, major transit and transport service provider ISP level' has ever interacted with electrical grid management, power plant operations, or coal or natural gas pipelines and logistics. I find it very hard to take seriously prognostication from persons who've never been responsible for the electrical input of a nationstate." But then someone else could just respond to that with a similar message about how those who control the powergrid are hard to take seriously when they've never grown their own food or managed the food and water needs of humans who run the powergrid.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    Yes, but "The Internet" is an actual specific thing composed of stuff at OSI layer 1, and various other things at layers 2-7 in the rest of the model. If a person whose only experience with it is at the software application layer starts opining about what internet infrastructure should look like underneath what their knowledge base encompasses, I would try to determine what if any experience they might have with actually running an ISP. To follow your analogy, I don't agree with the concept, because it would be more like criticizing an article titled "Who controls the power grid", in which the author opines on some cryptocurrency based solution for something related to the grid, but has no experience actually running the grid as an electrical engineer at the BPA or TVA might have.
mrmrcoleman 6y ago
(2019) Originally posted here: https://www.wired.com/story/how-blockchain-can-wrest-the-internet-from-corporations/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-blockchain-can-wrest-the-int...
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Surprising to me that would repost on their blog so much later.
shilpiakter9120 6y ago
what is the benefits for us
anonytrary 6y ago
Always funny to see these seemingly thought provoking articles from VCs and startup people as if people haven't already been talking about these same ideas for years. Congrats, a12345z, you finally realized it.
KingOfCoders 6y ago
Cloudflare.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  This deserves more visibility. Cloudflare is one of the parties with immense power.
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
> That’s why the pendulum is swinging back to an internet governed by open, community-controlled services. This has only recently become possible, thanks to technologies arising from the blockchain and cryptocurrencies. I absolutely believe that the pendulum does need to swing back towards community controlled services but it's quite the leap to make to say that we can only do that now and only with a specific set of technologies that this VC firm happens to be heavily invested in. What about good old fashioned trust? Producing and following open standards based on systems of collective decision making is how we built the web in the first place. We don't have to have zero trust networks with monetary incentives to rebuild the open web. We just need aligned individuals building towards a common vision of what the web should be. I think our failure to do this well in the last decade has really been a failure of vision where former leaders in this space have either been too dogmatic to really represent our collective interests or all too willing to adopt antithetical business practices that compromise that vision in the first place. We need new leaders to represent open innovation and to build alignment towards an internet that can really be a tool for disintermediation. Novel technology won't save the web. Focusing on money will only exacerbate the problems in the long-run. A culture of open innovation is the only thing that will help us realize the abundance of the digital economy. To build that, we need communities that we can all trust will remain aligned to our collective interests.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Answer: The user.
eznzt 6y ago
Are investors usually this clueless about how things work?
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Not all of the. But quite a few will invest in areas that they have no expertise in. They usually have the smarts to not start writing about those subjects as though they suddenly do have that expertise.
skywhopper 6y ago
“There has been a lot of talk in the past few years about blockchains, which are heavily hyped but poorly understood. Blockchains are networks of physical computers that work together in concert to form a single virtual computer.” I mean, how could anyone be confused when you yourself are actively fudging the meaning in the immediate next sentence? The rest of the paragraph is worse. Embarrassingly bad, but par for the course from a16z.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  It's cringeworthy.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
Nice article, I just posted the link on my Mastodon [1] account, which seems appropriate. I understand that HN people who work for Internet platform companies like Facebook and Google push back on using open protocols and open distributed systems - never blame people for doing things in their self interest. For the rest of us, for social, tech, and political reasons, I hope that we can push back at least a little against abuse of platform companies - that is in our self interest. [1] https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1150176 https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1150176
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> I understand that HN people who work for Internet platform companies like Facebook and Google push back on using open protocols and open distributed systems - never blame people for doing things in their self interest. Strongly disagree. Live and let live is fine so long as we dont screw each other over. In those cases they are being actively hostile to peoples freedom. When they push, push back as hard as you can. Push them down the stairs if that's what it takes to make them see their self interest is actively hostile to others. (No, I'm not advocating violence, just taking the term "pushback" to the next metaphorical level. Ugh)
  - jimmygrapes 6y ago
    Fight like hell.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

116 points by simonpure 6y ago

This is an interesting idea, but can people help me by posting examples of the type of crypto contract underpinned service that a16z are talking about?

bartmika 6y ago

- "As long as technology has a global reach, someone will have the world in the palm of his hand. If not Bob Page, then Everett, Dowd..." -Tracer Tong from Deus Ex (2000)

nexthash 6y ago

Whoever controls the Internet accumulates enormous power. This is evident in things such as the enormous salaries of software engineers, social media's influence on public opinion, and Trump being able to stir his devotees to attack the US Capitol. I like the optimism of this piece - decentralized tech can revolutionize the Internet's cloud-based economy - but I would caution falling into the same hubris that technologists felt in the early 2000s about Big Tech. FAANG does not want to give up its immense power on the Internet, and there will always be somebody looking for ways to co-opt it if we move into a decentralized Internet economy.

jph 6y ago

Much of the groundwork for the internet and open software happened in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to influxes of government funding, including at many universities and research organizations. I advocate for government funding for public good internet software, because the societal benefit can be so high, and the only alternative so far is monopoly-equivalent companies such as FAANG. In the United States, and in many other countries, there's plenty of precedence for government funding for public libraries, public broadcasting, public transportation, etc.

kortilla 6y ago
> Much of the groundwork for the internet and open software happened in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to influxes of government funding, including at many universities and research organizations. Sure, that’s one part of it. Then it was industry that came in and made it all useful. A significant portion of open source contributions to Linux are from people working for industry. Most of the advancements to make routing scale, etc were driven by the likes of Cisco, AT&T, etc.
skywhopper 6y ago
Yeah, plus those folks actually had problems to solve and things to invent. These days 99.99% of VC projects and the stuff coming out of most tech giants is just throwing obscene amounts of money at creating new problems that no one knew they had, hoping some of it will stick and fund the next round of waste.
guerrilla 6y ago
You mention FAANG but don't forget Bell Labs which was also supported by a giant monopooy at the time, so that supports your theory too.

young_unixer 6y ago

We desperately need a decent desktop operating system. After that basic need is satisfied, fixing the problems in the upper layers will be easier in comparison. To develop any kind of software, you need to do so in a desktop operating system, so it's important for it to be reliable and usable. I think the only viable way to achieve this is to create a Linux-based OS. Not another Linux distribution, but something consistent and well thought out and that solves the problems that no one in the Linux space wants to solve right now.

fartcannon 6y ago
What problems are those?
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  Not having a keyboard-like pop-up app that can work inside all other apps that's half speech-to-text processor, half emoji picker, like you have on mobile except having it on desktop. And a way to run all Windows software flawlessly. And making KDE the default DE because it's the best one. And Wayland feature parity. And another packaging format that's like Flatpak and AppImage, except the best of both combined into one, that everyone uses from now on instead of any of the others. And something about how good Macbook trackpads are.
- young_unixer 6y ago
  1. We need a clear separation between system programs and application programs, so that a user can install the latest version of Python without it ever colliding with the outdated version of Python that the OS uses internally. The user shouldn't even need to be aware of the existence of the other Python. 2. The default way to install third-party application software shouldn't depend on repositories or servers. It should be based on installing files, just like on Windows. The OS should define a stable format for the OS to install, update and uninstall these files. Additionally, a permission system like Android's could be a good idea. 3. We need a desktop environment that's visually appealing and has a good UX. 4. We need centralized, thorough and official user documentation about the OS, so that the user doesn't need to browse random forums and wikis in order to learn how to use some piece of the OS. Note that this documentation is about the OS, not about third party software. And this documentation should be distinct from the developer's documentation. 5. Consistency. The user shouldn't need to learn 10 different config file formats or inconsistent command flags across the system in order to configure it.

pattusk 6y ago

I find this article naively optimistic (which may be unsurprising given how much Andreessen Horowitz is invested in the crypto space). I don't see how anybody can delude themselves to think that blockchain is about giving control back to the users, or that it is somehow democratic. Just look at the distribution of the supply for any token. You'll have the top 1% of wallets controlling > 80% of the supply. Dev keeping half the supply to themselves. Even airdrops to users like Uniswap did don't prevent someone from buying up most of the supply. Crypto and governance tokens give you plutocracy, not democracy. And that's not even mentioning the issue around access to the code (see Blockstream)

undefined1 6y ago
I'm curious what you all think about Nano? No ICO, no fees, no mining. https://nano.org/ https://nano.org/
wyager 6y ago
Power law distributions are inevitable and necessary in organic scale-free networks. Any change to a scale-free system that would make it no longer obey a power law would also render it useless. Democracy (uniform distribution of some resource) only makes sense in narrow contexts. In any financial system, a uniform resource distribution is highly unstable and will stabilize to a power law distribution in the absence of massive deadweight loss inducing distortions. This is completely independent of whether or not some shitcoin uses a scammy premine or some other initial allocation strategy.

walrus01 6y ago

It's unclear to me if the person who wrote "who controls the Internet" has ever interacted with core internet infrastructure at the router, BGP, major transit and transport service provider ISP level. I find it very hard to take seriously prognostication from persons who've never been responsible for even a small sized ASN. Persons I do take seriously when they prognosticate on the future of the Internet: The individuals responsible for some of the most important RFCs of the past 20 years. The people who have the equivalent of 'enable' on core routers of gargantuan ISPs, and on much smaller ISPs doing very special things in the world like last-mile 1Gbps symmetric FTTH. Persons recognized in the community of individuals associated with RIPE, ARIN, APNIC, AFRINIC, etc and the various special interest regional network operator groups, as having a high degree of network engineering acumen.

istorical 6y ago
Isn't it possible to keep tracing things back to a more base layer beyond what you've described though? It's kind of arbitrary to draw the line any particular place. Like I could write "it's unclear to me if the person who wrote 'interacted with core internet infrastructure at the router, BGP, major transit and transport service provider ISP level' has ever interacted with electrical grid management, power plant operations, or coal or natural gas pipelines and logistics. I find it very hard to take seriously prognostication from persons who've never been responsible for the electrical input of a nationstate." But then someone else could just respond to that with a similar message about how those who control the powergrid are hard to take seriously when they've never grown their own food or managed the food and water needs of humans who run the powergrid.
- walrus01 6y ago
  Yes, but "The Internet" is an actual specific thing composed of stuff at OSI layer 1, and various other things at layers 2-7 in the rest of the model. If a person whose only experience with it is at the software application layer starts opining about what internet infrastructure should look like underneath what their knowledge base encompasses, I would try to determine what if any experience they might have with actually running an ISP. To follow your analogy, I don't agree with the concept, because it would be more like criticizing an article titled "Who controls the power grid", in which the author opines on some cryptocurrency based solution for something related to the grid, but has no experience actually running the grid as an electrical engineer at the BPA or TVA might have.

mrmrcoleman 6y ago

(2019) Originally posted here: https://www.wired.com/story/how-blockchain-can-wrest-the-internet-from-corporations/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-blockchain-can-wrest-the-int...

Ericson2314 6y ago
Surprising to me that would repost on their blog so much later.

shilpiakter9120 6y ago

what is the benefits for us

anonytrary 6y ago

Always funny to see these seemingly thought provoking articles from VCs and startup people as if people haven't already been talking about these same ideas for years. Congrats, a12345z, you finally realized it.

KingOfCoders 6y ago

Cloudflare.

jacquesm 6y ago
This deserves more visibility. Cloudflare is one of the parties with immense power.

benjaminjosephw 6y ago

> That’s why the pendulum is swinging back to an internet governed by open, community-controlled services. This has only recently become possible, thanks to technologies arising from the blockchain and cryptocurrencies. I absolutely believe that the pendulum does need to swing back towards community controlled services but it's quite the leap to make to say that we can only do that now and only with a specific set of technologies that this VC firm happens to be heavily invested in. What about good old fashioned trust? Producing and following open standards based on systems of collective decision making is how we built the web in the first place. We don't have to have zero trust networks with monetary incentives to rebuild the open web. We just need aligned individuals building towards a common vision of what the web should be. I think our failure to do this well in the last decade has really been a failure of vision where former leaders in this space have either been too dogmatic to really represent our collective interests or all too willing to adopt antithetical business practices that compromise that vision in the first place. We need new leaders to represent open innovation and to build alignment towards an internet that can really be a tool for disintermediation. Novel technology won't save the web. Focusing on money will only exacerbate the problems in the long-run. A culture of open innovation is the only thing that will help us realize the abundance of the digital economy. To build that, we need communities that we can all trust will remain aligned to our collective interests.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Answer: The user.

eznzt 6y ago

Are investors usually this clueless about how things work?

jacquesm 6y ago
Not all of the. But quite a few will invest in areas that they have no expertise in. They usually have the smarts to not start writing about those subjects as though they suddenly do have that expertise.

skywhopper 6y ago

“There has been a lot of talk in the past few years about blockchains, which are heavily hyped but poorly understood. Blockchains are networks of physical computers that work together in concert to form a single virtual computer.” I mean, how could anyone be confused when you yourself are actively fudging the meaning in the immediate next sentence? The rest of the paragraph is worse. Embarrassingly bad, but par for the course from a16z.

jacquesm 6y ago
It's cringeworthy.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

Nice article, I just posted the link on my Mastodon [1] account, which seems appropriate. I understand that HN people who work for Internet platform companies like Facebook and Google push back on using open protocols and open distributed systems - never blame people for doing things in their self interest. For the rest of us, for social, tech, and political reasons, I hope that we can push back at least a little against abuse of platform companies - that is in our self interest. [1] https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1150176 https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1150176

phkahler 6y ago
>> I understand that HN people who work for Internet platform companies like Facebook and Google push back on using open protocols and open distributed systems - never blame people for doing things in their self interest. Strongly disagree. Live and let live is fine so long as we dont screw each other over. In those cases they are being actively hostile to peoples freedom. When they push, push back as hard as you can. Push them down the stairs if that's what it takes to make them see their self interest is actively hostile to others. (No, I'm not advocating violence, just taking the term "pushback" to the next metaphorical level. Ugh)
- jimmygrapes 6y ago
  Fight like hell.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]