6 ms·

The Internet as we know it was built on the back of someone else's free. I am older than most of the crew here and can remember when the majority of the telnet

The Internet as we know it was built on the back of someone else's free. I am older than most of the crew here and can remember when the majority of the telnetting and IRCing we did was against .edu domains, using the disk space of a Sparc 1, sucking up someone else's bandwidth. In February of 1993, someone very much like Don Draper woke, inexplicably but smiling, with the first morning erection in years as the <img> tag was invented; banner ads slouched towards CERN to be born. NetZero told us that the Internet should be free. Email, free of expensive stamps, flew 'round the world. And Advertisers and Spammers and the Attention Economy held illimitable dominion over all. We have paid an enormous price for the "free" Internet and that price has been hidden from us through layers of affiliates and misdirection and double-Irish. Rudderless algorithms decide whether your fame career has any kind of money associated with it and for precisely how long. When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS." I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here.

bobwaycott 6y ago
Ye gods, I haven’t heard anyone reference NetZero in ages. My mates and I got everyone we knew to use it. I still remember when, in the midst of us studying and discussing philosophy, we wondered if NetZero was really free or if we were just paying for it with something other than money. Thus began my unceasing hatred of the advertising-driven internet.
- ralusek 6y ago
  Would you look at that, you really do say "ye gods" a lot.
  - Natfan 6y ago
    Looks like they have a keyboard shortcut for it.[0] Which is fine. I think you're getting downvoted because you made their turn of phrase seem like a bad thing. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26938769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26938769
    - ralusek 6y ago
      I was specifically responding to them because of the comment you linked here.
- paulcole 6y ago
  From the link in your profile: https://socialjoey.com/services/advertising/ https://socialjoey.com/services/advertising/ Your unceasing hatred of the advertising-driven internet led you to profit off of it?
joe_the_user 6y ago
The free structure of the Internet was the only way it could have appeared and is still the only way most of it can operate, for good or for ill. Even more, people attacking the free part tend to evoke an image of all the other manipulative parts of modern media vanishing if people somehow pay. But the Wall Street Journal and to a lesser extent the New York Times, do their best to be paid but it's the same sort of product, trying to eyeballs. Spotify has a paid and an advertisement based service. It's the same service. Media, free or not, is based on attention. In fact, in the present and earlier eras, advertising gave more money than subscriptions for all the subscription based magazines - subscriptions are valuable to show advertisers your loyal customs. What's the solution for the problematic of modern media? I could recommend this text but it takes concentrated reading to get through. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/ http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/
- krapp 6y ago
  Before the web, newspapers, magazines and other media could afford writers, editors and journalists, and the effect of the web was for print media to gut its infrastructure and budgets in favor of intern bloggers and clickbait because it couldn't be free and afford to compete with random no-budget sites and Twitter feeds otherwise. The news used to be worth paying for, and for some reason people seem to have convinced themselves that the media was never better than it is now, but before everything was on the web, it really was better. The free web has democratized media and publishing in many radical and transformative ways, but in the process of unseating the old media gatekeepers has also completely destroyed the quality of journalism and long-form content, worldwide.
  - ganafagol 6y ago
    "Destroyed" may be a too strong word. It may currently be a little hidden below the layer of all the crap out there, but good journalism is not dead and once reasonable payment models have beeb worked out, it can easily come back. Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.
    - 6y ago
nightowl_games 6y ago
Fantastic writing. Give me more.
EGreg 6y ago
How about like https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token
pjc50 6y ago
The alternative on offer in the 80s definitely did make every transaction a financial transaction: the phone company. We can have a look at what the world might have been without the Internet's decision to build without a billing layer, and indeed to route around billing, without needing a time machine. It would have been a faster version of Prestel and Minitel. Fully centralised, with national borders. All the TOS issues would still be there, except that because the billing system knows your address abusing your account could get you prosecuted.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  If payments had been built into the structure of the internet, they could have been done in an optional way. Per memory, that's how the original RFCs looked? Which means you still would have had free content, as well as paid. The fascinating historical bit is when you follow the cross-border issue... it would have required efficient, scalable (small to large amounts) international monetary transfers between individuals. And that would have been as, or more, transformational than the internet. CoL arbitrage. Individual international mobility. Remittance fee slashing. In the late 1980s. The mind boggles.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    > it would have required efficient, scalable (small to large amounts) international monetary transfers between individuals. That would have caused it to face even bigger barriers to adoption, surely? The UK only just abolished capital controls in 1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Controls_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Controls_in_the_Unite... The current cryptocurrency system (cryptography itself was subject to arms control until 1991!) relies on being able to use a credit card to transfer real money to a (usually foreign) exchange, do some transactions, and then receive a wire back with the real money. All of which are products of the Internet itself.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      It would have! But the other way to look at it is that the benefit of the internet was so great over what came before, that it might have had a chance of succeeding!
guerrilla 6y ago
> We have paid an enormous price for the "free" Internet and that price has been hidden from us through layers of affiliates and misdirection and double-Irish. Rudderless algorithms decide whether your fame career has any kind of money associated with it and for precisely how long. When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS." I don't really think it would be any different if we paid. Look at sports for example. That's paid via subscriptions, tickets, merchandise, state sponsorship and so on, but it's still just as plastered with ads as the Internet. I think anywhere exploitation is possible, it will happen. If we paid, it'd just make some people even richer than they are now.
- kelnos 6y ago
  That's the thing. Ads will always generate revenue. If you can also get people to pay for your content, great. So then you have two sources of revenue for the same product. But some services do manage to do without ads; Netflix is the big one that comes to mind. Hulu has an ad-free version if you pay more. Spotify has a free ad-supported plan or a paid ad-free plan. Then you have things in the middle like HBO Max: most (all?) shows have ads before them, but it's an ad promoting another HBO show. So clearly paid & ad-free is possible. What's not clear to me is why it's possible for some things and not for others. To use your sports example, perhaps without ads ticket and merchandise prices would have to rise to the point where enough people wouldn't buy them such that it would cause a problem? I don't know what the contribution to revenue is for ticket sales vs. ads.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    > But some services do manage to do without ads; Netflix is the big one that comes to mind. There’s a metric ton of ads in Netflix, they’re built into the content. All the extra time in a car chase focusing on the car logo and the characters talking about a car’s feature are not part of the plot. I find it even worse than ad breaks, since the content itself gets worse, and you waste your time. Although, I know TV networks were doing heavy product placement even before streaming came around, so they had ad breaks, ads in the show, and subscriber revenue.
  - 6y ago
ksec 6y ago
>NetZero told us that the Internet should be free. Email, free of expensive stamps, flew 'round the world. Most ( if not all ) bad things starts from very good intentions.
m463 6y ago
On the other hand, I remember folks setting up peering agreements. What if that model had taken over? How about a neighborhood hub where you pay someone to put in a small fiber run from your house and choose a vendor who can run your traffic back and forth from that hub? Or maybe there's a citywide ring network everyone hooks into and you pay for out-of-city data? Or what if most cellphone data defaulted to wifi first? No cellphone plan required if no cellular connection?
- kortilla 6y ago
  Most of the stuff people do online is non-local though. If any non-negligible amount of traffic was just staying in your local city, ISPs would have already optimized for it with direct local peering. As it stands though, it’s so little traffic that it’s not even worth a circuit in a local IXP.
  - tnzm 6y ago
    It's a chicken-and-egg thing, methinks. When I started using the Internet in the early 00's, it was over a metered connection - but my ISP had a FTP server with content where traffic was unmetered, so people could download music and movies even on a meager data cap of 500MB (cheapest plan - I have fond memories of exceeding every metered plan by 2X, causing surcharges until my parents finally caved in and went for unmetered.) This was later replaced by a private BitTorrent tracker as the government briefly tried to crack down on piracy a few years later; traffic between peers in that tracker was unmetered as well, as they were all clients of the same ISP. This introduced a lot of people in my city to torrenting; a few more years down the road, data caps were relaxed and eventually removed, another ISP's local tracker evolved into the nationwide filesharing platform that my peers still cherish. (Sure, Hollywood got screwed, but there was minimal value they could extract from our market in the first place, considering the vastly different standard of living.) Of course, I hear the ISP landscape in the USA is a little different; and with worldwide content streaming services like Netflix and Spotify being paid monthly, usage patterns have surely changed. Maybe today's equivalent would be local ISPs playing the privacy card and providing self-hosted encrypted NextCloud instances? I'm not sure what percentage of local traffic would this amount to, but it's not that difficult to imagine a world where the atomization of society driven by the non-locality of the Internet is offset by the fact that your cloud services are at least hosted in the same jurisdiction as yourself, and where the Web serves as an augmentation to local communities. (My dark Balkan side does not discount the possibility of walking into one's ISP's office and kicking their asses for fucking with one's connectivity or data, legal consequences notwithstanding - good luck pulling that on Comcast, or flying to Dublin or Frankfurt or wherever to kick Google's ass!) Maybe it's a little difficult to imagine how this can be competitive to the current globalized landscape though. It would effectively go against the interests of the same entities that fund the underlying infrastructural development, and besides political pushback (e.g. my ISP contract prevents me from redistributing the connection to my neighbors, although I hear this scheme is nonetheless widespread elsewhere) there might also be purely technical scaling issues (such as the existing technology simply being poorly adapted to whatever novel model of organizing connectivity eventually sticks.)
mschuster91 6y ago
> When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS." > I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here. One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts. Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space, a gateway between the digital and meatspace world, they should also be regulated by independent authorities.
- krapp 6y ago
  >One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts. Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space, a gateway between the digital and meatspace world, they should also be regulated by independent authorities. That would set a precedent that any site with any user supplied content must require intervention and approval by a court before any form of moderation can take place, or at least that all sites must require court approval for their terms of service. which by extension means all speech on the web will be under direct government control. That would include Hacker News and any blog that allows comments. This is a much greater degree of control over freedom of speech than exists in public spaces in the real world - where people can speak freely generally without government enforced moderation, and in any case websites are not public spaces. So on top of everything else, governments would assert unprecedented control over free enterprise and freedom of association. And it doesn't matter where you decide to draw the line, perhaps only requiring this level of regulation for sites with a certain number of users, this being Hacker News I shouldn't have to point out the potential slippery slope in having the government decide where that line is drawn. The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse. I had not meant that every moderation action would need a judge, but that every person should have the legal right to appeal and plead their case in front of a judge instead of hitting stone walls.
7952 6y ago
I think the current situation is a state of equilibrium brought about by technical limitations. A typical user has limited bandwidth, and limited storage. That makes the client server model very effective for something like video sharing or a social network and defaults to a particular economic model. But something like messaging can work more like a message queue. The basic storage and bandwidth requirements are low so you just download everything. Facebook, Google and Microsoft (Office 365) benefit hugely from this. But maybe Apple, or Telco's could break this pattern. Sell devices with massive amounts of storage that no one will use on their own. A 1TB IPhone with a good internet connection could make encrypted messaging a possibility for media rich apps or even make P2P possible.
- tgragnato 6y ago
  > A 1TB IPhone with a good internet connection [...] P2P possible Battery life would be terrible. Personally, I'm still waiting for the coupling of mobile and "personal servers". Micro servers at the exclusive use of one person, in an attractive form factor, made easy to use. Products that you can buy in an electronics store, such as a smartphone or a laptop.
kodah 6y ago
I may be in this age group or I may have just used the same technologies around the same time period. When people say the internet is "free" it carries, typically, one of two meanings: - Free from control. Governments are a tricky thing. You trust them until you don't; especially if your country has a history of distrust for authority. - Free as in beer. This was always more of an illusion than anything. The IRC servers you spoke of had to be networked and hosted. The services had to be developed and reworked over the years. People had to staff the network to keep it free from abuse. The networks were never free, but they also never had aims to monetize. Our friends in marketing and the people who run dubious spam businesses recognized that people are drawn to free and made a business case out of it. You can't fix people being drawn to free, but you can fix the definition of what it means to say you offer a "free" service. For instance, what Facebook and Google provide isn't free - they broker your data in exchange for nifty services. What if you had to say that, and weren't allowed to use the word free? I don't think the future lies in non-freedom, I think it lies in gatekeeping what it means to be free.
qudat 6y ago
The gemini project is trying to remove all financial incentives from a new web of content: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ The key idea for me is 1 request for 1 page. It's a stripped down markdown with no images allowed. Although even then some clients are trying to support embedding images which goes against the protocol.

bobwaycott 6y ago

Ye gods, I haven’t heard anyone reference NetZero in ages. My mates and I got everyone we knew to use it. I still remember when, in the midst of us studying and discussing philosophy, we wondered if NetZero was really free or if we were just paying for it with something other than money. Thus began my unceasing hatred of the advertising-driven internet.

ralusek 6y ago
Would you look at that, you really do say "ye gods" a lot.
- Natfan 6y ago
  Looks like they have a keyboard shortcut for it.[0] Which is fine. I think you're getting downvoted because you made their turn of phrase seem like a bad thing. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26938769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26938769
  - ralusek 6y ago
    I was specifically responding to them because of the comment you linked here.
paulcole 6y ago
From the link in your profile: https://socialjoey.com/services/advertising/ https://socialjoey.com/services/advertising/ Your unceasing hatred of the advertising-driven internet led you to profit off of it?

joe_the_user 6y ago

The free structure of the Internet was the only way it could have appeared and is still the only way most of it can operate, for good or for ill. Even more, people attacking the free part tend to evoke an image of all the other manipulative parts of modern media vanishing if people somehow pay. But the Wall Street Journal and to a lesser extent the New York Times, do their best to be paid but it's the same sort of product, trying to eyeballs. Spotify has a paid and an advertisement based service. It's the same service. Media, free or not, is based on attention. In fact, in the present and earlier eras, advertising gave more money than subscriptions for all the subscription based magazines - subscriptions are valuable to show advertisers your loyal customs. What's the solution for the problematic of modern media? I could recommend this text but it takes concentrated reading to get through. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/ http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/

krapp 6y ago
Before the web, newspapers, magazines and other media could afford writers, editors and journalists, and the effect of the web was for print media to gut its infrastructure and budgets in favor of intern bloggers and clickbait because it couldn't be free and afford to compete with random no-budget sites and Twitter feeds otherwise. The news used to be worth paying for, and for some reason people seem to have convinced themselves that the media was never better than it is now, but before everything was on the web, it really was better. The free web has democratized media and publishing in many radical and transformative ways, but in the process of unseating the old media gatekeepers has also completely destroyed the quality of journalism and long-form content, worldwide.
- ganafagol 6y ago
  "Destroyed" may be a too strong word. It may currently be a little hidden below the layer of all the crap out there, but good journalism is not dead and once reasonable payment models have beeb worked out, it can easily come back. Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.
  - 6y ago

nightowl_games 6y ago

Fantastic writing. Give me more.

EGreg 6y ago

How about like https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token

pjc50 6y ago

The alternative on offer in the 80s definitely did make every transaction a financial transaction: the phone company. We can have a look at what the world might have been without the Internet's decision to build without a billing layer, and indeed to route around billing, without needing a time machine. It would have been a faster version of Prestel and Minitel. Fully centralised, with national borders. All the TOS issues would still be there, except that because the billing system knows your address abusing your account could get you prosecuted.

ethbr0 6y ago
If payments had been built into the structure of the internet, they could have been done in an optional way. Per memory, that's how the original RFCs looked? Which means you still would have had free content, as well as paid. The fascinating historical bit is when you follow the cross-border issue... it would have required efficient, scalable (small to large amounts) international monetary transfers between individuals. And that would have been as, or more, transformational than the internet. CoL arbitrage. Individual international mobility. Remittance fee slashing. In the late 1980s. The mind boggles.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > it would have required efficient, scalable (small to large amounts) international monetary transfers between individuals. That would have caused it to face even bigger barriers to adoption, surely? The UK only just abolished capital controls in 1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Controls_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Controls_in_the_Unite... The current cryptocurrency system (cryptography itself was subject to arms control until 1991!) relies on being able to use a credit card to transfer real money to a (usually foreign) exchange, do some transactions, and then receive a wire back with the real money. All of which are products of the Internet itself.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    It would have! But the other way to look at it is that the benefit of the internet was so great over what came before, that it might have had a chance of succeeding!

guerrilla 6y ago

> We have paid an enormous price for the "free" Internet and that price has been hidden from us through layers of affiliates and misdirection and double-Irish. Rudderless algorithms decide whether your fame career has any kind of money associated with it and for precisely how long. When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS." I don't really think it would be any different if we paid. Look at sports for example. That's paid via subscriptions, tickets, merchandise, state sponsorship and so on, but it's still just as plastered with ads as the Internet. I think anywhere exploitation is possible, it will happen. If we paid, it'd just make some people even richer than they are now.

kelnos 6y ago
That's the thing. Ads will always generate revenue. If you can also get people to pay for your content, great. So then you have two sources of revenue for the same product. But some services do manage to do without ads; Netflix is the big one that comes to mind. Hulu has an ad-free version if you pay more. Spotify has a free ad-supported plan or a paid ad-free plan. Then you have things in the middle like HBO Max: most (all?) shows have ads before them, but it's an ad promoting another HBO show. So clearly paid & ad-free is possible. What's not clear to me is why it's possible for some things and not for others. To use your sports example, perhaps without ads ticket and merchandise prices would have to rise to the point where enough people wouldn't buy them such that it would cause a problem? I don't know what the contribution to revenue is for ticket sales vs. ads.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > But some services do manage to do without ads; Netflix is the big one that comes to mind. There’s a metric ton of ads in Netflix, they’re built into the content. All the extra time in a car chase focusing on the car logo and the characters talking about a car’s feature are not part of the plot. I find it even worse than ad breaks, since the content itself gets worse, and you waste your time. Although, I know TV networks were doing heavy product placement even before streaming came around, so they had ad breaks, ads in the show, and subscriber revenue.
- 6y ago

ksec 6y ago

>NetZero told us that the Internet should be free. Email, free of expensive stamps, flew 'round the world. Most ( if not all ) bad things starts from very good intentions.

m463 6y ago

On the other hand, I remember folks setting up peering agreements. What if that model had taken over? How about a neighborhood hub where you pay someone to put in a small fiber run from your house and choose a vendor who can run your traffic back and forth from that hub? Or maybe there's a citywide ring network everyone hooks into and you pay for out-of-city data? Or what if most cellphone data defaulted to wifi first? No cellphone plan required if no cellular connection?

kortilla 6y ago
Most of the stuff people do online is non-local though. If any non-negligible amount of traffic was just staying in your local city, ISPs would have already optimized for it with direct local peering. As it stands though, it’s so little traffic that it’s not even worth a circuit in a local IXP.
- tnzm 6y ago
  It's a chicken-and-egg thing, methinks. When I started using the Internet in the early 00's, it was over a metered connection - but my ISP had a FTP server with content where traffic was unmetered, so people could download music and movies even on a meager data cap of 500MB (cheapest plan - I have fond memories of exceeding every metered plan by 2X, causing surcharges until my parents finally caved in and went for unmetered.) This was later replaced by a private BitTorrent tracker as the government briefly tried to crack down on piracy a few years later; traffic between peers in that tracker was unmetered as well, as they were all clients of the same ISP. This introduced a lot of people in my city to torrenting; a few more years down the road, data caps were relaxed and eventually removed, another ISP's local tracker evolved into the nationwide filesharing platform that my peers still cherish. (Sure, Hollywood got screwed, but there was minimal value they could extract from our market in the first place, considering the vastly different standard of living.) Of course, I hear the ISP landscape in the USA is a little different; and with worldwide content streaming services like Netflix and Spotify being paid monthly, usage patterns have surely changed. Maybe today's equivalent would be local ISPs playing the privacy card and providing self-hosted encrypted NextCloud instances? I'm not sure what percentage of local traffic would this amount to, but it's not that difficult to imagine a world where the atomization of society driven by the non-locality of the Internet is offset by the fact that your cloud services are at least hosted in the same jurisdiction as yourself, and where the Web serves as an augmentation to local communities. (My dark Balkan side does not discount the possibility of walking into one's ISP's office and kicking their asses for fucking with one's connectivity or data, legal consequences notwithstanding - good luck pulling that on Comcast, or flying to Dublin or Frankfurt or wherever to kick Google's ass!) Maybe it's a little difficult to imagine how this can be competitive to the current globalized landscape though. It would effectively go against the interests of the same entities that fund the underlying infrastructural development, and besides political pushback (e.g. my ISP contract prevents me from redistributing the connection to my neighbors, although I hear this scheme is nonetheless widespread elsewhere) there might also be purely technical scaling issues (such as the existing technology simply being poorly adapted to whatever novel model of organizing connectivity eventually sticks.)

mschuster91 6y ago

> When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS." > I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here. One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts. Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space, a gateway between the digital and meatspace world, they should also be regulated by independent authorities.

krapp 6y ago
>One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts. Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space, a gateway between the digital and meatspace world, they should also be regulated by independent authorities. That would set a precedent that any site with any user supplied content must require intervention and approval by a court before any form of moderation can take place, or at least that all sites must require court approval for their terms of service. which by extension means all speech on the web will be under direct government control. That would include Hacker News and any blog that allows comments. This is a much greater degree of control over freedom of speech than exists in public spaces in the real world - where people can speak freely generally without government enforced moderation, and in any case websites are not public spaces. So on top of everything else, governments would assert unprecedented control over free enterprise and freedom of association. And it doesn't matter where you decide to draw the line, perhaps only requiring this level of regulation for sites with a certain number of users, this being Hacker News I shouldn't have to point out the potential slippery slope in having the government decide where that line is drawn. The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse. I had not meant that every moderation action would need a judge, but that every person should have the legal right to appeal and plead their case in front of a judge instead of hitting stone walls.

7952 6y ago

I think the current situation is a state of equilibrium brought about by technical limitations. A typical user has limited bandwidth, and limited storage. That makes the client server model very effective for something like video sharing or a social network and defaults to a particular economic model. But something like messaging can work more like a message queue. The basic storage and bandwidth requirements are low so you just download everything. Facebook, Google and Microsoft (Office 365) benefit hugely from this. But maybe Apple, or Telco's could break this pattern. Sell devices with massive amounts of storage that no one will use on their own. A 1TB IPhone with a good internet connection could make encrypted messaging a possibility for media rich apps or even make P2P possible.

tgragnato 6y ago
> A 1TB IPhone with a good internet connection [...] P2P possible Battery life would be terrible. Personally, I'm still waiting for the coupling of mobile and "personal servers". Micro servers at the exclusive use of one person, in an attractive form factor, made easy to use. Products that you can buy in an electronics store, such as a smartphone or a laptop.

kodah 6y ago

I may be in this age group or I may have just used the same technologies around the same time period. When people say the internet is "free" it carries, typically, one of two meanings: - Free from control. Governments are a tricky thing. You trust them until you don't; especially if your country has a history of distrust for authority. - Free as in beer. This was always more of an illusion than anything. The IRC servers you spoke of had to be networked and hosted. The services had to be developed and reworked over the years. People had to staff the network to keep it free from abuse. The networks were never free, but they also never had aims to monetize. Our friends in marketing and the people who run dubious spam businesses recognized that people are drawn to free and made a business case out of it. You can't fix people being drawn to free, but you can fix the definition of what it means to say you offer a "free" service. For instance, what Facebook and Google provide isn't free - they broker your data in exchange for nifty services. What if you had to say that, and weren't allowed to use the word free? I don't think the future lies in non-freedom, I think it lies in gatekeeping what it means to be free.

qudat 6y ago

The gemini project is trying to remove all financial incentives from a new web of content: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ The key idea for me is 1 request for 1 page. It's a stripped down markdown with no images allowed. Although even then some clients are trying to support embedding images which goes against the protocol.