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I agree with the fundamental hypothesis, but the proposed "democratic" web suffers from the same fundamental problem as the federated model: how is it paid for

I agree with the fundamental hypothesis, but the proposed "democratic" web suffers from the same fundamental problem as the federated model: how is it paid for in sweat and treasure? Most people want to use the internet, not run the internet. No one (outside of some die-hards who will no doubt explain below) wants to run their own infrastructure -- it takes too much effort to do correctly and otherwise distracts from the end goal -- actually using the internet. The "democratic" web will need to be paid for, but everyone is used to getting internet for a flat fee from their ISP, so no one will pay for a VPS they have to manage (again, outside of some die-hards who will no doubt explain below) because why pay for the cow when the milk is free. That's right: the reason centralization wins is because its "free" to the user, at the cost of privacy and advertising. The only way to get the "democratic" web envisioned is to use the democratic version of the same behavior that the best centralized companies use: get a guaranteed revenue stream. That's right, to get a democratic web you will need to raise a tax and have the government run (or otherwise subsidize) the infrastructure.

coop_solution 5y ago
> That's right, to get a democratic web you will need to raise a tax and have the government run (or otherwise subsidize) the infrastructure. Is this the terrible conclusion that you were building up to? I see no problem with that compared to the alternatives (existing or non-existing).
bdauvergne 5y ago
Maybe we could call this tax a subscription and contrary to nation state that you have to belong to on birth, your could choose your "internet state" by subscribing. You would get some rights to access the infrastructure of this internet state (mail, DNS, micro-blogging, whatever...) and participate to its administration by voting and have some obligations (pay your subscription, vote, validate identity of people, participate to arbitration instances). I think this kind of corporation is called a cooperative, maybe the destiny of the free-internet are cooperatives. Federation between those virtual states would have a precedent, existing federation of real states.
- c-linkage 5y ago
  Voluntarily paying for subscriptions is exactly what people _don't_ want to do when an equivalent service can be had free of monetary charge. Also, the largest problem with "subscribing to your tribe" is that on the internet your email address is often your identity. If I have a falling-out with Tribe A and need to move to Tribe B, now I have the hassle of changing over all of the accounts using by Tribe A identity to use my Tribe B identity. This only gets worse when I have to move my entire blog and maybe even DNS entries (assuming I wanted the added hassle of managing my own domain in the "democratic" internet). Changing identity is the "payment in sweat" I mentioned above. Most people will make the a priori decision that changing identity is too much work and instead favor the centralized systems like Google to manage identity.
  - bdauvergne 5y ago
    That's clearly not different you can also change your email from Google to Live but you also have to pay in sweat as you say. The difference is you can have some control on your "tribe" as you call it because it's a democratic human organization where Microsoft and Google are sort of oligarchic human organizations, some people have power over them, you're just unable to be part of those people for actual money/power reasons. As I said I see no technical/organizational reason why techniques advocated for radical decentralization (like blockhain, dht, name-independant routing, etc..) could not be used to make the necessary sweat to move from a tribe to another easier (as there are political framework like the European Union which makes it easy to move your life from France to Germany or the reverse); move you signed DNS record from tribe 1 to tribe 2 so you move routing of your email, give some capability to tribe 1 to sync your data from tribe 2, and forgot about tribe 2. If tribe 2 is unreliable and still advertise that it should receive your email, you can do nothing, people in tribe 2 will lose contact with you. But if (real material) state A claim you are a criminal, and state B give you asylum that's great, but it won't make the danger of returning to state A disappear. I think that the case where tribe would be adversarial is an edge case, the same way Live and Google do not block each other emails. Anyway what I say will only verify if some people try it, make a global "user of internet association" with some kind of constitution for governing it democratically, amass some capital, create some infrastructure a la google-suite and see where it goes. If nobody adhere to it, I was wrong :) It seems that in this setting many current technology which needs some trust anchor to have some kind of performance become simpler (global ledger, secure name system, etc..) and very powerful.

coop_solution 5y ago

> That's right, to get a democratic web you will need to raise a tax and have the government run (or otherwise subsidize) the infrastructure. Is this the terrible conclusion that you were building up to? I see no problem with that compared to the alternatives (existing or non-existing).

bdauvergne 5y ago

Maybe we could call this tax a subscription and contrary to nation state that you have to belong to on birth, your could choose your "internet state" by subscribing. You would get some rights to access the infrastructure of this internet state (mail, DNS, micro-blogging, whatever...) and participate to its administration by voting and have some obligations (pay your subscription, vote, validate identity of people, participate to arbitration instances). I think this kind of corporation is called a cooperative, maybe the destiny of the free-internet are cooperatives. Federation between those virtual states would have a precedent, existing federation of real states.

c-linkage 5y ago
Voluntarily paying for subscriptions is exactly what people _don't_ want to do when an equivalent service can be had free of monetary charge. Also, the largest problem with "subscribing to your tribe" is that on the internet your email address is often your identity. If I have a falling-out with Tribe A and need to move to Tribe B, now I have the hassle of changing over all of the accounts using by Tribe A identity to use my Tribe B identity. This only gets worse when I have to move my entire blog and maybe even DNS entries (assuming I wanted the added hassle of managing my own domain in the "democratic" internet). Changing identity is the "payment in sweat" I mentioned above. Most people will make the a priori decision that changing identity is too much work and instead favor the centralized systems like Google to manage identity.
- bdauvergne 5y ago
  That's clearly not different you can also change your email from Google to Live but you also have to pay in sweat as you say. The difference is you can have some control on your "tribe" as you call it because it's a democratic human organization where Microsoft and Google are sort of oligarchic human organizations, some people have power over them, you're just unable to be part of those people for actual money/power reasons. As I said I see no technical/organizational reason why techniques advocated for radical decentralization (like blockhain, dht, name-independant routing, etc..) could not be used to make the necessary sweat to move from a tribe to another easier (as there are political framework like the European Union which makes it easy to move your life from France to Germany or the reverse); move you signed DNS record from tribe 1 to tribe 2 so you move routing of your email, give some capability to tribe 1 to sync your data from tribe 2, and forgot about tribe 2. If tribe 2 is unreliable and still advertise that it should receive your email, you can do nothing, people in tribe 2 will lose contact with you. But if (real material) state A claim you are a criminal, and state B give you asylum that's great, but it won't make the danger of returning to state A disappear. I think that the case where tribe would be adversarial is an edge case, the same way Live and Google do not block each other emails. Anyway what I say will only verify if some people try it, make a global "user of internet association" with some kind of constitution for governing it democratically, amass some capital, create some infrastructure a la google-suite and see where it goes. If nobody adhere to it, I was wrong :) It seems that in this setting many current technology which needs some trust anchor to have some kind of performance become simpler (global ledger, secure name system, etc..) and very powerful.