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Review of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

211 points by doctorshady 4y ago

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bmmayer1 4y ago
> we need a publicly owned internet. Ok, I'll bite. The privatized internet has failed us...compared to what? There's two prime examples of a publicly owned internet in the world today. One is run by the CCP and is sardonically known as the Great Firewall of China. The other is the state-run intranet of North Korea. Do we really think that these are desirable alternatives to a privately run and distributed internet where unfortunately some people say and do crazy things, and some internet providers happen to have geographical monopolies that really have nothing to do with the internet in the first place but local protectionism? Come on.
- vore 4y ago
  What? > On the infrastructural side, Tarnoff shows a clear preference for the community-owned networks that have been proliferating across the United States, even as they’ve faced opposition from the telecom oligopoly. These networks tend to deliver better service at lower cost, while prioritizing community needs over those of major corporations’ shareholders. > > Meanwhile, on the services side, Tarnoff takes aim at the “bigness” incentivized by the need to produce returns for the difficulties they create for self-governance and the negative social interactions they promote. Instead, he presents a model of a “protocolized” social media with a proliferation of small communities that can interact with one another and where public funding is available for media. The article says nothing about a state-owned restricted internet. The CCP doesn't even "own" the internet in China. Don't Red Scare like this, all it serves is to muddy the waters.
  - chroem- 4y ago
    Don't be so dismissive: it's a legitimate concern. These are the same western governments that are already trying to clamp down on internet content they don't like: e.g. pornography, encryption, etc.
    - vore 4y ago
      Again, the article is not talking about state ownership of the internet.
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- georgemcbay 4y ago
  I agree that the real problem is monopolies and not private ownership per se, but I wouldn't call it "local protectionism" so much as a complete lack of anti-trust enforcement allowing a small group of giant corporations to form a de facto cartel that is able to price fix and carve up their own regional monopolies as unspoken gentlemen's agreements. The monopolies are regional, but the players holding those local monopolies (and doing all sorts of lobbying to force out municipal ISP competition, etc) are a very small set of well known companies.
- djrobstep 4y ago
  Very sick of this rhetorical pattern: Anybody: *describes problem and straightforward solutions/improvements already proven in many other normal countries* Americans: "Well at least I'm not in North Korea!!! You want us to live like North Korea?" It's so tiresome!
  - ddingus 4y ago
    Sadly, it is also deeply rooted. The US is very highly propagandized. It is proving quite effective.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      You don't think Americans have any valid reason to be mistrustful of their government or have reservations about it owning their communications infrastructure? What is propaganda, exactly? The information brought to you by Mark Felt, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden? Or media corporations assuring you that only dangerous conspiracy theorists would dare to question their government?
      - ddingus 4y ago
        Of course they do! I am one, and my level of trust is not pretty. And it is no more pretty when it comes to private entities handling things. Both serve profit, not people. And there is massive corruption. Those do us no favors. The answer comes from us, the people. That is what the law says. The propaganda is all about everything but that. See it now? There are places in the world where government is effective and it performs the tasks the people need, want and appreciate. Corruption is low. Ask those people and they will tell you their mistrust is of money, power, and threats to democracy. Our propaganda talks about our democracy all the time. People who study this can tell you public opinion has almost zero impact on policy. That is not democracy. Americans know these things, and their trust is low, as it would be for anyone in similar circumstances. Americans seek answers and there are none to be had amidst the propagandized national discourse. That's the source of deeply rooted things as discussed above.
    - 4y ago
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >One is run by the CCP The CCP doesn't run 'the Chinese internet'. In many ways the Chinese digital sphere is even more privatized than its European or American counterparts given that its almost entirely built on the back of the vertically integrated private companies that the article attacks. It's why there's basically no comparable search giant to Google, not even domestic in China, everything is driven by proprietary platforms rather than protocols, as China largely leapfrogged over that phase. Also discussed in the context of why there's so little long form blogging in China, here (https://yiqinfu.github.io/posts/walled-gardens-china/ https://yiqinfu.github.io/posts/walled-gardens-china/)
  - abigail95 4y ago
    private chinese companies exist to enact ccp policy the public/private distinction from western countries doesn't exist in the same way over there to say it's more privatized would imply the government has less control, when clearly the opposite is true
  - t0suj4 4y ago
    You call the shots, you own it.
- deleted 4y ago
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- diordiderot 4y ago
  Chattanooga TN has the fastest internet in the US because they have publically owned ISP https://tech.co/news/chattanooga-fastest-internet-usa-2018-08 https://tech.co/news/chattanooga-fastest-internet-usa-2018-0...
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    The countries with the fastest broadband (according to wikipedia) appear to include those which have private ISPs, so I'm not convinced by that claim.
    - SyzygistSix 4y ago
      There is more than one way to skin a cat. (yuck)
- cs137 4y ago
  There's two prime examples of a publicly owned internet in the world today. One is run by the CCP and is sardonically known as the Great Firewall of China. The other is the state-run intranet of North Korea. Nothing about the Chinese government is "publicly owned". China is state capitalism at its finest--or worst, depending on whom you ask. North Korea is also not meaningfully communist and has since changed its ideology to juche, a strange mishmash of old-style imperialism, personality cult, and frank absurdity.
  - CryptoPunk 4y ago
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- susanasj 4y ago
  I'll bite on this: we absolutely would be better off with state provided internet infrastructure. I don't care nearly as much about the levels above that, but the fiber in the ground should be a publicly owned utility. there's lots of info here on a campaign that I am involved in NYC: internetforall.nyc But the short version is: internet access is crucial to modern life (jobs, housing, civic participation), and access to it is very unequally distributed because we are beholden to a few monopolies. I live in a nice building in gentrified Brooklyn and I have exactly one choice of internet provider. That has been true of every building I have lived in in Brooklyn. Poor neighborhoods and public housing may not even have access to broadband at all. NYC has been sued by homeless advocates because many shelters have no access at all, but when NYC has spent money to try to subsidize internet through private providers they are so immune to competition that they just don't fulfill their contracts, and the city has no choice to but to continue contracting with them: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/report-verizon-nyc-settle-six-year-broadband-dustup https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/report-verizon-nyc-set.... The reality is that providing the infrastructure to poor neighborhoods is not profitable and never will be, and the nature of the physical infrastructure leads to monopoly and corruption. Are some of the problems because of incompetence and corruption in local government? Yes, of course. But if more cities have publicly owned and publicly run networks then at least someone has to answer for the embarrassing state of internet access in the US.
motohagiography 4y ago
Governments can barely manage a website, so we may want to exercise some collective discernment before giving them the whole internet to manage. I'm skeptical of the intentions of authors at Jacobin though, as the only power they ever want to decentralize and redistribute always seems to be someone else's.
- yata69420 4y ago
  The author's name is Marx and he's a PhD candidate in New Zealand: https://twitter.com/parismarx https://twitter.com/parismarx You can't make this stuff up.
  - vore 4y ago
- abathur 4y ago
  So, you would not be skeptical of the authors at Jacobin if they spent their days advocating for the decentralization and redistribution of their own power?
- knowledge-clay 4y ago
  > Governments can barely manage a website "Governments" built most of the technology that the web relies upon today.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
    Well, sort of. They at least provided the incentive.
  - strangeattractr 4y ago
    Government funding built it would be more appropriate. Government agencies (outside of intelligence) are usually bereft of technology competency.
    - deleted 4y ago
tbrownaw 4y ago
Bit of a weird mix of complaining about the results of last-mile shenanigans (hey, let's get municipal broadband banned!) and how centralized services like Facebook and Twitter have managed to out-compete most alternatives. Blaming it all on the presence of business being inherently corruptive of what would have otherwise been a utopia is also a bit sketchy.
osigurdson 4y ago
>> The United States now pays some of the highest prices in the world for some of the worst internet service No, that's Canada
- timbit42 4y ago
  They said, "some".
whatevenisthat 4y ago
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- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  it's a shame that the communists are sometimes right.
  - chroem- 4y ago
    You know, somehow I just have a hard time getting behind the most numerically murderous ideology in the history of the planet. Communist periodicals have just as much business being on HN as their nazi counterparts: none.
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teucris 4y ago
Please read the entire article before assuming that this is a call for a state takeover of the internet.
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  It's calling for "deprivatization". Very very clearly. And, well, that's a fancy word for government takeover.
  - teucris 4y ago
    > On the infrastructural side, Tarnoff shows a clear preference for the community-owned networks that have been proliferating across the United States > Meanwhile, on the services side, Tarnoff takes aim at the “bigness” incentivized by the need to produce returns for the difficulties they create for self-governance and the negative social interactions they promote. Instead, he presents a model of a “protocolized” social media with a proliferation of small communities that can interact with one another and where public funding is available for media.
    - tbrownaw 4y ago
      > Instead, he presents a model of a “protocolized” social media with a proliferation of small communities that can interact with one another and where public funding is available for media. Kinda like Mastodon, except you get to fight over who controls the government funds that everyone's supposed to depend on.
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istillwritecode 4y ago
I wish I could post a screenshot of this site, because it proves beyond all measure why the commercial web sucks. Two modals for "sign up for our mailing list" and "accept all cookies". Fuck you very much. Why would I read your opinion whining about the web when you contributed to the downfall of the web yourself?
- arandomhuman 4y ago
  I was not familiar with the publisher posting this article, but briefly overlooked your comment before opening the link. At first glance, I was amused, genuinely thinking this article/website a interesting parody of making a website with all the dark patterns and implementation of sign-up-to-mailing-list/tracking/shopping/subscription/etc. and was excited thinking it was awesome someone was so aware of the problems with the internet today they encapsulated the issues into the website itself satirically. But upon clicking around around further the author was indeed completely unaware of the irony of its own article.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    Hipocrisy is a valid criticism but not a counter-argument. I believe the meme format is "you want to improve society somewhat yet you participate in it".
    - arandomhuman 4y ago
      I don't see how my comment was proposing an argument to the content within the article. It was merely a criticism and would hope to it interpreted as such. Wouldn't be nice to see a higher level of quality and consistency in commentaries like this, especially when the title is as ambitious as something as 'fighting for the digital future'? I don't mean to sound rude, but your response sounds a bit presumptuous and complacent with hypocrisy.
  - streamlining 4y ago
    What? The website has one pop up for me and it looks nice actually. Cookie consent notices are the fault of lacking browser standards, not individual web sites.
roenxi 4y ago
The article is a bit vague on the actual arguments. This quote deserves special consideration: > "A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few" Giving control to the government is rather explicitly giving control to the few - the government is busy responding to issues voters see as key (eg, inflation, war, environmental concerns, skirmishes between different political groups, etc). Unless a voter is willing (and stupid enough) to prioritise cheap internet access above the important issues then public internet is just asking for regulatory capture. The government doesn't have the bandwidth to do what this quote implies they can. It will just result in an incompetent, politically connected few in control. We know there is a group who are willing to get involved in corrupting the regulations - it is the people currently profiting off poor internet regulation. How many people are going to use voting as a signal for their displeasure in corruption of a Board of the Internet?
- Rygian 4y ago
  Privatizing means giving control to "the few whose only incentive is to make more money." Which is worse beyond doubt.
  - culi 4y ago
    Yes but I think what the person you're responding to was pointing out was the high risk of regulatory capture. We tend to have this false dichotomy of the government vs private companies. When in reality most regulation that's passed is most heavily influenced by lobbyists and special (corporate) interests that don't represent the majority. OP is pointing out that government regulation will only work as long as the public stays engaged. In the long term it would actually lead to even more power concentrated to "the few whose only incentive is to make more money."
    - diordiderot 4y ago
      It feels really unfair that all anti-gov / taxation arguments are just fatalistic "this will fail" and we're okay with that as if entropy isn't the default state of the universe. No use building this bridge it'll just rust. Why eat! you're gonna die anyways. Why bother with a wealth tax, they'll out smart you anyways.
Proven 4y ago
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heydemo 4y ago
“'A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few,' writes Tarnoff, and since that tendency is hardwired into capitalism itself — not just a certain iteration of capitalism — fixing the internet requires a different strategy: deprivatization." The problem here is that network effects and economies of scale generally make centralization more practical. Capitalism's competition between multiple centrally managed models, although not perfect, is tough to beat. "Rather than lay out a concrete plan for a deprivatized internet, Tarnoff explains that experimentation will be key." It's tough to clap your hands and summon a decentralized system, but Jacobin maintains typical faith something never tried will work well, as long as it's anti-capitalist. Seems like regulation within capitalism is a much more dependable way of addressing flaws in the free market.
voz_ 4y ago
The jacobin has completely lost the thread, I used to love this magazine.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  It's a _socialist_ publication. How has advocating for deprivitization of an industry come as a shock?
ketzu 4y ago
The article discusses two main points (apparently from a book, but I am not going to read that one before commenting): * Infrastructure * Services On the infrastructure side it proposes community owned access to the internet as an alternative to few, often a single, commercial provider for access. These partially already exist (as discussed in the article) but not as widespread as people would want and, worse, got hampered by local laws forbidding these local organizations in many US cities (as far as I remember at least). This seems relatively straight forward and with removal of those laws this could be practices fairly easily for the last-mile problem. For the backbone this is not a solution though. If that was to be "community owned" it would be equivalent to the government running it on the national scale and unclear on how to run the international connections and who shouold own and operate them. As far as I can tell, the privat sector doesn't do a too shabby job at running those (besides major security problems with BGP...). On the services side, the article seems to take a "protocols over platforms" stance, that seems to be popular on HN, too. It leaves open some questions for me, though: What if people do not switch? How to handle existing platforms with severe vendor lock-in or network effects? I think those open questions are not easy or straight forward to answer and that's why the article only goes for the anyways-popular approaches. Although, I don't think the north-korea and china examples are good "deprivatized internet" examples. I have no idea of the north korean internet, but for chinas great firewall my imperssion is it is an enforcement tool for locality and local laws, the internet itself is as privatized as it is outside of it - centralized platforms, some p2p things, ads, tracking and run by mostly private companies. Maybe something like minitel and other original competitors are more of an example for state managed internet. I am by no means educated well on minitel, but afair companies had to register with a central authority to host a service, which cuased severe friction and protectionism problems.
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briga 4y ago
With a name like Paris Marx you hardly need to question where this author's bias lies. Right now with my smartphone (a device you can be sure would never have been invented on a government committee) I can stream any song released in the past 100 years, I can get detailed step-by-step instructions on how to drive to the other side of the continent, I have access to the biggest encyclopedias that have ever existed, I can learn any programming language for free, I can keep up to date 24/7 with current events (even if the government doesn't approve of the news outlets I'm looking at), I can make a living working remotely (with software developed by private companies), I can order literally any item and have it delivered straight to my door, the list goes on... Having worked as a software engineer, it's a miracle that any of this works at all. Adding in 7 layers of government bureaucracy sounds like a good way to have the whole edifice come crumbling down, not to mention stifling any sort of innovation that might be left in tech. I guess my point is, if there was every anything that has done more to liberate the average human being, it is the internet. I just don't buy the argument that any of this would have happened without free market competition, or that the state of the internet not is somehow worse than it would be otherwise.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > With a name like Paris Marx you hardly need to question where this author's bias lies Surely. Look at all these confirmed Marxists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_(surname)#Notable_people_with_the_surname https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_(surname)#Notable_people_... So many in entertainment. I guess people were right about communists running hollywood. And some people were so clever they had the name before Karl Marx was even born!
  - briga 4y ago
    Well I mean obviously political beliefs are not heritable. But this guy does seem to have made a name for himself as an internet socialist, judging by his other publications
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Come _on_ Marx is just a last name. You gotta make a better argument than that.
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mathlover2 4y ago
Personally, I find this article ridiculous, even without the irony mentioned in the comments. I think there should be regulation of ISPs coupled with more community broadband efforts. I also like protocol-based social media. I also think there should be scrutiny of larger companies for anti-competitive behavior. But you can do these things, and other efforts, without banning private investment in the Internet entirely. Also, this article's assertion that the Internet's golden age ended in 1995 is rather laughable. I know Usenet pre-Eternal September was nice, but I'd hardly call it the "golden age" of the internet, especially since it was barely accessible to the public at that time.
- deleted 4y ago
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- thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
  > barely accessible to the public at that time. Maybe that’s what they mean.
aanthracite 4y ago
As a person who lives in a post communist country, I'm certainly sure we don't want the state to manage internet or any other technology for that matter. Look at what's going on right now in Russia, North Korea or China (and these are only firsts that come to my mind). It's really hard for people there to get any information beyond the state propaganda. Good times create dumb people -> dumb people make communism -> communism creates bad times -> bad times creates smart people -> smart people create capitalism -> capitalism creates good times -> good times create dumb people... So, let us avoid the red color...
helloworld11 4y ago
To those criticizing the (mostly) absurd arguments of this website that so un-ironically crams in all the same commercial incentives it criticizes of the supposedly terrible private internet, remember that Jacobin is a very markedly left socialist magazine with a long history of throwing shit on anything market oriented. Some of their arguments are valid and decent, others are just ridiculous and not to mention hypocritical considering that the magazine itself is owned by a corporate entity and very much dedicated to its own bottom line of revenues and earnings. edit: I mean, what would you expect of a magazine that named itself after a bunch of "heroes" of the French Revolution whose own extreme, fanatical leftism was a pioneer for mass murder of civilians in the name of ideological purity.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  >I mean, what would you expect of a magazine that named itself after a bunch of "heroes" of the French Revolution whose own extreme, fanatical leftism was a pioneer for mass murder of civilians in the name of ideological purity. >The name of the magazine derives from the 1938 book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James in which James ascribes the Haitian revolutionists a greater purity in regards to their attachment to the ideals of the French Revolution than the French Jacobins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)#Title_and_logo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)#Title_and_l...
  - helloworld11 4y ago
    Fair point about the naming origin, but I think it's worth elaborating again: The ideals of the French Revolution were themselves very problematic. The French Jacobins adapted these "ideals" of the French Revolution in their most extreme, taken to its conclusion form, and the result was a blood bath. Ergo, those very ideals, applied to messy human beings, created a murderously greater mess. It's tiresome to see an endless stream of justifications for extreme socialist leftism with the notion that it only went wrong because "people didn't live up to it". People shouldn't have to live up to an ideology. The ideology should realistically adapt itself to fundamental aspects of the human condition, especially if not doing so means killing innocent human beings and destroying much of their peaceful social organization. If someone were to say that Nazism would be great "if only all people were blood and soil aryans", it would rightfully be considered grotesque. With extreme socialism, the expectation of people to act completely at odds with our non-collectivist nature (because we're not ants) is taken as a defect os us instead of this woefully, deeply wrong line of thinking. Again, it's grotesque and hypocritical.
dasil003 4y ago
Every time someone starts talking in grand terms about how the entire status quo of some major facet of civilization "should be" a certain way with zero reflection on the systemic incentives that have led it to be the way it is I die a little inside.
- culi 4y ago
  Could you be a bit more specific? This whole point of this article is to point out how systemic incentives haven't lived up to what they promised the internet would be like...
- ssklash 4y ago
  I think the entire point of the article was a discussion of the systemic incentives of capitalism and especially private ownership of what turned into a public service, so I don't see how you can say there was zero reflection.
WalterBright 4y ago
"Take the protocols that allow these various networks to communicate with one another and eventually produced TCP/IP. “Under private ownership, such a language could never have been created,” writes Tarnoff." Um, networks communicating with each other was commonplace in those days, they were called "gateways". Also, there were many privately developed networks, like the bulletin board system, that were global. The internet also runs on Ethernet - all those internet cables you've got laying around are Ethernet, developed by Xerox.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  100% the internet was a diverse mix of public and private technologies. BBSes were run privately (group or individual), Fidonet was by private individuals, and Usenet was run by universities, just on the social side. DARPA may have funded TCP/IP but computer networks were thriving before then.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    That's right. The idea that a global network wouldn't have existed with DARPA is not credible. Everybody with two computers wanted to connect them, and various schemes of doing it flourished. Heck, even I came up with an outline of how a global system could work before I'd heard of DARPA. (I never did anything about it because I was stupid.)
    - HaZeust 4y ago
      We still know you from Empire, though - so not everything was fruitless ;)
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        So many opportunities to become a billionaire I missed! America is not only the land of opportunity, it's the land of blind fools.
        4y ago
Gentil 4y ago
OK. This is a good article. But the title of the blog post is misleading. The author is talking about the privatized internet as in the infrastructure of the internet that is privatized. Not individual business privatization. Remember the Internet Society planning to sell .org? - https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_shambles/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_sha.... ICANN and Internet Society has been under the spotlight for shitty behavior since a very long time. W3C is also heavily lobbied by companies like Google for instance is abusing it's browser market share against to make the internet less private. Then there is Manifest v3 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3NzzhHzc-qnk4w4PX-0XMw8/edit# https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3Nzz.... This article is about things like that. The infrastructure privatization and lobbying. Not individual business privatization. While I didn't like the author's website's patterns, that shouldn't change the fact about what the author is trying to convey.
- Animats 4y ago
  > Manifest v3 At one point, I had exactly the same browser add-on running under both Firefox and Chrome. Then Google wanted changes. I dropped Chrome support, because nobody runs add-ons under Chrome much anyway.
  - einpoklum 4y ago
    Was that before or after Mozilla decided to stop let you load proper add-ons, and make you settle for the crippled WebExtensions API?
  - sexy_seedbox 4y ago
    > nobody runs add-ons under Chrome much anyway Beg to differ. Every non-developer where I work has at least one add-on for Chrome, usually Grammarly or a screenshot/screen capture tool (because there's really no default tool in Chrome to do this).
- junofan 4y ago
  Nah, it’s about Tarnoff’s brand of internet Marxism and how commercialization has driven a subsumption of “labor” (basically internet users) at all levels, shaping the internet we use today. At the application layer, he’s talking about how user-generated content arose as an internet-native thing to be profited from—in the early days, storefronts weren’t as profitable as eBay. Website authors compete for placement in Google’s search results, feeding Google’s ad empire. At the infra layer, he’s talking about how backbones are designed around delivering commercial content ubiquitously rather than connecting communities. Tarnoff thinks there’s an alternative where you connect to your local library’s social network through your local ISP coop to see what your neighbors are up to.
perryizgr8 4y ago
No, privatized interests have brought us whatever is good about the internet today. They have also brought about a lot of the bad stuff, true. In government hands there would have been just incompetemt stagnation and wastage of taxpayer funds.
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DeathArrow 4y ago
- amelius 4y ago
  The internet started as a state-owned project.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    As a military R&D project 50 years ago to develop more capable communications networks. That doesn't say much about building and running the internet of today.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Your two statements are practically in contradiction with each other. It reminds me of the right-wing that wants to cancel programs for the lowest income, yet votes for bills to bail out and provide welfare for the largest scum corporations all while getting kickbacks and taking bribes. I agree having government manage projects is not ideal, but there are certainly times and teams that have been a lot more efficient and better than others.
- sofixa 4y ago
  You should read about Minitel, the French state-owned internet precursor that was flourishing before floundering due to a few reasons ( competition from the internet, delays in new features, tech choices that were coming to bite back, etc.)
  - amelius 4y ago
    This really shows the range of government effectiveness. At one end you have bored public servants who produce nothing but kafkaesque nightmares. At the other end you have government-employed academics who produce cool stuff that drives tech innovations. When thinking about the government, people often only think about the first case.
- qwery 4y ago
Wolfenstein98k 4y ago
The best part about outlets like this is that you don't need to open any articles to know what they're criticising and what they're advocating.
g8oz 4y ago
>>The internet has long been surrounded by a libertarian idealism, despite always failing to deliver on those ambitions Ouch
sovietcattle 4y ago
Private is bad. Public is good. by Paris Marx
- 0daystock 4y ago
  Writes technology rants from his iPhone and Twitter account - actual Marx is doing somersaults in the grave.
0daystock 4y ago
Jacobin: private capital is BAD. Why? Because it's part of evil for-profit capitalism! Seriously, that actually appears to be the thesis. > Instead of waiting to see what Google or Amazon hand us, technology is produced by communities and collectives to serve very different needs and ends. You can already do that - right now. But it's easier to write a whiny diatribe than it is to learn how to program though, isn't it?
AlbertCory 4y ago
In 1990, the federal government released a new version of GOSIP, which required that vendors demonstrate compliance with the OSI suite of protocols. These would really have been the "public internet" with standards agreed upon by international bodies, and voting by country. The large telephone companies, in many countries government-regulated monopolies, expected to run it, as they did telephone service. I actually kicked off a lengthy thread on the internet-history mailing list about this, and the conclusion was that by 1990, the war was already over and TCP had won. Network operators said, in effect, "OK, we support OSI. But GOSIP doesn't say we actually have to run it on our network." One guy from The Wollongong Group said that his company offered a package to assist in converting from TCP to OSI, since obviously everyone would have to do it. They found that in Europe, supposedly the hotbed of international standards, there was only demand for a package to convert the other way: OSI --> TCP. Note that this is not an object lesson proving either that "government works" OR "government always screws things up." The reason TCP worked and OSI didn't was that regular engineers and grad students and postdocs, not politicians and big telecoms, built it. One reason they had such success is that the Defense Department applied time pressure: "give us something that works now, not in the glorious future." So that's also the government -- just a different part of it.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The weird side effect of all this is that almost all networking classes and books explain TCP using ... the OSI [OSI] model, even though it doesn't really apply and can itself be confusing trying to make everything fit [1122]. Things like HTTP/3 confuse it even more. [1122] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1122#page-8 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1122#page-8 [OSI] The theory that OSI stands for "over specified interface" is calumnious lies.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Yeah, the 7-layer model kinda captured the public mind. Only up to layer 4, though.
gyre007 4y ago
Strange, but if privatised internet has failed us, why is there a massive banner on top of the article?
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- ok123456 4y ago
  Didn't see it.
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walrus01 4y ago
What has failed us is putting people like Ajit Pai in charge of the FCC and the federal government trying to remove net neutrality. The economics textbook version of the term "regulatory capture" is what has failed us in the large telecom and large ISP industry. The private internet has failed us? No shit, maybe we shouldn't allow entities like the combined Centurylink/Level3 to acquire various mid sized players and reduce the market competition. Maybe we shouldn't allow Rogers and Shaw to merge in Canada. Things like that. Maybe when the US federal government hands out subsidy money to companies like Frontier and Verizon to build suburban and rural FTTH they should be held accountable when they just take the money and don't actually build the service promised. Maybe people in their ordinary homes in ordinary neighborhoods should have better options than degraded DSL from the local "phone" company on 30 year old copper POTS lines or the near monopoly local Comcast DOCSIS3 coax cable service, squeezing every last dollar of ROI out of that legacy coax plant. bias/point of view: I do network engineering for a small/mid-size ISP that directly competes with the telecom dinosaurs.
- alexfromapex 4y ago
  I feel like the federal government at large has failed us, due to financial conflicts of interest taking priority over everything
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  - svachalek 4y ago
    It's gotten really bad, and still seems to be accelerating in that direction. When government stops responding to voters, it's no longer a democracy (or democratically elected republic if you want to go there).
    - rabuse 4y ago
      We're shifting towards a feudalistic society.
voz_ 4y ago
Is this that jacobin article again?
- wmf 4y ago
  It's another review of the same book that Jacobin reviewed.
kwatsonafter 4y ago
Great article. I like that it gets to the real meat-and-potatoes of what determines, "tech policy" in the United States. Moving forward it doesn't seem like a movement back to a, "science and research-first" communication architecture is really feasible but I think, considering that the real, "Internet" is just, "computers talking to each other" that there are going to be parallelized cultures existing on-top of the extent TCP/IP infrastructure that might be worthwhile.
rank0 4y ago
Nobody is going to run core internet infrastructure for free. The government can’t even handle our current infrastructure of roads, bridges, electrical grids, and utilities. How on earth is the government supposed to operate as an ISP? We need better regulation, not public ownership. Or I guess we’ll just tack on another Trillion dollars to our annual deficit…infinite government expansion/spending can solve every problem right?! /s
- walrus01 4y ago
  there is a middle ground in between asking that the government run the internet, and allowing telecom behemoths to merge as they please and reduce consumer competition. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=largest+telecom+industry+acquisitions https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=largest+t... You can run a totally fine regional last mile ISP with 10, 15, or 50 FTE staff positions. Depending on your geographical scale. Or 500. You don't need to be a Comcast, Centurylink or Verizon sized monster. In fact some of the absolute best consumer-service quality 1GbE and 10GbE symmetric FTTH ISPs that I'm aware of are run by teams of less than 25 people in total. On a county sized scale.
  - rank0 4y ago
    What you’re describing is not at all inconsistent with my view. The damn article was about “deprivatizing” the internet.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Sure, nobody is saying the government should do nothing with the internet. It's already involved with subsidies. But the article is about government ownership of the internet. That's a very different thing.
- klipt 4y ago
  You seem to be assuming government means federal, but local government is also government and there are many towns with municipal fiber their residents are happy with.
cyanydeez 4y ago
- iamdamian 4y ago
  See also: Late capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism
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hitovst 4y ago
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kristopolous 4y ago
The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield” is just false. As is the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack. It's uncited in the book, I've got a copy. Anyone could just fraudulently send email as generalSmith@dod.mil in 1975 and you'd have no way of knowing if it was real. And then it would traverse in a nondeterministic unencrypted way over any machine that claims it can get it there with no way of knowing whether it succeeded or whether the message received was the message sent. It was built by academics for tasks like remote timesharing and it ran mostly on minicomputers, not even mainframes. All the early nodes were at academic institutions. Exactly 0 were on military bases. The project goals, people involved, sites it was installed at, technologies built, all the founders, Cerf, Kahn, Taylor, Roberts, Linkletter - zero military people - 100% academics. None of this suggests military purpose Look at the abysmal security the network had. Do you think email, rcp, ftp and telnet was designed for military use? It was openly bridged to the Soviet research network through IIASA, you know, cause that's how cold war things happened - open door policy to the enemy Or what about the routing protocols where a rogue network switch could just announce itself and then start soliciting for traffic to pass through it. In 1997, a misbehaving router singlehandedly took down the net https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS_7007_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS_7007_incident any enemy could have easily done this. Look at DNS host transfer up to about 2002 - you could just query for all records dumping your entire network topology, to just anyone - extremely valuable information for your enemies. Look at finger and the original whois, an email and personnel lookup tool. You could use it to get people's schedule, all the people who work under them, what they're doing, how to contact them, where they last logged in at - do you know what I'd really like to have as your military enemy? Heck let's cite Wikipedia as if reality matters: "20th century WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. A WHOIS query of a person's last name would yield all individuals with that name. A query with a given keyword returned all registered domains containing that keyword. A query for a given administrative contact returned all domains the administrator was associated with." Sending out spies, espionage, sabotage, all unnecessary if you're enemy is using this technology. You could do it all from a terminal. There's zero security in any of these. The doors are unlocked and swinging open with a giant honking welcome sign blinking. Edit: Apparently reality is unpopular. I'm committed to reality far more than being popular. My politics are on the far left btw, that's why I demand such high standards from these people. They're supposedly playing for my team. But let me tell you, they don't seem to care either.
Apocryphon 4y ago
> In his analysis of capitalist development, Karl Marx drew a distinction between the “formal” and “real” subsumption of labour by capital. In formal subsumption, an existing labour process remains intact, but is now performed on a capitalist basis. A peasant who used to grow his own food becomes a wage labourer on somebody else’s farm. The way he works the land stays the same. In real subsumption, by contrast, the labour process is revolutionised to meet the requirements of capital. Formerly, capital inherited a process; now, it remakes the process. Our agricultural worker becomes integrated into the industrialised apparatus of the modern factory farm. The way he works completely changes: his daily rhythms bear little resemblance to those of his peasant predecessors. And the new arrangement is more profitable for the farm’s owner, having been explicitly organised with that end in mind. > This is a useful lens for thinking about the evolution of the internet, and for understanding why the dot-coms didn’t succeed. The internet of the mid-to-late 1990s was under private ownership, but it had not yet been optimised for profit. It retained too much of its old shape as a system designed for researchers, and this shape wasn’t conducive to the new demands being placed on it. Formal subsumption had been achieved, in other words, but real subsumption remained elusive. > Accomplishing the latter would involve technical, social and economic developments that made it possible to construct new kinds of systems. These systems are the digital equivalents of the modern factory farm. They represent the long-sought solution to the problem that consumed and ultimately defeated the dot-com entrepreneurs: how to push privatisation up the stack. And eBay offered the first glimpse of what that solution looked like. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31784966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31784966
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vt85 4y ago
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211 points by doctorshady 4y ago

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> we need a publicly owned internet. Ok, I'll bite. The privatized internet has failed us...compared to what? There's two prime examples of a publicly owned internet in the world today. One is run by the CCP and is sardonically known as the Great Firewall of China. The other is the state-run intranet of North Korea. Do we really think that these are desirable alternatives to a privately run and distributed internet where unfortunately some people say and do crazy things, and some internet providers happen to have geographical monopolies that really have nothing to do with the internet in the first place but local protectionism? Come on.

vore 4y ago
What? > On the infrastructural side, Tarnoff shows a clear preference for the community-owned networks that have been proliferating across the United States, even as they’ve faced opposition from the telecom oligopoly. These networks tend to deliver better service at lower cost, while prioritizing community needs over those of major corporations’ shareholders. > > Meanwhile, on the services side, Tarnoff takes aim at the “bigness” incentivized by the need to produce returns for the difficulties they create for self-governance and the negative social interactions they promote. Instead, he presents a model of a “protocolized” social media with a proliferation of small communities that can interact with one another and where public funding is available for media. The article says nothing about a state-owned restricted internet. The CCP doesn't even "own" the internet in China. Don't Red Scare like this, all it serves is to muddy the waters.
- chroem- 4y ago
  Don't be so dismissive: it's a legitimate concern. These are the same western governments that are already trying to clamp down on internet content they don't like: e.g. pornography, encryption, etc.
  - vore 4y ago
    Again, the article is not talking about state ownership of the internet.
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georgemcbay 4y ago
I agree that the real problem is monopolies and not private ownership per se, but I wouldn't call it "local protectionism" so much as a complete lack of anti-trust enforcement allowing a small group of giant corporations to form a de facto cartel that is able to price fix and carve up their own regional monopolies as unspoken gentlemen's agreements. The monopolies are regional, but the players holding those local monopolies (and doing all sorts of lobbying to force out municipal ISP competition, etc) are a very small set of well known companies.
djrobstep 4y ago
Very sick of this rhetorical pattern: Anybody: *describes problem and straightforward solutions/improvements already proven in many other normal countries* Americans: "Well at least I'm not in North Korea!!! You want us to live like North Korea?" It's so tiresome!
- ddingus 4y ago
  Sadly, it is also deeply rooted. The US is very highly propagandized. It is proving quite effective.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    You don't think Americans have any valid reason to be mistrustful of their government or have reservations about it owning their communications infrastructure? What is propaganda, exactly? The information brought to you by Mark Felt, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden? Or media corporations assuring you that only dangerous conspiracy theorists would dare to question their government?
    - ddingus 4y ago
      Of course they do! I am one, and my level of trust is not pretty. And it is no more pretty when it comes to private entities handling things. Both serve profit, not people. And there is massive corruption. Those do us no favors. The answer comes from us, the people. That is what the law says. The propaganda is all about everything but that. See it now? There are places in the world where government is effective and it performs the tasks the people need, want and appreciate. Corruption is low. Ask those people and they will tell you their mistrust is of money, power, and threats to democracy. Our propaganda talks about our democracy all the time. People who study this can tell you public opinion has almost zero impact on policy. That is not democracy. Americans know these things, and their trust is low, as it would be for anyone in similar circumstances. Americans seek answers and there are none to be had amidst the propagandized national discourse. That's the source of deeply rooted things as discussed above.
  - 4y ago
Barrin92 4y ago
>One is run by the CCP The CCP doesn't run 'the Chinese internet'. In many ways the Chinese digital sphere is even more privatized than its European or American counterparts given that its almost entirely built on the back of the vertically integrated private companies that the article attacks. It's why there's basically no comparable search giant to Google, not even domestic in China, everything is driven by proprietary platforms rather than protocols, as China largely leapfrogged over that phase. Also discussed in the context of why there's so little long form blogging in China, here (https://yiqinfu.github.io/posts/walled-gardens-china/ https://yiqinfu.github.io/posts/walled-gardens-china/)
- abigail95 4y ago
  private chinese companies exist to enact ccp policy the public/private distinction from western countries doesn't exist in the same way over there to say it's more privatized would imply the government has less control, when clearly the opposite is true
- t0suj4 4y ago
  You call the shots, you own it.
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diordiderot 4y ago
Chattanooga TN has the fastest internet in the US because they have publically owned ISP https://tech.co/news/chattanooga-fastest-internet-usa-2018-08 https://tech.co/news/chattanooga-fastest-internet-usa-2018-0...
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  The countries with the fastest broadband (according to wikipedia) appear to include those which have private ISPs, so I'm not convinced by that claim.
  - SyzygistSix 4y ago
    There is more than one way to skin a cat. (yuck)
cs137 4y ago
There's two prime examples of a publicly owned internet in the world today. One is run by the CCP and is sardonically known as the Great Firewall of China. The other is the state-run intranet of North Korea. Nothing about the Chinese government is "publicly owned". China is state capitalism at its finest--or worst, depending on whom you ask. North Korea is also not meaningfully communist and has since changed its ideology to juche, a strange mishmash of old-style imperialism, personality cult, and frank absurdity.
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
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susanasj 4y ago
I'll bite on this: we absolutely would be better off with state provided internet infrastructure. I don't care nearly as much about the levels above that, but the fiber in the ground should be a publicly owned utility. there's lots of info here on a campaign that I am involved in NYC: internetforall.nyc But the short version is: internet access is crucial to modern life (jobs, housing, civic participation), and access to it is very unequally distributed because we are beholden to a few monopolies. I live in a nice building in gentrified Brooklyn and I have exactly one choice of internet provider. That has been true of every building I have lived in in Brooklyn. Poor neighborhoods and public housing may not even have access to broadband at all. NYC has been sued by homeless advocates because many shelters have no access at all, but when NYC has spent money to try to subsidize internet through private providers they are so immune to competition that they just don't fulfill their contracts, and the city has no choice to but to continue contracting with them: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/report-verizon-nyc-settle-six-year-broadband-dustup https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/report-verizon-nyc-set.... The reality is that providing the infrastructure to poor neighborhoods is not profitable and never will be, and the nature of the physical infrastructure leads to monopoly and corruption. Are some of the problems because of incompetence and corruption in local government? Yes, of course. But if more cities have publicly owned and publicly run networks then at least someone has to answer for the embarrassing state of internet access in the US.

motohagiography 4y ago

Governments can barely manage a website, so we may want to exercise some collective discernment before giving them the whole internet to manage. I'm skeptical of the intentions of authors at Jacobin though, as the only power they ever want to decentralize and redistribute always seems to be someone else's.

yata69420 4y ago
The author's name is Marx and he's a PhD candidate in New Zealand: https://twitter.com/parismarx https://twitter.com/parismarx You can't make this stuff up.
- vore 4y ago
abathur 4y ago
So, you would not be skeptical of the authors at Jacobin if they spent their days advocating for the decentralization and redistribution of their own power?
knowledge-clay 4y ago
> Governments can barely manage a website "Governments" built most of the technology that the web relies upon today.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  Well, sort of. They at least provided the incentive.
- strangeattractr 4y ago
  Government funding built it would be more appropriate. Government agencies (outside of intelligence) are usually bereft of technology competency.
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tbrownaw 4y ago

Bit of a weird mix of complaining about the results of last-mile shenanigans (hey, let's get municipal broadband banned!) and how centralized services like Facebook and Twitter have managed to out-compete most alternatives. Blaming it all on the presence of business being inherently corruptive of what would have otherwise been a utopia is also a bit sketchy.

osigurdson 4y ago

>> The United States now pays some of the highest prices in the world for some of the worst internet service No, that's Canada

timbit42 4y ago
They said, "some".

whatevenisthat 4y ago

[flagged]

adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
it's a shame that the communists are sometimes right.
- chroem- 4y ago
  You know, somehow I just have a hard time getting behind the most numerically murderous ideology in the history of the planet. Communist periodicals have just as much business being on HN as their nazi counterparts: none.
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teucris 4y ago

Please read the entire article before assuming that this is a call for a state takeover of the internet.

tbrownaw 4y ago
It's calling for "deprivatization". Very very clearly. And, well, that's a fancy word for government takeover.
- teucris 4y ago
  > On the infrastructural side, Tarnoff shows a clear preference for the community-owned networks that have been proliferating across the United States > Meanwhile, on the services side, Tarnoff takes aim at the “bigness” incentivized by the need to produce returns for the difficulties they create for self-governance and the negative social interactions they promote. Instead, he presents a model of a “protocolized” social media with a proliferation of small communities that can interact with one another and where public funding is available for media.
  - tbrownaw 4y ago
    > Instead, he presents a model of a “protocolized” social media with a proliferation of small communities that can interact with one another and where public funding is available for media. Kinda like Mastodon, except you get to fight over who controls the government funds that everyone's supposed to depend on.
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istillwritecode 4y ago

I wish I could post a screenshot of this site, because it proves beyond all measure why the commercial web sucks. Two modals for "sign up for our mailing list" and "accept all cookies". Fuck you very much. Why would I read your opinion whining about the web when you contributed to the downfall of the web yourself?

arandomhuman 4y ago
I was not familiar with the publisher posting this article, but briefly overlooked your comment before opening the link. At first glance, I was amused, genuinely thinking this article/website a interesting parody of making a website with all the dark patterns and implementation of sign-up-to-mailing-list/tracking/shopping/subscription/etc. and was excited thinking it was awesome someone was so aware of the problems with the internet today they encapsulated the issues into the website itself satirically. But upon clicking around around further the author was indeed completely unaware of the irony of its own article.
- hnbad 4y ago
  Hipocrisy is a valid criticism but not a counter-argument. I believe the meme format is "you want to improve society somewhat yet you participate in it".
  - arandomhuman 4y ago
    I don't see how my comment was proposing an argument to the content within the article. It was merely a criticism and would hope to it interpreted as such. Wouldn't be nice to see a higher level of quality and consistency in commentaries like this, especially when the title is as ambitious as something as 'fighting for the digital future'? I don't mean to sound rude, but your response sounds a bit presumptuous and complacent with hypocrisy.
- streamlining 4y ago
  What? The website has one pop up for me and it looks nice actually. Cookie consent notices are the fault of lacking browser standards, not individual web sites.

roenxi 4y ago

The article is a bit vague on the actual arguments. This quote deserves special consideration: > "A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few" Giving control to the government is rather explicitly giving control to the few - the government is busy responding to issues voters see as key (eg, inflation, war, environmental concerns, skirmishes between different political groups, etc). Unless a voter is willing (and stupid enough) to prioritise cheap internet access above the important issues then public internet is just asking for regulatory capture. The government doesn't have the bandwidth to do what this quote implies they can. It will just result in an incompetent, politically connected few in control. We know there is a group who are willing to get involved in corrupting the regulations - it is the people currently profiting off poor internet regulation. How many people are going to use voting as a signal for their displeasure in corruption of a Board of the Internet?

Rygian 4y ago
Privatizing means giving control to "the few whose only incentive is to make more money." Which is worse beyond doubt.
- culi 4y ago
  Yes but I think what the person you're responding to was pointing out was the high risk of regulatory capture. We tend to have this false dichotomy of the government vs private companies. When in reality most regulation that's passed is most heavily influenced by lobbyists and special (corporate) interests that don't represent the majority. OP is pointing out that government regulation will only work as long as the public stays engaged. In the long term it would actually lead to even more power concentrated to "the few whose only incentive is to make more money."
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    It feels really unfair that all anti-gov / taxation arguments are just fatalistic "this will fail" and we're okay with that as if entropy isn't the default state of the universe. No use building this bridge it'll just rust. Why eat! you're gonna die anyways. Why bother with a wealth tax, they'll out smart you anyways.

Proven 4y ago

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heydemo 4y ago

“'A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few,' writes Tarnoff, and since that tendency is hardwired into capitalism itself — not just a certain iteration of capitalism — fixing the internet requires a different strategy: deprivatization." The problem here is that network effects and economies of scale generally make centralization more practical. Capitalism's competition between multiple centrally managed models, although not perfect, is tough to beat. "Rather than lay out a concrete plan for a deprivatized internet, Tarnoff explains that experimentation will be key." It's tough to clap your hands and summon a decentralized system, but Jacobin maintains typical faith something never tried will work well, as long as it's anti-capitalist. Seems like regulation within capitalism is a much more dependable way of addressing flaws in the free market.

voz_ 4y ago

The jacobin has completely lost the thread, I used to love this magazine.

diordiderot 4y ago
It's a _socialist_ publication. How has advocating for deprivitization of an industry come as a shock?

ketzu 4y ago

The article discusses two main points (apparently from a book, but I am not going to read that one before commenting): * Infrastructure * Services On the infrastructure side it proposes community owned access to the internet as an alternative to few, often a single, commercial provider for access. These partially already exist (as discussed in the article) but not as widespread as people would want and, worse, got hampered by local laws forbidding these local organizations in many US cities (as far as I remember at least). This seems relatively straight forward and with removal of those laws this could be practices fairly easily for the last-mile problem. For the backbone this is not a solution though. If that was to be "community owned" it would be equivalent to the government running it on the national scale and unclear on how to run the international connections and who shouold own and operate them. As far as I can tell, the privat sector doesn't do a too shabby job at running those (besides major security problems with BGP...). On the services side, the article seems to take a "protocols over platforms" stance, that seems to be popular on HN, too. It leaves open some questions for me, though: What if people do not switch? How to handle existing platforms with severe vendor lock-in or network effects? I think those open questions are not easy or straight forward to answer and that's why the article only goes for the anyways-popular approaches. Although, I don't think the north-korea and china examples are good "deprivatized internet" examples. I have no idea of the north korean internet, but for chinas great firewall my imperssion is it is an enforcement tool for locality and local laws, the internet itself is as privatized as it is outside of it - centralized platforms, some p2p things, ads, tracking and run by mostly private companies. Maybe something like minitel and other original competitors are more of an example for state managed internet. I am by no means educated well on minitel, but afair companies had to register with a central authority to host a service, which cuased severe friction and protectionism problems.

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briga 4y ago

With a name like Paris Marx you hardly need to question where this author's bias lies. Right now with my smartphone (a device you can be sure would never have been invented on a government committee) I can stream any song released in the past 100 years, I can get detailed step-by-step instructions on how to drive to the other side of the continent, I have access to the biggest encyclopedias that have ever existed, I can learn any programming language for free, I can keep up to date 24/7 with current events (even if the government doesn't approve of the news outlets I'm looking at), I can make a living working remotely (with software developed by private companies), I can order literally any item and have it delivered straight to my door, the list goes on... Having worked as a software engineer, it's a miracle that any of this works at all. Adding in 7 layers of government bureaucracy sounds like a good way to have the whole edifice come crumbling down, not to mention stifling any sort of innovation that might be left in tech. I guess my point is, if there was every anything that has done more to liberate the average human being, it is the internet. I just don't buy the argument that any of this would have happened without free market competition, or that the state of the internet not is somehow worse than it would be otherwise.

the_only_law 4y ago
> With a name like Paris Marx you hardly need to question where this author's bias lies Surely. Look at all these confirmed Marxists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_(surname)#Notable_people_with_the_surname https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_(surname)#Notable_people_... So many in entertainment. I guess people were right about communists running hollywood. And some people were so clever they had the name before Karl Marx was even born!
- briga 4y ago
  Well I mean obviously political beliefs are not heritable. But this guy does seem to have made a name for himself as an internet socialist, judging by his other publications
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
Come _on_ Marx is just a last name. You gotta make a better argument than that.

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mathlover2 4y ago

Personally, I find this article ridiculous, even without the irony mentioned in the comments. I think there should be regulation of ISPs coupled with more community broadband efforts. I also like protocol-based social media. I also think there should be scrutiny of larger companies for anti-competitive behavior. But you can do these things, and other efforts, without banning private investment in the Internet entirely. Also, this article's assertion that the Internet's golden age ended in 1995 is rather laughable. I know Usenet pre-Eternal September was nice, but I'd hardly call it the "golden age" of the internet, especially since it was barely accessible to the public at that time.

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thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
> barely accessible to the public at that time. Maybe that’s what they mean.

aanthracite 4y ago

As a person who lives in a post communist country, I'm certainly sure we don't want the state to manage internet or any other technology for that matter. Look at what's going on right now in Russia, North Korea or China (and these are only firsts that come to my mind). It's really hard for people there to get any information beyond the state propaganda. Good times create dumb people -> dumb people make communism -> communism creates bad times -> bad times creates smart people -> smart people create capitalism -> capitalism creates good times -> good times create dumb people... So, let us avoid the red color...

helloworld11 4y ago

To those criticizing the (mostly) absurd arguments of this website that so un-ironically crams in all the same commercial incentives it criticizes of the supposedly terrible private internet, remember that Jacobin is a very markedly left socialist magazine with a long history of throwing shit on anything market oriented. Some of their arguments are valid and decent, others are just ridiculous and not to mention hypocritical considering that the magazine itself is owned by a corporate entity and very much dedicated to its own bottom line of revenues and earnings. edit: I mean, what would you expect of a magazine that named itself after a bunch of "heroes" of the French Revolution whose own extreme, fanatical leftism was a pioneer for mass murder of civilians in the name of ideological purity.

boomboomsubban 4y ago
>I mean, what would you expect of a magazine that named itself after a bunch of "heroes" of the French Revolution whose own extreme, fanatical leftism was a pioneer for mass murder of civilians in the name of ideological purity. >The name of the magazine derives from the 1938 book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James in which James ascribes the Haitian revolutionists a greater purity in regards to their attachment to the ideals of the French Revolution than the French Jacobins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)#Title_and_logo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)#Title_and_l...
- helloworld11 4y ago
  Fair point about the naming origin, but I think it's worth elaborating again: The ideals of the French Revolution were themselves very problematic. The French Jacobins adapted these "ideals" of the French Revolution in their most extreme, taken to its conclusion form, and the result was a blood bath. Ergo, those very ideals, applied to messy human beings, created a murderously greater mess. It's tiresome to see an endless stream of justifications for extreme socialist leftism with the notion that it only went wrong because "people didn't live up to it". People shouldn't have to live up to an ideology. The ideology should realistically adapt itself to fundamental aspects of the human condition, especially if not doing so means killing innocent human beings and destroying much of their peaceful social organization. If someone were to say that Nazism would be great "if only all people were blood and soil aryans", it would rightfully be considered grotesque. With extreme socialism, the expectation of people to act completely at odds with our non-collectivist nature (because we're not ants) is taken as a defect os us instead of this woefully, deeply wrong line of thinking. Again, it's grotesque and hypocritical.

dasil003 4y ago

Every time someone starts talking in grand terms about how the entire status quo of some major facet of civilization "should be" a certain way with zero reflection on the systemic incentives that have led it to be the way it is I die a little inside.

culi 4y ago
Could you be a bit more specific? This whole point of this article is to point out how systemic incentives haven't lived up to what they promised the internet would be like...
ssklash 4y ago
I think the entire point of the article was a discussion of the systemic incentives of capitalism and especially private ownership of what turned into a public service, so I don't see how you can say there was zero reflection.

WalterBright 4y ago

"Take the protocols that allow these various networks to communicate with one another and eventually produced TCP/IP. “Under private ownership, such a language could never have been created,” writes Tarnoff." Um, networks communicating with each other was commonplace in those days, they were called "gateways". Also, there were many privately developed networks, like the bulletin board system, that were global. The internet also runs on Ethernet - all those internet cables you've got laying around are Ethernet, developed by Xerox.

Karrot_Kream 4y ago
100% the internet was a diverse mix of public and private technologies. BBSes were run privately (group or individual), Fidonet was by private individuals, and Usenet was run by universities, just on the social side. DARPA may have funded TCP/IP but computer networks were thriving before then.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  That's right. The idea that a global network wouldn't have existed with DARPA is not credible. Everybody with two computers wanted to connect them, and various schemes of doing it flourished. Heck, even I came up with an outline of how a global system could work before I'd heard of DARPA. (I never did anything about it because I was stupid.)
  - HaZeust 4y ago
    We still know you from Empire, though - so not everything was fruitless ;)
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      So many opportunities to become a billionaire I missed! America is not only the land of opportunity, it's the land of blind fools.
      - 4y ago

Gentil 4y ago

OK. This is a good article. But the title of the blog post is misleading. The author is talking about the privatized internet as in the infrastructure of the internet that is privatized. Not individual business privatization. Remember the Internet Society planning to sell .org? - https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_shambles/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_sha.... ICANN and Internet Society has been under the spotlight for shitty behavior since a very long time. W3C is also heavily lobbied by companies like Google for instance is abusing it's browser market share against to make the internet less private. Then there is Manifest v3 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3NzzhHzc-qnk4w4PX-0XMw8/edit# https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3Nzz.... This article is about things like that. The infrastructure privatization and lobbying. Not individual business privatization. While I didn't like the author's website's patterns, that shouldn't change the fact about what the author is trying to convey.

Animats 4y ago
> Manifest v3 At one point, I had exactly the same browser add-on running under both Firefox and Chrome. Then Google wanted changes. I dropped Chrome support, because nobody runs add-ons under Chrome much anyway.
- einpoklum 4y ago
  Was that before or after Mozilla decided to stop let you load proper add-ons, and make you settle for the crippled WebExtensions API?
- sexy_seedbox 4y ago
  > nobody runs add-ons under Chrome much anyway Beg to differ. Every non-developer where I work has at least one add-on for Chrome, usually Grammarly or a screenshot/screen capture tool (because there's really no default tool in Chrome to do this).
junofan 4y ago
Nah, it’s about Tarnoff’s brand of internet Marxism and how commercialization has driven a subsumption of “labor” (basically internet users) at all levels, shaping the internet we use today. At the application layer, he’s talking about how user-generated content arose as an internet-native thing to be profited from—in the early days, storefronts weren’t as profitable as eBay. Website authors compete for placement in Google’s search results, feeding Google’s ad empire. At the infra layer, he’s talking about how backbones are designed around delivering commercial content ubiquitously rather than connecting communities. Tarnoff thinks there’s an alternative where you connect to your local library’s social network through your local ISP coop to see what your neighbors are up to.

perryizgr8 4y ago

No, privatized interests have brought us whatever is good about the internet today. They have also brought about a lot of the bad stuff, true. In government hands there would have been just incompetemt stagnation and wastage of taxpayer funds.

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DeathArrow 4y ago

amelius 4y ago
The internet started as a state-owned project.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  As a military R&D project 50 years ago to develop more capable communications networks. That doesn't say much about building and running the internet of today.
encryptluks2 4y ago
Your two statements are practically in contradiction with each other. It reminds me of the right-wing that wants to cancel programs for the lowest income, yet votes for bills to bail out and provide welfare for the largest scum corporations all while getting kickbacks and taking bribes. I agree having government manage projects is not ideal, but there are certainly times and teams that have been a lot more efficient and better than others.
sofixa 4y ago
You should read about Minitel, the French state-owned internet precursor that was flourishing before floundering due to a few reasons ( competition from the internet, delays in new features, tech choices that were coming to bite back, etc.)
- amelius 4y ago
  This really shows the range of government effectiveness. At one end you have bored public servants who produce nothing but kafkaesque nightmares. At the other end you have government-employed academics who produce cool stuff that drives tech innovations. When thinking about the government, people often only think about the first case.
qwery 4y ago

Wolfenstein98k 4y ago

The best part about outlets like this is that you don't need to open any articles to know what they're criticising and what they're advocating.

g8oz 4y ago

>>The internet has long been surrounded by a libertarian idealism, despite always failing to deliver on those ambitions Ouch

sovietcattle 4y ago

Private is bad. Public is good. by Paris Marx

0daystock 4y ago
Writes technology rants from his iPhone and Twitter account - actual Marx is doing somersaults in the grave.

0daystock 4y ago

Jacobin: private capital is BAD. Why? Because it's part of evil for-profit capitalism! Seriously, that actually appears to be the thesis. > Instead of waiting to see what Google or Amazon hand us, technology is produced by communities and collectives to serve very different needs and ends. You can already do that - right now. But it's easier to write a whiny diatribe than it is to learn how to program though, isn't it?

AlbertCory 4y ago

In 1990, the federal government released a new version of GOSIP, which required that vendors demonstrate compliance with the OSI suite of protocols. These would really have been the "public internet" with standards agreed upon by international bodies, and voting by country. The large telephone companies, in many countries government-regulated monopolies, expected to run it, as they did telephone service. I actually kicked off a lengthy thread on the internet-history mailing list about this, and the conclusion was that by 1990, the war was already over and TCP had won. Network operators said, in effect, "OK, we support OSI. But GOSIP doesn't say we actually have to run it on our network." One guy from The Wollongong Group said that his company offered a package to assist in converting from TCP to OSI, since obviously everyone would have to do it. They found that in Europe, supposedly the hotbed of international standards, there was only demand for a package to convert the other way: OSI --> TCP. Note that this is not an object lesson proving either that "government works" OR "government always screws things up." The reason TCP worked and OSI didn't was that regular engineers and grad students and postdocs, not politicians and big telecoms, built it. One reason they had such success is that the Defense Department applied time pressure: "give us something that works now, not in the glorious future." So that's also the government -- just a different part of it.

bombcar 4y ago
The weird side effect of all this is that almost all networking classes and books explain TCP using ... the OSI [OSI] model, even though it doesn't really apply and can itself be confusing trying to make everything fit [1122]. Things like HTTP/3 confuse it even more. [1122] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1122#page-8 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1122#page-8 [OSI] The theory that OSI stands for "over specified interface" is calumnious lies.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Yeah, the 7-layer model kinda captured the public mind. Only up to layer 4, though.

gyre007 4y ago

Strange, but if privatised internet has failed us, why is there a massive banner on top of the article?

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ok123456 4y ago
Didn't see it.
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walrus01 4y ago

What has failed us is putting people like Ajit Pai in charge of the FCC and the federal government trying to remove net neutrality. The economics textbook version of the term "regulatory capture" is what has failed us in the large telecom and large ISP industry. The private internet has failed us? No shit, maybe we shouldn't allow entities like the combined Centurylink/Level3 to acquire various mid sized players and reduce the market competition. Maybe we shouldn't allow Rogers and Shaw to merge in Canada. Things like that. Maybe when the US federal government hands out subsidy money to companies like Frontier and Verizon to build suburban and rural FTTH they should be held accountable when they just take the money and don't actually build the service promised. Maybe people in their ordinary homes in ordinary neighborhoods should have better options than degraded DSL from the local "phone" company on 30 year old copper POTS lines or the near monopoly local Comcast DOCSIS3 coax cable service, squeezing every last dollar of ROI out of that legacy coax plant. bias/point of view: I do network engineering for a small/mid-size ISP that directly competes with the telecom dinosaurs.

alexfromapex 4y ago
I feel like the federal government at large has failed us, due to financial conflicts of interest taking priority over everything
- deleted 4y ago
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- svachalek 4y ago
  It's gotten really bad, and still seems to be accelerating in that direction. When government stops responding to voters, it's no longer a democracy (or democratically elected republic if you want to go there).
  - rabuse 4y ago
    We're shifting towards a feudalistic society.

voz_ 4y ago

Is this that jacobin article again?

wmf 4y ago
It's another review of the same book that Jacobin reviewed.

kwatsonafter 4y ago

Great article. I like that it gets to the real meat-and-potatoes of what determines, "tech policy" in the United States. Moving forward it doesn't seem like a movement back to a, "science and research-first" communication architecture is really feasible but I think, considering that the real, "Internet" is just, "computers talking to each other" that there are going to be parallelized cultures existing on-top of the extent TCP/IP infrastructure that might be worthwhile.

rank0 4y ago

Nobody is going to run core internet infrastructure for free. The government can’t even handle our current infrastructure of roads, bridges, electrical grids, and utilities. How on earth is the government supposed to operate as an ISP? We need better regulation, not public ownership. Or I guess we’ll just tack on another Trillion dollars to our annual deficit…infinite government expansion/spending can solve every problem right?! /s

walrus01 4y ago
there is a middle ground in between asking that the government run the internet, and allowing telecom behemoths to merge as they please and reduce consumer competition. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=largest+telecom+industry+acquisitions https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=largest+t... You can run a totally fine regional last mile ISP with 10, 15, or 50 FTE staff positions. Depending on your geographical scale. Or 500. You don't need to be a Comcast, Centurylink or Verizon sized monster. In fact some of the absolute best consumer-service quality 1GbE and 10GbE symmetric FTTH ISPs that I'm aware of are run by teams of less than 25 people in total. On a county sized scale.
- rank0 4y ago
  What you’re describing is not at all inconsistent with my view. The damn article was about “deprivatizing” the internet.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Sure, nobody is saying the government should do nothing with the internet. It's already involved with subsidies. But the article is about government ownership of the internet. That's a very different thing.
klipt 4y ago
You seem to be assuming government means federal, but local government is also government and there are many towns with municipal fiber their residents are happy with.

cyanydeez 4y ago

iamdamian 4y ago
See also: Late capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism
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hitovst 4y ago

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kristopolous 4y ago

The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield” is just false. As is the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack. It's uncited in the book, I've got a copy. Anyone could just fraudulently send email as generalSmith@dod.mil in 1975 and you'd have no way of knowing if it was real. And then it would traverse in a nondeterministic unencrypted way over any machine that claims it can get it there with no way of knowing whether it succeeded or whether the message received was the message sent. It was built by academics for tasks like remote timesharing and it ran mostly on minicomputers, not even mainframes. All the early nodes were at academic institutions. Exactly 0 were on military bases. The project goals, people involved, sites it was installed at, technologies built, all the founders, Cerf, Kahn, Taylor, Roberts, Linkletter - zero military people - 100% academics. None of this suggests military purpose Look at the abysmal security the network had. Do you think email, rcp, ftp and telnet was designed for military use? It was openly bridged to the Soviet research network through IIASA, you know, cause that's how cold war things happened - open door policy to the enemy Or what about the routing protocols where a rogue network switch could just announce itself and then start soliciting for traffic to pass through it. In 1997, a misbehaving router singlehandedly took down the net https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS_7007_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS_7007_incident any enemy could have easily done this. Look at DNS host transfer up to about 2002 - you could just query for all records dumping your entire network topology, to just anyone - extremely valuable information for your enemies. Look at finger and the original whois, an email and personnel lookup tool. You could use it to get people's schedule, all the people who work under them, what they're doing, how to contact them, where they last logged in at - do you know what I'd really like to have as your military enemy? Heck let's cite Wikipedia as if reality matters: "20th century WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. A WHOIS query of a person's last name would yield all individuals with that name. A query with a given keyword returned all registered domains containing that keyword. A query for a given administrative contact returned all domains the administrator was associated with." Sending out spies, espionage, sabotage, all unnecessary if you're enemy is using this technology. You could do it all from a terminal. There's zero security in any of these. The doors are unlocked and swinging open with a giant honking welcome sign blinking. Edit: Apparently reality is unpopular. I'm committed to reality far more than being popular. My politics are on the far left btw, that's why I demand such high standards from these people. They're supposedly playing for my team. But let me tell you, they don't seem to care either.

Apocryphon 4y ago

> In his analysis of capitalist development, Karl Marx drew a distinction between the “formal” and “real” subsumption of labour by capital. In formal subsumption, an existing labour process remains intact, but is now performed on a capitalist basis. A peasant who used to grow his own food becomes a wage labourer on somebody else’s farm. The way he works the land stays the same. In real subsumption, by contrast, the labour process is revolutionised to meet the requirements of capital. Formerly, capital inherited a process; now, it remakes the process. Our agricultural worker becomes integrated into the industrialised apparatus of the modern factory farm. The way he works completely changes: his daily rhythms bear little resemblance to those of his peasant predecessors. And the new arrangement is more profitable for the farm’s owner, having been explicitly organised with that end in mind. > This is a useful lens for thinking about the evolution of the internet, and for understanding why the dot-coms didn’t succeed. The internet of the mid-to-late 1990s was under private ownership, but it had not yet been optimised for profit. It retained too much of its old shape as a system designed for researchers, and this shape wasn’t conducive to the new demands being placed on it. Formal subsumption had been achieved, in other words, but real subsumption remained elusive. > Accomplishing the latter would involve technical, social and economic developments that made it possible to construct new kinds of systems. These systems are the digital equivalents of the modern factory farm. They represent the long-sought solution to the problem that consumed and ultimately defeated the dot-com entrepreneurs: how to push privatisation up the stack. And eBay offered the first glimpse of what that solution looked like. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31784966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31784966

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vt85 4y ago

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