> To me, the problem isn’t that internet can be made slightly less awful than it is today. The problem is that it doesn’t do anything its proponents claim it do

> To me, the problem isn’t that internet can be made slightly less awful than it is today. The problem is that it doesn’t do anything its proponents claim it does. In some very important ways, the internet is not secure. It doesn’t replace the post office with ethernet cables; in fact, in many ways it is far less trustworthy than the postal service. It's not decentralized, and its inevitable centralization is harmful because it’s largely emergent and ill-defined. It still has trusted intermediaries, often with more power and less oversight than the post office. Internet still requires governance. It still requires regulation. (These things are what I wrote about here.) The problem with internet is that it’s not an improvement to any system—and often makes things worse. > In our letter, we write: “By its very design, the internet is poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. From its inception, this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as e-commerce and information-at-your-fingertips to justify its existence, despite far better solutions to these issues already in use. Despite more than thirteen years of development, it has severe limitations and design flaws that preclude almost all applications that deal with public customer data and regulated services and are not an improvement on the existing mailing system.”