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It looks like the direction we’re headed is a two-tiered Internet. The first layer will require your real world identity (more than simply your ISP knowing who
by Belopolye 3y ago
It looks like the direction we’re headed is a two-tiered Internet. The first layer will require your real world identity (more than simply your ISP knowing who you are because of billing) to access, post, download, upload, etc, which I suppose will first be required to access banking, social networks, etc, destroying anonymity.
The second will be more or less what we have now, but my fear is that access to this layer will be restricted further and further until it goes the way of Usenet and ISPs either willingly (or by regulation) turn off access to it.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoI think there are actually several reasons why this is a likely direction: 1. Children (duh, this article) 2. Misinformation (accountability, no astroturfing) 3. Misinformation Robots (age verifying robots is a difficult task) 4. Malicious Robots (do you need Cloudflare if you have an Age ID Firewall?) 5. Scraping Robots (nothing prevents scraping like knowing who to sue...) 6. Hackers (nothing prevents hacking like knowing who to sue, even if it's only 80% of the time...) 7. AI Use / Abuse (anonymity is a dangerous thing with AI) Etc. To be honest, if I was an Age ID verification company, I'd be calling around to my competition to figure out how to develop some kind of interoperability standard; in the hopes that would make age-restricted services much more convenient and thus widespread. Now if they could get Billing integrated into the system as well, then we're cooking with gas.
- Belopolye 3y ago8. Industry is desperate to destroy piracy. On top of all of your reasons.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoTragically, it works both ways. 8. Destroy privacy of anonymous users. 9. Increase privacy by preventing reposting (by robots or trolls) of information that a court has ordered suppressed. (Example from the near future: AI-generated revenge porn.) 10. Increase privacy by preventing companies like Clearview AI from legally getting away with murder of privacy. Edit for Belopolye's response below: Very good point; but that would require all websites to be in on it and not just a partial implementation. But the movie and video game industries would love that...
- Belopolye 3y agoAutocorrect got me- I meant to type piracy. Updated my comment :)
- hooverd 3y agoIndustry is desperate to destroy general purpose computing.
- codedokode 3y agoNo I have a better plan which guarantees full 100% safety for children but doesn't require verification or identification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37991197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37991197
- conception 3y agoThe problem with your solution is laws/regulations are not really enforceable internationally.
- codedokode 3y agoDo not allow accessing foreign websites (from countries which did not join the convention) when "safe content" setting is active.
- afavour 3y agoHow do you define “foreign website”?
- codedokode 3y agoA website which is hosted (physically located) in a country not participating in Safe Content Marking Agreement or owner of which is anonymous or is from a foreign country. Basically any site whose owner or operator you cannot put to jail.
- superq 3y agoHow long before "safe content" becomes the default? .. and then the requirement .. and then the law? I'll take my Internet unsafe, thank you very much.
- throwanem 3y agoThe other problem with that solution is that it's impossible. Sounds great aside from that implementation detail, though!
- Spooky23 3y agoWell TBH the open internet provided a ton of benefit, but has metastasized into a force of misery and evil. The near collapse of democracy in the United States, the various nasty impacts of social media, the death of professional journalism, the emergence of automated propaganda bots, etc are all negative impacts of open internet that are destroying society. This may not be the answer, but neither is that status quo. We can't go back to 2003 or 1993. The older people here live like it's 2003. It's not. HN is a throwback to those days, but we live in a world shaped by anonymous actors performing in bad faith.
- chmod775 3y ago> The near collapse of democracy in the United States, the various nasty impacts of social media, the death of professional journalism, the emergence of automated propaganda bots, etc are all negative impacts of open internet that are destroying society. So which of these is a walled-garden internet going to fix? Actually which of these are even a consequence of the internet being open in the first place? Pretty sure the answer to both is: none. These (perceived) issues are completely tangential and have absolutely nothing to do with the internet being open or closed. This sounds a lot to me like: "People I don't like are using this thing, so let's ruin it for everyone." You're still not going to like these people afterwards, nor are going to change them for the better by antagonizing everyone.
- tbrownaw 3y ago> The near collapse of democracy in the United States, Banning anonymous speech would make it more dangerous to advocate against current policy, and speed up this collapse you're worried about.
- junofan 3y agoOctogenarians saved democracy by mailing everybody ballots with their names on them. Controlling distribution channels is probably more important than anonymity, which is why the article points to things like “impact assessments” and other blockers to free distribution.
- 3y ago
- thomastjeffery 3y agoAll of this hinges on the notion that moderation and curation must be done by a centralized party, not by the users themselves. The foundation of this bullshit idea is intellectual property. Let's just go ahead and get rid of that, and let the people manage their network.
- Belopolye 3y agoAgree with your sentiment, but I see the future I expect at the confluence of a lot of different parties/positions (domestic politics, geopolitics, advertising, anti-piracy, “save the children,” anti-terrorism, etc) who have the money, vested interest, and ideological motivation to accomplish this. For myself, if this plays out as I’ve described it just means it’s time to…go read a book or something, I don’t know.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago> I expect at the confluence of a lot of different parties/positions (domestic politics, geopolitics, advertising, anti-piracy, “save the children,” anti-terrorism, etc) who have the money, vested interest, and ideological motivation to accomplish this. That is their leverage, yes, but the tool at hand is copyright.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoThis comment caught my eye more than all the others. As I get older and live through this amazing ride, I am increasingly of the mind that the total abolition of "intellectual property" in all its manifest forms would not only be the saving move for humanity, but that it's more or less inevitable. Climate change is going to put so much pressure on us to innovate very rapidly, and patents and copyright now form such obvious impediments, nobody except Disney is going to give a care about enforcing intellectual property within 20 years. These are the last desperate days of the old order trying to bury its spoils through centralisation and locking-down. As an author, coder, inventor and creator I also see that generative "AI" - or rather the emergence of a portable semiotic/literary digital collective consciousness - will spell the end for ego-driven protection rackets that make us say "Think of the creators who need food!" New tools will provide such abundance to creativity. We will still create of course, and enjoy it very much. "The Internet" is such a fascinating story. Just at the point when we think all is lost, quite by surprise, and suddenly, we win. So in the 22nd century I imagine we will look back on the days when one couldn't freely share any digital artifact as we look back on slavery and witch hunting today. And in that richness and abundance people will stop seeking out what is harmful to them to nurse their empty, depressive desperation and hopelessness. And those that profit from pushing misery at others will have no place the table. I am only sad I won't get to live in that time - but watching the death of such rotten conceits as "intellectual property" and the "advertising industry" will be satisfaction enough.
- JohnFen 3y agoThe first layer is unacceptable to me, so I guess I just wouldn't access that at all. If the second layer goes, then that's the whole game. The internet would be closed off to me entirely.
- theturtletalks 3y agoI always joked with my friend that if the internet was created today, it would be a walled garden. Jokes on me cause that's happening anyways.
- pixl97 3y agoMaybe the joke was always on us techies thinking that the wild west internet could survive in this world? I mean the internet at first got away being what it was, because it was small, and because it didn't affect outside of the internet that much. But now that the net is big, and connected to 'real things' that suddenly being a degree of separation from the "Genocide power hour forum" is actually quite unpleasant and has many risks. Businesses will gladly move to some walled garden to avoid this, they don't care about freedom, they care about profit. And while your aunt and uncle say they care about freedom, they mean "Freedom to be exactly like them and any other degenerates get nailed to a cross". Your average voter will get tired of the crime and harassment online will vote in the next authoritarian that says they have an simple easy solution for the internet problem. Us techies will say "but the authoritarian is wrong, this isn't simple or easy". The authoritarian knowing how propaganda works will tell the lie twice as big and twice as often and win the next election.
- JohnFen 3y ago> Businesses will gladly move to some walled garden to avoid this I support this entirely. One of the largest reasons why the internet is getting much worse with time is that businesses want to use it. Getting them off the open internet would eliminate a fair amount of nastiness and might return some of what we've lost.
- poisonborz 3y agoIt will become more like how it already is: the ""open"" internet with a need for registration/real names everywhere, and the ""dark"" net with zero rules and the usual cat and mouse of police raids/honeypots vs technical advancements in obfuscation. And seeing how this repeated so many times in tech and other industries, I think that's the best we as humanity can do for the near future.
- fidotron 3y agoHonestly I think we're close to there already, with the Play Store and App Store leading the charge. The giveaway is the amount of traffic generated by users in the second category is much lower than it used to be, while the first category grows. Just look at how much everyone here complains about their inability to find interesting things in this second tier today. Now that the VC money isn't going to prop up free stuff, or the ecosystem of dev tools to support free stuff, it's hard to see how the second lives on. What will be left is P2P, torrents, and psyops masquerading as organic meme wars, everything else will evaporate or migrate to the first tier.
- nonameiguess 3y agoPossibly where we're headed is an expansion of the first layer, but it already exists. You currently need to use your real identity to do things like access banking and file taxes. You also need to provide your age to access services like porn and gambling. The complaint here isn't the use of age and/or identity verification for anything at all. It's using it to access social media. There isn't much in the way of a good legal reason to do this and previous attempts have seemingly been shut down by courts. Children are currently allowed to enter and occupy congregation spaces also used by adults, i.e. churches, parks, community centers, libraries. Private clubs are allowed to ban children if they want to, but have never been legally required to unless they specifically provide adult services like strippers and booze. This also, of course, seems way less workable than real-world versions. At least in person, if a child presents a fake ID, a bouncer can sanity check that they look like the photo and look like they might actually be an adult. 12 year-olds with pocket change to spare can pretty trivially pay a poor person who doesn't give a shit to scan their retinas in Sam Altman's world coin face reader and hand over their private keys and now they've got a fake ID that no website can call bullshit on. Even without that, a kid can easily get an older sibling or friend to share a login, just like my wife's younger sister used to borrow my wife's ID to get into clubs and bars or I used to buy cigarettes and liquor for my friends because I had the earliest birthday. Policymakers don't want to admit it, but it is ultimately up to parents to police what their children do on the Internet. There is no automated system that can't be beaten until they figure out a way to hook up a blood prick to your computer and check telomere length to estimate your genetic age, assuming we don't figure out how to reverse that, and even that can't prevent a child from shoulder-surfing an adult.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hooverd 3y agoTechies will post about how draconian that North Korean Ullim tablet is and then try to recreate it at home, for the children of course.