7 ms·

The Public Interest Internet

113 points by recifs 2y ago

recifs 2y ago
Allow me to open with a wildly speculative question: What if the internet were public interest technology? I mean "internet" the way most people understand it, which is to say our whole digital sphere, and by "public interest" I don't mean tinkering at the margins to reduce harm from some bad actors or painting some glossy ethics principles atop a pile of exploitative rent-seeking — I mean through and through, warts and all, an internet that works in support of a credible, pragmatic definition of the common good.
- imagineerschool 2y ago
  We'd start with a group of people centered around agreement on "credible, pragmatic definition of the common good" I'm in.
  - its_ethan 2y ago
    And history has no examples of times when a group of people centered around agreement on their version of common good going poorly, right? Right??
    - digging 2y ago
      Better then to just not work toward the common good?
      - its_ethan 2y ago
        Better to let ideas compete and build consensus than to surrender decision making abilities that effect everyone over to some arbitrary group of people that we are just told to trust (but don't worry they have good intentions). We don't currently have a select group of people who share a vision of "common good" making decisions for us, and yet things keep improving. So I'd advocate we stick with what we know is working, rather than the above surrendering of autonomy in exchange for the promise of some utopia..
        digging 2y ago
        Ok, I suppose we were arguing different points, but I disagree with your arguments. > yet things keep improving I mean, that's just obviously not true.
        its_ethan 2y ago
        I have no doubt you could find some metrics to show a recent decline in, but (on the whole) is the average human not better off in the year 2024 than they were in 1954? 1924? 1824? I do have a feeling we're not talking about the same thing here, so could you clarify how it's "obviously not true" that things have been/are improving?
        digging 2y ago
        I'm referring to the internet, not the whole of human existence. That would be too complicated a subject to make any such simplistic statements on. But actually I also disagree with your premise that we don't have small corrupt groups already deciding what's "best" for everyone, WRT the internet or life as a whole. Just because they're openly motivated by greed doesn't make them less harmful. It's the cabals atop Google and Facebook which ushered in an age of absolute surveillance on a mass scale, how cool and fun.
        its_ethan 2y ago
        I never said anything about corruption one way or another, I said we don't have groups with an agreed upon definition of "common good" - look at basically any healthy decision-making group (government, party planning committee, whatever) and you'll find two sides with differing definitions. I think we'd maybe both agree that Google and Facebook ushering in "absolute surveillance" probably came about from a single-minded view of "common good" within those companies - aka an example of a group of people aligned on a common good leading to things going poorly. But it's silly to think that some other group with a different (but also single-minded) definition of common good is going to somehow fix all the problems and not cause new, potentially worse, problems. That's what I was attempting to get at with my initial comment. Given that we weren't even really talking about the same thing from the start, and that I don't care enough to continue, I'm gonna opt out from this convo. Have a nice day though.
- Gormo 2y ago
  The moment you try to define a singular "common good", you wind up with a variety of competing factions all putting forth their own wildly divergent and often contradictory notions of what that common good consists of. Most people have an unfortunate tendency to project their own values and preferences onto the world at large, and fail to recognize when they cross the boundary out of their own spaces and into other people's. Recognizing this means advancing solutions that primarily aim to minimize conflict among many parties, each pursuing their own particular concept of the good within their own boundaries, and avoiding trying to universalize any singular set of terminal values. Attempting to pursue solutions that depend on everyone agreeing on the same set of terminal values will always fail, and will often generate intense conflict that escalates well beyond the bounds of the original question and causes a great deal of collateral damage.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    This (the last 2 paragraphs) certainly seems correct, but what if the fact of the matter is you have it ~backwards?
    - Gormo 2y ago
      Then I supposed I'd have to re-evaluate my priors. Are there any 'facts of the matter' that might substantiate an alternate conclusion?
  - digging 2y ago
    > The moment you try to define a singular "common good", you wind up with a variety of competing factions all putting forth their own wildly divergent and often contradictory notions of what that common good consists of. Yes, that's called compromise. It's basically one of the foundations of society and civilization. It's not a blocker for public-interest projects.
    - cheeseomlit 2y ago
      'Compromise' paints an idealistic picture, its often just a euphemism for 'the more powerful/entrenched party gets what they want by default, but they'll let the other side vocally express their frustration to maintain the veneer of an actual conversation.' What you're describing sounds like a top-down restructuring of the internet at large, which is a golden opportunity for any interested party to restructure it in their favor. Whoever has the means will do so, and it will not be motivated by public interest since the public are not the ones with the means. When I hear "an internet that works in support of a credible, pragmatic definition of the common good", to me that translates to "we're going to turn the surveillance up to 11 and ban encryption to combat CSAM", because that's how such projects pan out in reality
- atoav 2y ago
  I mean to be honest something like the early social media platforms like myspace or even reddit up to a degree were public interest platforms. And back then nobody really thought all that mich about financing, so these spaces weren't about extracting user data or shaping their opinions. The algorithms were simplistic as hell and the timelines still deserved that name. The state runs libraries not just to give people access to books, but also because they are social community spaces. Why not provide something like that, just online. Something that doesn't need to make money, but provide a service that people can trust in a different way that a corporation.
roenxi 2y ago
> So, say you want to create a new web standard... This and the following image have a misguided understanding of the market. We know how this situation plays out because we ran exactly that experiment in the 2000s with Firefox and IE6. Those market share numbers are contingent on Google doing the best possible job as curators insofar as the userbase can tell. If there are browser features that users want (like tabs) or web standards that enable Cool New Stuff (like modern JS) then users will go out of their way to install browsers that support them. Firefox got all the way to around 20-30% of the market before MS's control of the web collapsed and we entered the current era. The "problem" that competitors of Google face is that Google is a rather competent steward of web standards. Their browser engine is hard to compete with because it is very good, their web standards are hard to compete with because they are largely appropriate. Although I stand by a prediction I have that the next wave will be when a Brave-like model takes hold and the price of browsing the web drops from free to negative. With crypto we are surely getting to spitting distance of advertisers paying users directly to look at ads instead of paying Google to organise the web such that users look at ads.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  > If there are browser features that users want (like tabs) [...] then users will go out of their way to install browsers that support them. The prerequisite of this is that such a web browser exists, which is not a given. I'd sacrifice an arm for a web browser that has non-disappearing natively themed scroll bars since due to accessibility issues I struggle with scroll wheels. This is not a big technical ask, yet to date, the only one I've found that offers this is Falkon, which unfortunately stuck on an old version of qt's webkit port meaning a bunch of websites break with it. You have a lot of choices but almost all of them are the same, or suck; or both.
  - severine 2y ago
    I'd sacrifice an arm for a web browser that has non-disappearing natively themed scroll bars since due to accessibility issues I struggle with scroll wheels. Doesn't Firefox work at this? 1.Go to about:preferences or open the Firefox preferences via the UI 2.Scroll down until you get to a section titled "Browsing", or search for "scroll" 3.Check the setting "Always show scrollbars" ref: https://superuser.com/questions/1720362/firefox-scroll-bar-disappearing https://superuser.com/questions/1720362/firefox-scroll-bar-d... Go Marginalia!
beders 2y ago
Summary: Someone's gotta pay for the Ramen. A good start would be to demand that internet infrastructure operators do just that - and nothing more. Internet providers do just that one job: Routing IP. No peeking into my packages please. Strengthening and regulating the underlying world-wide infrastructure: undersea cables, transcontinental fiber networks - with oversight that prevents any org (public or private) from intercepting traffic would go a long way to protect the Public Interest. Alas, a pipe dream.
- mvc 2y ago
  > Alas, a pipe dream. Or "tube" dream as it were.
renegat0x0 2y ago
I see some discussions about browsers. I think they are not that relevant for the current state of the Internet. I use ff, and 99% of the web looks, and behaves correctly. imho search engines affect page contents, and 'style' of the web. They define what is visible, and what is not, what is acceptable, and what is not. According to the chart Google controls 91% of that pie. I do feel that most of what is wrong with the Internet is because of ads. The next thing is that corporations and governments use it to wield, exert power. The next thing is that contemporary search fails spectacularly at "discovery". When have you found 'a new blog' via google search? When did you find a new 'music band' using google search? When did you found fun web radio station? Google is answer machine. It is not a good place to find new things. It is not a good place to find retro things. As a thought example lets think that alternative is possible. Let's say someone creates "a new search" that is successful, and makes Internet fun again. The corporations can sniff the trends and will move their presence to that space. Governments will also move there. They will make the pressure again on the "new successful search engine" to bend it to their rule. They will force their willpower eventually. They will perform enshittification again. One way to break this trend is to have Internet federated, but this road is not funded enough. Why would anybody invest in hosting parts of the Internet? I was thinking about government funding for such projects, but I would be really surprised if that road resulted in anything good. That is why I created an offline cache of the Internet [1]. I do not need to host it, yet anybody can use it. I can easily find "amiga" related domains, and start my search using just this. Do not provide web apps. Provide data. Provide files. Provide something that works off-line. "File over app". [1] https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
laurex 2y ago
As someone working in this space, I think standards and standard governance are important, but just as important are the economics. Right now, tech is largely dominated by platforms designed to extract resources in various ways, and to redistribute those resources to investors. To create a public interest internet, we will have to find a dwindling sense of collective and individual responsibility to our collective interests, and that includes recognising the very real and pressing economic implications of technofeudalism. That then means putting resources into digital public infrastructure, through pressure on our collectively held assets, such as pension funds and government procurement.
- localfirst 2y ago
  The weakest link of any platform is always this: where is the cash on-ramp? Do you have mechanisms to play legal/jurisdiction arbitrage? What happens if a bunch of government/special interest groups declare your garden illegal? We are only as good as what is allowed.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
In my opinion the first step in a more decentralized internet, or at least a big part in being able to move in that direction would be a system for a global easy system for (micro)payments. That is preferably modelled like cash. (more anonymous). and ubiquitous, they can also be used in the real world. It would be nice for me, if someone reads an article I wrote and they give me ¤0.01 ¤0.001 or something. (Given that a lot of countries, people make vastly less money than others what constitutes a "micro"payment. That would of course mean that transactions were either utterly inexpensive or free. We would have a ubiquitous, distributed, untraceable", distributed means of conducting international transactions. I think we have all the technical issues solved. but No Western government will ever allow it. (Nor most other governments). Since it would rob them of a lot of power, and we would hear: "Terrorism, child pornography, bypass economic sanctions, election manipulation, disinformation" etc etc. The usual stuff. (Even though all of that is going on already....
- pessimizer 2y ago
  [dead]
ETH_start 2y ago
I would much prefer the state compete with market actors, not commandeer their operations. The state has significant advantages when competing against private market actors because it can sustainably fund public goods, due to the fact that its vast tax collection apparatus can capture a much higher proportion of the value generated by public goods than private actors can. An adequately funded public good has several advantages over private goods: * Wide public buy-in: Due to the absence of barriers to contribution, such as secret code or restrictive licensing requirements for modifications. * Generally favorable public perceptions: Public goods often enjoy more trust and support. If the state provides a compelling option, it can naturally attract users, and without having to impose mandates on existing market options. This is greatly preferrable to the regulatory approach, which can have unintended consequences that slow innovation and reduce market options. For example, if regulations impose heavy compliance burdens on tech companies, they would divert resources to legal and administrative expenses, leading to less resources for R&D. Regulatory regimentation to ostensibly achieve some public policy goal, can also prevent companies from experimenting with new ideas and approaches, which ultimately slows the industry's rate of progress. So by having the state compete rather than regulate coercively, we get the benefits of market-driven innovation while also testing the potential of public goods to provide superior value than what market-provisioned goods can. Such state-funded public options can also be used to non-coercively bolster open standards, by giving then the critical mass of adoption needed to become market standards.
- troyvit 2y ago
  It took me like 12 days to read the whole article, so, this comment is super late but someday maybe you'll run across it. All I want to say is that's a great idea. Back when email started entering wide use I was flummoxed as to why the post office didn't offer its own email options.
  - ETH_start 2y ago
    Thanks for engaging with the discussion. With respect to the thought that came to you back in the early email days, I don't mean to be pedantic when I say this, and it may have had definite merit — like ensuring services that are naturally monopolistic due to network effects, are provided by an entity collectively controlled by the public — but an email service wouldn't fit the economic definition of a public good. An open source codebase allowing anyone to set up their own mail server would be the public good in that domain. A table that gives examples of private vs public goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods#Goods_classified_by_exclusivity_and_competitiveness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods#Goods_classified_by_excl... Public goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) For more complex goods, involving management of platforms, I think the only type of public good that could compete with proprietary offerings is the software that allows people to form a decentralized consensus and run applications on top of it, e.g. blockchain node software and smart contract code, respectively.

113 points by recifs 2y ago

Allow me to open with a wildly speculative question: What if the internet were public interest technology? I mean "internet" the way most people understand it, which is to say our whole digital sphere, and by "public interest" I don't mean tinkering at the margins to reduce harm from some bad actors or painting some glossy ethics principles atop a pile of exploitative rent-seeking — I mean through and through, warts and all, an internet that works in support of a credible, pragmatic definition of the common good.

imagineerschool 2y ago
We'd start with a group of people centered around agreement on "credible, pragmatic definition of the common good" I'm in.
- its_ethan 2y ago
  And history has no examples of times when a group of people centered around agreement on their version of common good going poorly, right? Right??
  - digging 2y ago
    Better then to just not work toward the common good?
    - its_ethan 2y ago
      Better to let ideas compete and build consensus than to surrender decision making abilities that effect everyone over to some arbitrary group of people that we are just told to trust (but don't worry they have good intentions). We don't currently have a select group of people who share a vision of "common good" making decisions for us, and yet things keep improving. So I'd advocate we stick with what we know is working, rather than the above surrendering of autonomy in exchange for the promise of some utopia..
      - digging 2y ago
        Ok, I suppose we were arguing different points, but I disagree with your arguments. > yet things keep improving I mean, that's just obviously not true.
        its_ethan 2y ago
        I have no doubt you could find some metrics to show a recent decline in, but (on the whole) is the average human not better off in the year 2024 than they were in 1954? 1924? 1824? I do have a feeling we're not talking about the same thing here, so could you clarify how it's "obviously not true" that things have been/are improving?
        digging 2y ago
        I'm referring to the internet, not the whole of human existence. That would be too complicated a subject to make any such simplistic statements on. But actually I also disagree with your premise that we don't have small corrupt groups already deciding what's "best" for everyone, WRT the internet or life as a whole. Just because they're openly motivated by greed doesn't make them less harmful. It's the cabals atop Google and Facebook which ushered in an age of absolute surveillance on a mass scale, how cool and fun.
        its_ethan 2y ago
        I never said anything about corruption one way or another, I said we don't have groups with an agreed upon definition of "common good" - look at basically any healthy decision-making group (government, party planning committee, whatever) and you'll find two sides with differing definitions. I think we'd maybe both agree that Google and Facebook ushering in "absolute surveillance" probably came about from a single-minded view of "common good" within those companies - aka an example of a group of people aligned on a common good leading to things going poorly. But it's silly to think that some other group with a different (but also single-minded) definition of common good is going to somehow fix all the problems and not cause new, potentially worse, problems. That's what I was attempting to get at with my initial comment. Given that we weren't even really talking about the same thing from the start, and that I don't care enough to continue, I'm gonna opt out from this convo. Have a nice day though.
Gormo 2y ago
The moment you try to define a singular "common good", you wind up with a variety of competing factions all putting forth their own wildly divergent and often contradictory notions of what that common good consists of. Most people have an unfortunate tendency to project their own values and preferences onto the world at large, and fail to recognize when they cross the boundary out of their own spaces and into other people's. Recognizing this means advancing solutions that primarily aim to minimize conflict among many parties, each pursuing their own particular concept of the good within their own boundaries, and avoiding trying to universalize any singular set of terminal values. Attempting to pursue solutions that depend on everyone agreeing on the same set of terminal values will always fail, and will often generate intense conflict that escalates well beyond the bounds of the original question and causes a great deal of collateral damage.
- mistermann 2y ago
  This (the last 2 paragraphs) certainly seems correct, but what if the fact of the matter is you have it ~backwards?
  - Gormo 2y ago
    Then I supposed I'd have to re-evaluate my priors. Are there any 'facts of the matter' that might substantiate an alternate conclusion?
- digging 2y ago
  > The moment you try to define a singular "common good", you wind up with a variety of competing factions all putting forth their own wildly divergent and often contradictory notions of what that common good consists of. Yes, that's called compromise. It's basically one of the foundations of society and civilization. It's not a blocker for public-interest projects.
  - cheeseomlit 2y ago
    'Compromise' paints an idealistic picture, its often just a euphemism for 'the more powerful/entrenched party gets what they want by default, but they'll let the other side vocally express their frustration to maintain the veneer of an actual conversation.' What you're describing sounds like a top-down restructuring of the internet at large, which is a golden opportunity for any interested party to restructure it in their favor. Whoever has the means will do so, and it will not be motivated by public interest since the public are not the ones with the means. When I hear "an internet that works in support of a credible, pragmatic definition of the common good", to me that translates to "we're going to turn the surveillance up to 11 and ban encryption to combat CSAM", because that's how such projects pan out in reality
atoav 2y ago
I mean to be honest something like the early social media platforms like myspace or even reddit up to a degree were public interest platforms. And back then nobody really thought all that mich about financing, so these spaces weren't about extracting user data or shaping their opinions. The algorithms were simplistic as hell and the timelines still deserved that name. The state runs libraries not just to give people access to books, but also because they are social community spaces. Why not provide something like that, just online. Something that doesn't need to make money, but provide a service that people can trust in a different way that a corporation.

roenxi 2y ago

> So, say you want to create a new web standard... This and the following image have a misguided understanding of the market. We know how this situation plays out because we ran exactly that experiment in the 2000s with Firefox and IE6. Those market share numbers are contingent on Google doing the best possible job as curators insofar as the userbase can tell. If there are browser features that users want (like tabs) or web standards that enable Cool New Stuff (like modern JS) then users will go out of their way to install browsers that support them. Firefox got all the way to around 20-30% of the market before MS's control of the web collapsed and we entered the current era. The "problem" that competitors of Google face is that Google is a rather competent steward of web standards. Their browser engine is hard to compete with because it is very good, their web standards are hard to compete with because they are largely appropriate. Although I stand by a prediction I have that the next wave will be when a Brave-like model takes hold and the price of browsing the web drops from free to negative. With crypto we are surely getting to spitting distance of advertisers paying users directly to look at ads instead of paying Google to organise the web such that users look at ads.

marginalia_nu 2y ago
> If there are browser features that users want (like tabs) [...] then users will go out of their way to install browsers that support them. The prerequisite of this is that such a web browser exists, which is not a given. I'd sacrifice an arm for a web browser that has non-disappearing natively themed scroll bars since due to accessibility issues I struggle with scroll wheels. This is not a big technical ask, yet to date, the only one I've found that offers this is Falkon, which unfortunately stuck on an old version of qt's webkit port meaning a bunch of websites break with it. You have a lot of choices but almost all of them are the same, or suck; or both.
- severine 2y ago
  I'd sacrifice an arm for a web browser that has non-disappearing natively themed scroll bars since due to accessibility issues I struggle with scroll wheels. Doesn't Firefox work at this? 1.Go to about:preferences or open the Firefox preferences via the UI 2.Scroll down until you get to a section titled "Browsing", or search for "scroll" 3.Check the setting "Always show scrollbars" ref: https://superuser.com/questions/1720362/firefox-scroll-bar-disappearing https://superuser.com/questions/1720362/firefox-scroll-bar-d... Go Marginalia!

beders 2y ago

Summary: Someone's gotta pay for the Ramen. A good start would be to demand that internet infrastructure operators do just that - and nothing more. Internet providers do just that one job: Routing IP. No peeking into my packages please. Strengthening and regulating the underlying world-wide infrastructure: undersea cables, transcontinental fiber networks - with oversight that prevents any org (public or private) from intercepting traffic would go a long way to protect the Public Interest. Alas, a pipe dream.

mvc 2y ago
> Alas, a pipe dream. Or "tube" dream as it were.

renegat0x0 2y ago

I see some discussions about browsers. I think they are not that relevant for the current state of the Internet. I use ff, and 99% of the web looks, and behaves correctly. imho search engines affect page contents, and 'style' of the web. They define what is visible, and what is not, what is acceptable, and what is not. According to the chart Google controls 91% of that pie. I do feel that most of what is wrong with the Internet is because of ads. The next thing is that corporations and governments use it to wield, exert power. The next thing is that contemporary search fails spectacularly at "discovery". When have you found 'a new blog' via google search? When did you find a new 'music band' using google search? When did you found fun web radio station? Google is answer machine. It is not a good place to find new things. It is not a good place to find retro things. As a thought example lets think that alternative is possible. Let's say someone creates "a new search" that is successful, and makes Internet fun again. The corporations can sniff the trends and will move their presence to that space. Governments will also move there. They will make the pressure again on the "new successful search engine" to bend it to their rule. They will force their willpower eventually. They will perform enshittification again. One way to break this trend is to have Internet federated, but this road is not funded enough. Why would anybody invest in hosting parts of the Internet? I was thinking about government funding for such projects, but I would be really surprised if that road resulted in anything good. That is why I created an offline cache of the Internet [1]. I do not need to host it, yet anybody can use it. I can easily find "amiga" related domains, and start my search using just this. Do not provide web apps. Provide data. Provide files. Provide something that works off-line. "File over app". [1] https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

laurex 2y ago

As someone working in this space, I think standards and standard governance are important, but just as important are the economics. Right now, tech is largely dominated by platforms designed to extract resources in various ways, and to redistribute those resources to investors. To create a public interest internet, we will have to find a dwindling sense of collective and individual responsibility to our collective interests, and that includes recognising the very real and pressing economic implications of technofeudalism. That then means putting resources into digital public infrastructure, through pressure on our collectively held assets, such as pension funds and government procurement.

localfirst 2y ago
The weakest link of any platform is always this: where is the cash on-ramp? Do you have mechanisms to play legal/jurisdiction arbitrage? What happens if a bunch of government/special interest groups declare your garden illegal? We are only as good as what is allowed.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

In my opinion the first step in a more decentralized internet, or at least a big part in being able to move in that direction would be a system for a global easy system for (micro)payments. That is preferably modelled like cash. (more anonymous). and ubiquitous, they can also be used in the real world. It would be nice for me, if someone reads an article I wrote and they give me ¤0.01 ¤0.001 or something. (Given that a lot of countries, people make vastly less money than others what constitutes a "micro"payment. That would of course mean that transactions were either utterly inexpensive or free. We would have a ubiquitous, distributed, untraceable", distributed means of conducting international transactions. I think we have all the technical issues solved. but No Western government will ever allow it. (Nor most other governments). Since it would rob them of a lot of power, and we would hear: "Terrorism, child pornography, bypass economic sanctions, election manipulation, disinformation" etc etc. The usual stuff. (Even though all of that is going on already....

pessimizer 2y ago
[dead]

ETH_start 2y ago

I would much prefer the state compete with market actors, not commandeer their operations. The state has significant advantages when competing against private market actors because it can sustainably fund public goods, due to the fact that its vast tax collection apparatus can capture a much higher proportion of the value generated by public goods than private actors can. An adequately funded public good has several advantages over private goods: * Wide public buy-in: Due to the absence of barriers to contribution, such as secret code or restrictive licensing requirements for modifications. * Generally favorable public perceptions: Public goods often enjoy more trust and support. If the state provides a compelling option, it can naturally attract users, and without having to impose mandates on existing market options. This is greatly preferrable to the regulatory approach, which can have unintended consequences that slow innovation and reduce market options. For example, if regulations impose heavy compliance burdens on tech companies, they would divert resources to legal and administrative expenses, leading to less resources for R&D. Regulatory regimentation to ostensibly achieve some public policy goal, can also prevent companies from experimenting with new ideas and approaches, which ultimately slows the industry's rate of progress. So by having the state compete rather than regulate coercively, we get the benefits of market-driven innovation while also testing the potential of public goods to provide superior value than what market-provisioned goods can. Such state-funded public options can also be used to non-coercively bolster open standards, by giving then the critical mass of adoption needed to become market standards.

troyvit 2y ago
It took me like 12 days to read the whole article, so, this comment is super late but someday maybe you'll run across it. All I want to say is that's a great idea. Back when email started entering wide use I was flummoxed as to why the post office didn't offer its own email options.
- ETH_start 2y ago
  Thanks for engaging with the discussion. With respect to the thought that came to you back in the early email days, I don't mean to be pedantic when I say this, and it may have had definite merit — like ensuring services that are naturally monopolistic due to network effects, are provided by an entity collectively controlled by the public — but an email service wouldn't fit the economic definition of a public good. An open source codebase allowing anyone to set up their own mail server would be the public good in that domain. A table that gives examples of private vs public goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods#Goods_classified_by_exclusivity_and_competitiveness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods#Goods_classified_by_excl... Public goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) For more complex goods, involving management of platforms, I think the only type of public good that could compete with proprietary offerings is the software that allows people to form a decentralized consensus and run applications on top of it, e.g. blockchain node software and smart contract code, respectively.