5 ms·

I came to the realisation recently that the free Internet only happened (in the West) because: - The Silent Generation, in charge at the time, had no idea what

I came to the realisation recently that the free Internet only happened (in the West) because: - The Silent Generation, in charge at the time, had no idea what was this Internet thing about. - The US Intelligence community understood it was a powerful tool to operate abroad. - Nobody dared derailing the only engine of growth and progress in many economies It obviously got out of control and is very abnormal in fact if you consider how power really works. As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks. Anyway we are one major cyber disaster away for our the state to switch from a blacklist to whitelist paradigm. A safer and better Internet for everyone. We will probably still have ways to access the "Free" Internet. It is gonna be fun, slower and might get you in serious troubles.

pjc50 1y ago
Yeah, a lot of stuff only worked because it was a "subculture". That could no longer be sustained once the first Twitter President arrived.
- ajsnigrutin 1y ago
  The decline of internet began way before trump, I'd say with the rise of facebook and everything moving on there (your local restaurant used to have a website, then switched to facebook only). Centralized power, centralized censorship. At approximately the same time, social networks became less social and more propaganda feeds.... so it went from a feed of content made by your friends for other friends (from complaints in status messages to photos of their plates) and moved to whatever crap they try to serve you now,...
Dracophoenix 1y ago
You're forgetting that that the Internet was intertwined with the phone system at a time when the latter was the only reliable form of communication at both local and long-distance levels. Interference with the Internet would be interference with the international telephone system.
- int_19h 1y ago
  I don't see how the fact that dial-up was the norm for the internet "last mile" changes anything wrt the ability to block it. It would be done in exact same way it is done today - by forcing ISPs to do the blocking on internet protocol level.
- 6510 1y ago
  Thats a good idea, we could moderate the phone system.
MaxPock 1y ago
The internet was a very good tool in subverting dictatorships and influencing elections. Now that adversaries of the West have mastered it and the shoe is on the other foot ,internet bad
lxgr 1y ago
> As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks. I have to do that using corporate and residential US networks, simply because I use Firefox. As great as Cloudflares services might be to each individual user, the centralization of infrastructure, and by extension the centralization of power, doesn’t seem to be worth it at a macro level. The tragedy of the commons strikes again.
- ajsnigrutin 1y ago
  Try disabling third party cookies, and on some sites, you'll be clicking cloudflare captchas every time you open them :)
  - lxgr 1y ago
    Ah, I guess that's why I get tons of them, thank you! Can't they at least set a first-party cookie to avoid repeated captchas per site, given that they're terminating HTTP?
xtracto 1y ago
The thing is, the Internet was supposed to be P2P initially (in Spanish it had the motto "La red de redes" (the network of networks, meaning that it was supposed to connect several LANs together). But as soon as you had ISPs started, centralization came. Now, most countries will have at most 5 major ISPs, and in reality geographical availability within countries make 1 or 2 available. Then, originally people had their own websites (I was there!) in their own servers. But Geocities started the centralization trend. And then CDNs, and then MySpace/Facebook and all that. The only way we are going to get the "freedom" network as it was before is through mesh-networks or similar technologies. Which maybe so far are very slow and cumbersome, but they will have to evolve. I know it is not very fashionable here in HN, but the only see that capable of happening is implementing some kind of "incentive mechanism" that incenvitives people to let data pass through their node in the mesh network; aaaand cryptocurrencies offer an possible solution for that.
- sunshine-o 1y ago
  Something I have always been wondering is: how much was WiMAX a threat to this centralisation and the 3 - 5 ISP per country model? I remember around 2010 there were cities with several small new ISPs providing fast home and mobile Internet for cheap and with very good coverage. Infrastructure costs were probably very low. Order of magnitude I guess compared to 4G, cable or fiber. You could find phones supporting it (HTC was one of the maker) and it seemed to be the perfect solution for most users. I am not sure if those small ISPs already had a roaming system in place but it would have made a lot of sense. Anyway, when Intel finally gave up I thought there are probably strong forces wanting to keep access to the Internet in a few hands, expensive and centralised.
  - axus 1y ago
    The centralized search engine's AI summary says that LTE became more popular, and the people who would buy WiMax hardware ended up buying LTE hardware instead.
    - sunshine-o 1y ago
thomastjeffery 1y ago
Every computer is a general purpose computer. What would you do to force me to participate exclusively in your nanny-net? I suspect any answer to that question requires an incredible amount of coordination and participation. The real problem with the internet, as I see it, is centralization. This is a product of monopoly, which is the core feature of copyright. A truly better internet would replace the authoritative structure of copyright with a truly decentralized model. As far as I can tell, the only hard problem left in decentralized networking is moderation. No one wants to browse an unmoderated internet. The problem is that moderation is structured as an authoritative hierarchy, so it's not compatible with true decentralization. I propose we replace moderation with curation. Every user can intentionally choose the subset of internet they want to interact with, defined by attestations from other users, all backed with a web of trust. This way everyone is the highest authority, and users can help each other avoid content they are disinterested in.

pjc50 1y ago

Yeah, a lot of stuff only worked because it was a "subculture". That could no longer be sustained once the first Twitter President arrived.

ajsnigrutin 1y ago
The decline of internet began way before trump, I'd say with the rise of facebook and everything moving on there (your local restaurant used to have a website, then switched to facebook only). Centralized power, centralized censorship. At approximately the same time, social networks became less social and more propaganda feeds.... so it went from a feed of content made by your friends for other friends (from complaints in status messages to photos of their plates) and moved to whatever crap they try to serve you now,...

Dracophoenix 1y ago

You're forgetting that that the Internet was intertwined with the phone system at a time when the latter was the only reliable form of communication at both local and long-distance levels. Interference with the Internet would be interference with the international telephone system.

int_19h 1y ago
I don't see how the fact that dial-up was the norm for the internet "last mile" changes anything wrt the ability to block it. It would be done in exact same way it is done today - by forcing ISPs to do the blocking on internet protocol level.
6510 1y ago
Thats a good idea, we could moderate the phone system.

MaxPock 1y ago

The internet was a very good tool in subverting dictatorships and influencing elections. Now that adversaries of the West have mastered it and the shoe is on the other foot ,internet bad

lxgr 1y ago

> As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks. I have to do that using corporate and residential US networks, simply because I use Firefox. As great as Cloudflares services might be to each individual user, the centralization of infrastructure, and by extension the centralization of power, doesn’t seem to be worth it at a macro level. The tragedy of the commons strikes again.

ajsnigrutin 1y ago
Try disabling third party cookies, and on some sites, you'll be clicking cloudflare captchas every time you open them :)
- lxgr 1y ago
  Ah, I guess that's why I get tons of them, thank you! Can't they at least set a first-party cookie to avoid repeated captchas per site, given that they're terminating HTTP?

xtracto 1y ago

The thing is, the Internet was supposed to be P2P initially (in Spanish it had the motto "La red de redes" (the network of networks, meaning that it was supposed to connect several LANs together). But as soon as you had ISPs started, centralization came. Now, most countries will have at most 5 major ISPs, and in reality geographical availability within countries make 1 or 2 available. Then, originally people had their own websites (I was there!) in their own servers. But Geocities started the centralization trend. And then CDNs, and then MySpace/Facebook and all that. The only way we are going to get the "freedom" network as it was before is through mesh-networks or similar technologies. Which maybe so far are very slow and cumbersome, but they will have to evolve. I know it is not very fashionable here in HN, but the only see that capable of happening is implementing some kind of "incentive mechanism" that incenvitives people to let data pass through their node in the mesh network; aaaand cryptocurrencies offer an possible solution for that.

sunshine-o 1y ago
Something I have always been wondering is: how much was WiMAX a threat to this centralisation and the 3 - 5 ISP per country model? I remember around 2010 there were cities with several small new ISPs providing fast home and mobile Internet for cheap and with very good coverage. Infrastructure costs were probably very low. Order of magnitude I guess compared to 4G, cable or fiber. You could find phones supporting it (HTC was one of the maker) and it seemed to be the perfect solution for most users. I am not sure if those small ISPs already had a roaming system in place but it would have made a lot of sense. Anyway, when Intel finally gave up I thought there are probably strong forces wanting to keep access to the Internet in a few hands, expensive and centralised.
- axus 1y ago
  The centralized search engine's AI summary says that LTE became more popular, and the people who would buy WiMax hardware ended up buying LTE hardware instead.
  - sunshine-o 1y ago

thomastjeffery 1y ago

Every computer is a general purpose computer. What would you do to force me to participate exclusively in your nanny-net? I suspect any answer to that question requires an incredible amount of coordination and participation. The real problem with the internet, as I see it, is centralization. This is a product of monopoly, which is the core feature of copyright. A truly better internet would replace the authoritative structure of copyright with a truly decentralized model. As far as I can tell, the only hard problem left in decentralized networking is moderation. No one wants to browse an unmoderated internet. The problem is that moderation is structured as an authoritative hierarchy, so it's not compatible with true decentralization. I propose we replace moderation with curation. Every user can intentionally choose the subset of internet they want to interact with, defined by attestations from other users, all backed with a web of trust. This way everyone is the highest authority, and users can help each other avoid content they are disinterested in.