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The problem is the class of people who care about this stuff (like you and me) have largely lost control over shaping the future of the Internet, its protocols,
by nly 11y ago
The problem is the class of people who care about this stuff (like you and me) have largely lost control over shaping the future of the Internet, its protocols, and the things attached to it.
When it comes to the web, it feels like Google are now doing more to shape things to their business model than anyone else. HTTP/2, WebAssembly... it's only a matter of time before Chrome becomes the Play Store. This is a completely different vision to the days of centralized but federated services like e-mail, newsgroups and IRC. The web still feels like a pool of ugly hacks, but now it's ripe.
When you look outside of the web, there's little innovation on the open Internet. You can probably count the exciting non-proprietary stuff that has touched mainstream in the last 15 years on one hand (BitTorrent, Tor, Bitcoin). Most of what's 'hot' on the Internet isn't innovative at all, and it's all walled, proprietary, and monopolised (IM, social networking, VoIP)
- narrowrail 11y ago[nitpick: I don't think I would lump VOIP into that bunch because SIP is a pretty open standard that can work quite with some cheap hardware like an Obihai, and then a large wholesale VOIP provider like flowroute ($2/year for a DID and ~5 cents/min connectivity).] I think there are projects/people working on the things you are concerned about, but it will take time. I believe people are going to have to have some machine on their wired, home connection that is always-on doing background stuff that a SAAS server would be doing. The software business is closer to native applications in that case.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago> WebAssembly Huh? That's not a Google-exclusive thing.
- cwyers 11y agoIt's not even something that originated with Google, it comes out of Mozilla's work on ASM.js. If Google had their way we'd have NaCl instead.