
The Web in 2050 - darwhy
http://jacquesmattheij.com/the-web-in-2050
======
talyian
The year is 2050. You are reading this comment from a compatibility layer in
your open-source browser that translates HTML from the 2010s into Thought-
Interface Language 3.2, which was an open standard ratified in 2045 by a
global consortium of content and browser developers.

Back in the 2010s, web access was peculiarly gated in a dendritic
configuration as ISPs provided all the single-points-of-failure
interconnections between end users (including both content providers as well
as consumers) and the true "internet", a multiway resiliently-routed
interconnect of servers. As we know now, extending the peer-to-peer core of
the internet down to the consumer has had lasting impact, including breaking
up the routing monopolies of the ISPs as well as making it possible for anyone
willing to spend a few grand a year on server capacity to host a new peer-to-
peer router for nearby Internet users.

Many of you may not remember the origins of Google as a "search engine", a
monolithic index of "every reachable page on the internet." Such a quaint idea
has long since joined even further historic concepts such as Yahoo's "human-
curated list of pages on the Internet". Ever since the Searchtorrent protocol
was introduced and consumer searches were conducted on one of several
competing distributed hash tables across the internet, no one entity has had
to shoulder the responsibility of storing all the web content on the internet.
This author gladly pays a small monthly fee to a local search cache provider
for reliably fast localized caching of search results.

The web is here to stay. Remember your history next time you visit the local
Homo Sapiens preserve and give thanks to the carbon-based beings that invented
the Internet.

~~~
QAPereo
I think it's more likely that we'll be talking about "Guzzaline" and eating
each other.

~~~
gm-conspiracy
Brawndo? It's got electrolytes.

~~~
devrandomguy
What is Brawndo, exactly?

~~~
jacquesm
It's a reference to Idiocracy.

~~~
devrandomguy
I guess I should have used quotes.

------
triangleman
>If you’re over 50 you might just remember the birth of Google, with their
famous motto ‘Do No Evil’.

I love how people misremember this motto. The original slogan was "Don't be
evil" which is quite different and far more subjective to start with. Now they
have updated it to "Do the right thing" and you can imagine how easy it is to
dance around that.

But people seem to think Larry and Sergey were actually trying to be ethically
meticulous. Nonsense--the slogan always had the subtle meaning of "Don't be
Microsoft-level evil" and it turns out that was not an easy hurdle to clear.

~~~
choxi
Facebook changed theirs in 2014 from "Move Fast and Break Things" to "Move
Fast with Stable Infrastructure". It's funny how they predictably become
vaguer and less controversial.

~~~
CGamesPlay
Wait, is that true? I could see the case for less controversial ("breaking
things" can't be universally agreeable, right?), but it certainly seems less
vague to me. Anyways, the mission was never either of those. It was "make the
world more open and connected" and after the last US election changed to
"bring people together".

~~~
jacquesm
Funny I thought it was 'more profits for Facebook'.

~~~
SkyMarshal
'... while performing creepy psychological experiments on our users.'

~~~
jacquesm
I'm glad to see other people remember that. Unbelievable they got away with
that.

------
csomar
I disagree. Cryptocurrencies have shown that the new generation (as well as
the old one) can embrace new and decentralized technologies.

The decentralized web is already a "successful" idea. The correct
implementation for its wide use is not there yet. But it _will_ be there.

It is just a matter of time before we have a bigger "dark web", a
decentralized web, decentralized payment networks, and still have Google,
Facebook, and the likes.

As the internet population grows, and as people move to more digital
lifestyles; the people won't be limited (or gravitate) to a single portal.
Instead, they'll spread over different networks/infrastructures for their
different needs. Facebook can still be successful and grow while the
decentralized internet happen.

The Internet is growing both in number (population) and in use. People today
use the Internet to surf, chat, read the news, buy stuff online, book flights
and hotels, pay taxes, work, study, find partners, buy drugs, etc...

~~~
mynewtb
Cryptocurrencies are used for financial speculation, fraud and illegal trade.
With only tiny fractions of the cryptocurrency-using fraction of society using
them for other purposes. I would not call that nonsense the embrace of a
generation.

~~~
csomar
So? They are being used. The market cap of cryptocurrencies is over $100b
which is significant money; and the exchange of these currencies is liquid as
of date.

~~~
sharemywin
Imagine how much they'll be worth when they do something useful...;)

------
altotrees
I like the idea of "rebooting the web". If things continue in the direction
they are going now, I could see many forms of the internet existing. Just as
the Darkweb exists, I could see other splinter networks and technologies
taking shape as the internet we know now becomes more homogenized, whether it
is because of giants like Google and Facebook or government control (oh god
pls no) or any other factor.

I still fondly remember looking at Nike's newest shoe offerings in 1997,
waiting for the photos to download and listening to my dad complain about the
phone line being tied up. I looked at my girlfriend the other day in fact, and
just went "god, think of how different the internet is now compared to when we
were younger. What the hell will it look like in twenty years?" She called me
a nerd, but still considered the question. Exciting and sightly terrifying
thought to ponder, really.

~~~
drostie
It's worth remembering that there is an important difference between "the Web"
and "the Internet". This is the only way to understand something like when
Alan Kay says, "The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as
a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-
made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-
free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."

If you're less clear on what this distinction is: HTML+CSS+JS transmitted over
HTTP based on domains looked up via DNS -- this is the Web. Things like email
and BitTorrent and peer-to-peer networks and older things like Usenet
newsgroups have always existed on the Internet parallel to the Web, to say
nothing of, say, SSH and ping and other developer-friendly utilities, or
newcomers like BitCoin.

I've given a chunk of thought to how we might reboot the Web as a new service
living on the Internet and I've come away with more questions than answers.
What the Web has done extremely well is to convince a bunch of companies that
they need to have a Web Server living on the thing and hosting their content.
What it has done extremely poorly are these problems which maybe we don't even
think about: link-rot, the fact that you can't throw a dime at a YouTube video
you liked and trust that the content creator will get 8 cents and YouTube will
get 2, the fact that nobody can directly advertise to you, "watch this video
and we'll throw a dime at you!", the fact that you can't actually just fire up
your browser and start publishing a feed of videos and articles that you like
interspersed with a bunch of content you're writing -- you instead need to
sign up with some social network or blogging platform and then play by their
rules. The problem gets even harder when you think about systematically
purging illegal content and discouraging spam and so forth -- indeed the key
trait is to be able to say "I want to identify who is holding onto this
content and go after them via non-technological enforcement measures" and
such. One gets the impression that the Web is a very niche tradeoff in a vast
configuration space and that there are many other possibilities -- but it's
hard to see one that does something so fundamentally different to the Web that
people will instantly be addicted, "THIS is what I want."

~~~
jacquesm
Alan Kay and project Xanadu are _well_ worth studying in detail for anybody
interested in the web and what made it successful. The web is essentially an
extremely watered down version of what it could have been.

~~~
RonanTheGrey
> The web is essentially an extremely watered down version of what it could
> have been.

At the risk of starting a flamewar, this is largely due to the profit motive.
Profit inherently causes focus on specific areas that may or may not a) have
lasting social benefit, and b) be technologically robust.

There's something to be said for purely philanthropic projects. They promote
us to explore things that profit might not otherwise encourage.

~~~
jacquesm
I do not think that is the reason. The web in its original form, _long_ before
commerce came along was already a watered down version of Xanadu.

------
AaronFriel
If I know anything about the future, it doesn't look like the present.

The web won't look like it does now in 2050, and neither will the internet.

But it might very well be built on webassembly on browsing engines cum
operating systems on top of hypervisors on top of verified microkernels, and
the web will probably be delivered on top of HTTP/2 on top of TCP/UDP and so
on. The layers probably won't change that much.

~~~
the8472
> The layers probably won't change that much.

If someone solves the multicast problem during that time span things might
change radically on several layers. And even if not some immutable, content-
addressed protocols might make some inroads. SRI is planting the first seeds
in that direction.

~~~
sanxiyn
I had high hope for CCNx. Do you know what happened to it?

------
aaron-lebo
If things really are so dire in...33 years, then it won't be Facebook or
Google's fault, it'll be the fault of hundreds of thousands of hackers who had
the technology available and did nothing because everyone knows those two are
unbeatable, despite the fact that the tech gets cheaper and more accessible
every single day.

We've got a long way to go. They're not unbeatable. They're massive goliaths,
yes, but they also bloated and slow to adapt, can't focus on any one thing,
and don't have consumer loyalty. They can be beaten. Not saying they will, but
they can.

Side note, _Halt and Catch Fire_ , which has always tried to be technically
accurate starts focusing a lot on the early web in season 3 and 4. CERN,
NeXTcubes, and related all make an appearance. It's a fun watch if you are
interested in that stuff. The pilot starts with them reverse engineering an
IBM PC.

~~~
odammit
That show is great. Really hoping the story arc MacMillian into McAfee. That
could get really entertaining.

------
hawkice
If you reduce the details of the story into the statement "the future of the
web will be driven by anti-trust", I'd probably agree. The _present_ of the
web is driven by anti-trust, and there's always more consolidation.

Where machine learning, social networks, and advertising have economies of
scale, a tolerable future for the web would necessarily involve diseconomies
of scale. Personal connection, concierge service, local long-term engagement
with communities.

~~~
timtas
Throughout history, the moment anti-trust enters the picture is the exact
moment the supposed monopolist begins its natural collapse.

------
gaius
I remember in the late-90s portals were all the rage, everyone wanted to be
the one-stop shop for all their users browsing needs.

~~~
hnlmorg
Absolutely. Yahoo! used to be a particular favourite of mine. Search, email,
chat and games. A great place to hang out and weirdly not that far removed
from Facebook. Sure the UI has evolved quite a bit but it's similiar basic
services.

~~~
timtas
For a decent chunk of time maybe 1/4 of all internet users thought AOL _was_
the internet.

------
freech
Servers are only going to get cheaper. Programming is only going to get
easier. If anything, things like search engines and social networks are going
to become more competitive.

If someone has a genius idea for making a better engine, he won't work for
google, he'll create his own.

Implicit in this fear of centralization is a kaczynskiist belief that
"everything that can be invented has been invented".

People predicted some company taking over everything forever, and in fact even
before the web existed sci-fi-authors imagined a centralized network, were
from the servers to the software everything is provided by the government.
It's never going to happen.

~~~
pascalxus
>Servers are only going to get cheaper. Programming is only going to get
easier. If anything, things like search engines and social networks are going
to become more competitive

Programming skill and number of programmers is not a limiting factor to
Product and social networking development. In fact, there is a vast oversupply
of talent. If you look at the talent to opportunity ratio: it's enormous.

Look at product hunt. Dozens of potentially brilliant projects built and
released everyday and yet only a tiny tiny percentage will ever be successful.
Most fail because, either they've built something that too few people find
useful or the market they're trying to address is too crowded (already has too
many people offering similar services).

~~~
freech
Programming getting easier doesn't just mean that fewer or less skilled
programmers can build the same thing, it means that things can be build that
couldn't be build before.

Google wouldn't exist without C++ (as opposed to assembly language). Facebook
wouldn't exist without PHP (as opposed to C++).

------
shubhamjain
The rebooted decentralised web sounds exciting, but it's hard to deny that
there are large number of projects that only Google can carry out. At what
point does the dominance becomes irresponsibly large and requires
intervention?

~~~
rvanmil
I think we've recently reached that point with AMP.

------
obiefernandez
"Zuckerberg running for president as a Republican candidate in the United
States"

LOL... he would run as a Democrat, wouldn't he?

~~~
jacquesm
Given that the Republican party has already shown it is vulnerable to hostile
takeover by people with just money, brand recognition and no political
experience my bet would be he'd run as a Republican. Keep in mind that Trump
too in the past leaned Democrat but ran as a Republican.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Keep in mind that Trump too in the past leaned Democrat but ran as a
> Republican

Trump cultivated Democratic political connections as part of being an NYC-
based real estate developer, but has been on the political right (and
specifically the nativist/nationalist right) for quite a long time. His first
Presidential run, which was abandoned early, was in 2000 when he threw his hat
in the ring for the Reform Party nomination.

~~~
jacquesm
That's all true. _but_ (and it is only a small 'but'): The Republicans are the
party most friendly to big business and very wealthy people, something that
Zuckerberg would surely like.

~~~
dragonwriter
There's a pretty good case to be made that the dominant role of the neoliberal
faction of the Democratic Party makes it the party that is substantively best
for big business and the super rich at the moment (when it became dominant,
it's economic policies we're not far from those of the dominant faction of the
Republican Party—hence the “neoliberal consensus” that used to be frequently
discussed—but since then he overlapping nativist/protectivist, social
conservative, and religious authoritarian factions have gained more power.)

------
TekMol
If history repeats itself, then some new technology will take Google and
Facebook by surprise. And let a new player rise to the top.

AI is the obvious elephant in the room here.

If in 10 years Apple, Amazon, Tesla or some new startup has the better AI,
then this AI will search and present content better. And market it better. And
monetize it better. It might also produce its own content. Perfectly
customized interactive 3D surround sound content.

Mayb it will be some decentralized autonomous organization that lives on a
blockchain. Driven by AI, doing its thing. Outside of what a human mind can
understand.

~~~
adrianN
I think the current tech giants stand a pretty good chance of staying ahead of
the AI startups. They're soaking up all the PhDs and have astonishing amounts
of training data to play around with.

------
mdekkers
_An aging Richard Stallman throwing his towel into the ring_

That's when I realised this article was Fake News!

~~~
ubertaco
Some prefer the more-charitable, longer-lived term "fiction".

------
rst
Relics like this exist today -- there are still Gopher servers out there.
Current browsers no longer support the protocol, but you can tour the relics
through a proxy -- info here:

[http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/](http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/)

The links to gopherspace itself are on the upper right ("standard version"/no-
javascript); I'm honoring their request not to link to the proxy itself
directly.

------
kolbe
The symbolic nature of WWW leading to WW3 would be a little to much for me to
handle.

------
romaniv
If I was to bet, I would bet that in 2050 the web will be mostly replaced by
some kind of VR network with a lot of sound, 3D videos and interactive
objects. The web as it is already decays due to tons legacy cruft, insane
complexity of doing trivial things, oceans of bad content and hyper-
centralization. And all of these things are getting worse every year. VR is
our best bet for a clean start.

~~~
jdietrich
My bet is in the exact opposite direction. I think that the internet will be
increasingly ambient, driven by virtual assistants like Alexa and Google Now.
Most interactions will be short, personalised and push-oriented. Rich VR
experiences will exist, but they'll represent a very small proportion of
internet use.

Consider the development of phone technology. In the 70s and 80s, most
futurists thought that video calling would replace voice. They thought that
richer, higher-bandwidth experiences would dominate the market. In fact, the
opposite happened - voice was surpassed by SMS and IM. Users overwhelmingly
prefer to communicate in a medium that is less rich, but more convenient.
Asynchronous messaging came to dominate because it's "snackable" and doesn't
demand your full attention.

I think that the future is an Amazon drone dropping off a box of goodies that
you didn't order, but is exactly what you wanted. It's Google Now booking you
an Uber to a restaurant that turns out to be your new favourite place. It's
Spotify using heart rate, galvanic skin response, pupillary dilation and a
thousand other data points to compose the soundtrack to your life.

~~~
jacquesm
> I think that the future is an Amazon drone dropping off a box of goodies
> that you didn't order, but is exactly what you wanted. It's Google Now
> booking you an Uber to a restaurant that turns out to be your new favourite
> place. It's Spotify using heart rate, galvanic skin response, pupillary
> dilation and a thousand other data points to compose the soundtrack to your
> life.

I will definitely opt-out of your future.

------
zanybear
So... everybody starts from the premise that we will still be here in 2050....

~~~
hossbeast
No, that the internet will still be here.

------
swiftting
"at first joining the AMP bandwagon not realising this was the trojan horse
that led to their eventual demise"

Hopefully this will not be the result of AMP but interesting take nonetheless.

~~~
tyingq
Directionally, AMP does make the Google search page start to look more like
the semi captive AOL interface of old. Content producers upload stuff to AOL,
and pay for things like ads and "AOL keywords" to get an audience. AOL,
meanwhile, controls the UI, puts whatever they want in the sidebars, has all
the analytics data, etc.

------
cerealbad
the internet will go the way of the telephone network.

what will replace it? a copy of all your favourite people stored on the
implant in your brain. the interface will be a waking dream.

------
niftich
This scenario contains a lot to unpack. Let's try to extract some of the
claims:

1\. Most websites will get little to no traffic.

2\. Consolidation will eventually result in a mere handful of verticals
remaining, in the author's opinion, solely Google and Facebook.

3\. At first, content framing tactics, like FB Instant Articles and Google
AMP, will result in these providers obviating the need for users to navigate
outbound links; instead, the content will be surfaced from within the
ecosystem.

4\. Content providers (i.e. "publishers") go along with the above because in
truth they are desperate for revenue. Giving away content for free in exchange
for the potential of display ad revenue due to high volume is seen as their
only realistic hope for survival, making this a coercive relationship.

5\. Some strange political speculation, but, notably, the two giants banning
people and services who have presence on the other. Also, independent
newspapers get bought out and absorbed.

Out of this distillation of claims, #5 is complete baloney more egregious than
an industrially-processed slice of knockoff Mortadella; beyond even a fanciful
fantasy of how these companies work. Claims #1 through #4, on the other hand,
are very astute predictions, or rather, observations, as they're already here.

The long tail of websites is pretty long, and most sites indeed get very
little traffic even today. One need not look further than the power of
communities like HN and Reddit to slashdot all sorts of sites by overwhelming
it with legitimate traffic. This brittleness and inability of some sites to
scale to momentary demand, along with ISPs forbidding home servers and the
risk of malicious denial-of-service means that the original way of self-
hosting sites on the Web is largely dead [1], or at the very least, a risky
call. This unfortunate fact means you probably want to pay someone to host
your site instead. Though there are thousands upon thousands of professional
hosting providers, it's a dramatically smaller number than the number of
websites; so we're slowly walking up the tree of vertical consolidation.

#3 is well-documented, and #4 follows naturally from the tribulations of
finding business models that work on the web [2].

I stand by the view that #5 is too much of a leap; willingly excluding
potential customers seems like an act of folly -- Home Depot doesn't ban
anyone who shops at Lowe's, but instead they'd love to lure them away.
Orthodox airlines in the US at time of writing might as well be regarded as
quadrupoly: they have suspiciously similar ticket prices for most non-hub
destinations, and they have semi-secret programs to offer matching frequent
flier status to the topmost tier of most profitable travellers if one wants to
jump ship.

Nonetheless, there is in fact a real emergent phenomenon in the continued
vertical consolidation of content silos. Apple -- mysteriously absent from the
author's narrative -- is the exact sort of player whose excellent products,
dedicated fanbase, and seeming benevolance will result in the sort of
transformations that the author fears: Apple has doubled down on producing
original content [3] for its captive ecosystem, following the tactics of
Amazon and Netflix, but unlike them, Apple's presence does not extend
horizontally to other platforms. In fact, we just had a trending article [4]
which covered in-depth the different tactics companies use to achieve reach
and retain customers.

It's more believable to envision a future similar to what happened to major US
television networks: NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and Turner; lots of mergers and
intrigue, phases of ownership by movie studios, phases of ownership by
seemingly unrelated enterprises that pivoted to holding companies from
something else, acquisitions in efforts to form new verticals; and yet despite
all this, there's still several of them. They're all deeply vertical now, but
their valuations and regulatory pressure keeps them existing side-by-side.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699084](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699084)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299230)
[3] [https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/16/apple-said-to-be-
spending-...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/16/apple-said-to-be-
spending-1-billion-on-original-content-in-2018/) [4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15082966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15082966)

~~~
jacquesm
"After some years of dwindling turnover Apple finally got bought by Facebook,
which gave Facebook a way to counter the ever stronger integration between
Google's mobile offering vertically integrated from the website all the way to
the phones and tablets running its Android-NG operating system. The reason it
took as long as it did before this could come to pass is that Apple had
tremendous cash reserves from their enormous business success in the first two
decades of the new century and tried very hard to stay independent."

~~~
niftich
You made me do a double-take; to clarify, this paragraph is not present in the
article, but it presents an intriguing retort to my scenario.

~~~
jacquesm
Agreed the political stuff was thin, but I could not resist the temptation and
it fits well with the present day landscape becoming more and more polarized
where people start treating politics more like team sports than something
affecting all of us.

------
hackertux
>If you read this far you should probably follow me on twitter

------
nafey
So guys who will you place your bets on personally I think Google will prevail
over FB.

