
Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet - jonbaer
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-10-29/internet-50th-anniversary-ucla-kleinrock
======
adim86
I find this post quite disappointing. I don't mean to come off harsh but it is
quite naive and utopian and I cannot take the call to arms seriously. Saying
the internet went wrong is like saying the invention of cars went wrong cause
we still have car accidents. For every powerful force in the world, it will be
a source of good and bad things. The internet has changed the world, increased
communication, allowed people in New York to learn and communicate with people
in Egypt. Share stories, cultures, solve problems. A person in Nigeria can
teach themselves Hindu, just from pure curiosity and no budget. No publisher
needs to approve a book to be published or where it will be sold. We can make
phone calls for free at any point in the day. We have Wikipedia, which for
free provides more information than any human can process in their lifetime.
For everyone who has access to the internet, the bulk of the world knowledge
has been democratized and made accessible and something went wrong? Do
terrorists use the internet? sure! Has consumerism hijacked parts of the
internet? Sure! but these things are only symptoms of how powerful this tool
is. Should we try to control and fix these problems of course! But for someone
who created something so powerful, I am a bit disappointed at the negative
tone of this post on the 50th anniversary of the first message.

~~~
pwthornton
The Internet is not as bad as cars. That's harsh!

Cars kill more than 1 million people a year, and are actively cooking our
planet. On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a
huge negative.

The Internet is a lot more balanced, but both show how a lack of foresight and
system design can lead to a lot of negative consequences. We could drastically
cut down on the number of road deaths if we took it more seriously and made
some big system design changes, but we haven't. We can also make the Internet
a better place, but there will always be issue with all massive systems.

~~~
malvosenior
> _On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge
> negative._

Honestly there's no way this is true. How many people would die if they
couldn't use an ambulance? How many people are surviving on goods shipped to
them via trucks?

Of course things can be improved, but there's no way the automobile was a net
negative on humanity.

~~~
joshklein
What if the larger story of the industrialization enabled by that trucking
warms the planet to the point that humanity goes extinct? Something to at
least consider; unintended consequences are still consequences.

~~~
malvosenior
Humanity is not at risk of going extinct from global warming.

------
codegeek
Personally, I think the internet has changed millions if not billions of lives
for the better. Yes, it has introduced quite a few bad things like spam,
malware, surveillance etc. but with most good things, comes a few bad things.
Overall though, Internet has been tremendous in lifting so many people out of
poverty AND creating jobs that otherwise people could not dream of before the
internet. I can work for anyone over the internet and make money for myself
and my family. I can communicate with family members and friends across
continents. With all the hate social media gets for example, imagine a life
without them again. I say this as someone who hardly uses it but knows that it
is there if I want to communicate with someone I care about. Do you really
want to send physical letters again ? Yes they have their charm and nostalgia
but I am not willing to trade the convenience of internet for something worse
or outdated.

So Thank you for creating the internet all you tremendous people. I personally
wouldn't trade it. Can we fix a few things ? Sure we can. But it has not gone
wrong. It has changed lives, mine included for the better.

~~~
jrochkind1
I don't understand your theory of how the internet has "lifted so many people
out of poverty".

I'm not saying I disagree with it necessarily, I don't even understand what
you're suggesting enough to disagree or agree with it. It's definitely not
_obvious_ to me that the internet has somehow lifted so many people out of
poverty, I just don't understand what you mean.

~~~
mrlala
Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance of
getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right?

Maybe this can count as more of a smartphone thing an internet thing.. but
it's still largely an internet thing that would allow someone in a rough spot
to still be able to connect with people online and look/apply for jobs.

~~~
lucideer
> _Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance
> of getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right?_

Do they? How?

Are you suggesting that online jobs website make it easier to find a job? A
homeless person with a smartphone isn't the only one with access to the jobs
website. Nor does the existence of such a website intrinsically create the
jobs behind the ads on it.

A sibling commenter talks about the existence of the internet facilitating job
creation through other means, but I don't think homeless people having
smartphones has much bearing on this.

It's worth noting that income inequality has steadily increased in the last
~40 years at leastm (in the US), so talk of the internet lifting people out of
poverty has to be considered in that context.

~~~
generalpass
A homeless person desiring to gain some employable skills has an easier time
doing such with the Internet and an access device, such as a phone - even if
the phone has no cell service but can use free WiFi- than prior to the
existence of the Internet and those devices.

There is a silent class of homeless people whom I am not clear you are
including when you state "homeless", and that is people living on cars and/or
"couch-surfing". On the occasion I've seen it mentioned in articles, it seems
that it is nearly impossible to come up with reliable numbers on the actual
population of homeless people living under such conditions due to their
transitory nature.

It is likely true that the genuinely destitute homeless people, which is
comprised in large part of people who suffer severe psychological and mental
disorders, are only minimally aided by cell phones. I suspect the way they
actually benefit is they carry on their persons a means for those trying aid
them to find them as well as a life line they can tug, should they so choose.

"Inequality" is a divisive term with no genuine academic definition. Another
correlation is that as "inequality" has risen, so has the greatest reduction
in people living in subsistence farming and abject poverty in history of
mankind, a conclusion that would suggest that "inequality" positively
correlates with greater human flourishing, but the real purpose of my
mentioning this is to demonstrate that "inequality" is a largely meaningless
metric, by itself, used for manipulating people not familiar with broader
understanding of what has occurred for so many billions of people on the
planet.

------
segmondy
The internet never "went wrong". Nor did it go right.

If we want to talk about the internet going wrong, we can talk about running
out of IPV4 addresses, the garbage that DNS/BGP can be. The insecureness of
SMTP etc. Yet from a technical standpoint, it has gotten amazing. There was a
time https/ssl was not a thing, when everyone shuffled data via FTP, when
telnet ruled, when NFS was world rw and rlogin/rhost was the way of things. So
the net as a tool has gotten better to address it's weakness in relation to
privacy(crypto), spam (captcha/ML), fakes news (ML)

Spam, Fake News, Trolls, Privacy Abuse etc is all about people. We can ask,
how did the world/people get so wrong? But then, when we sit back and think
about it, this is the world that brought us a few world wars and tons of other
wars. All that crap going on over the net is annoying but nothing.

I'll take all the spam, fake news, trolls, ad stalking and attempt to capture
my data than live through a war.

~~~
K0SM0S
Right, this is exactly what I try to explain in a long comment[1] (different
thread, comparable topic).

I essentially argue that we should not confuse the medium (internet, a
"network of networks"; like air or water or space) with the usage and
information passing by said medium (the "high level" stuff like "speech" or
"websites"; like oral speech or stores and parks in the physical world).

I'm surprised that a researcher who contributed to building the medium, the
infrastructure itself, would fail to recognize we're talking at very different
levels, totally different scopes when we conflate 'internet' with any private
company or citizen operating over the medium. It's romantic and doesn't help
solving any kind of issue, whether low-level or high-level.

I will echo user `riazrizvi` in this thread:

> _Simply the internet has always reflected the segment of society that used
> it. Now that everyone uses it it reflects society at large. So I don’t think
> this is an internet problem, but rather an opportunity to see the worlds
> social problems being translated into a more transparent codified form. I
> reject the author’s two solutions as being low effort addendums. Let us
> acknowledge we are not seeing new problems, but rather we are seeing old
> problems with a new lens._

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21383074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21383074)

------
Accujack
It didn't go wrong. It went very well.

It didn't turn into the idealized vision that the author apparently had for
it, but that's not unusual.

~~~
workthrowaway
something definitely went wrong, imo.

when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic
about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies
and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites
linked to other websites with similar interest.

now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites
anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct.

~~~
101008
Yes, this is a common topic between my girlfriend and me. Internet as we know
it (we grew up in the 2000s with MSN, forums, etc) doesnt exist anymore.

First (at least for us, for other people there would be another "first") were
the basic webpages done in Frontpage or Dreamweaver (if you had enough RAM),
uploaded to free webservers like Tripod, Lycos, Geocities, copying and pasting
scripts found out there to remove popups and iframes, reading Photoshop
tutorials to do some effects or gifs animations. Everything were more crafted,
it took more time to do these kind of things (now everything is an app or a
drag and drop).

Then came the second version of the internet. Everything was a bit "more pro"
\- even amateur fansites payed for their hosting, they had forums, online
chats, etc. The open source community allowed this. From Wordpress with its
themes to phpBB2 forums, vBulletin, etc. Oh, I miss those days.

Then slowly all of that was lost. Nowadays we only have social accounts for
things. Fansites? Only accounts on Twitter, INstagram, YouTuber. Ask an
INfluencer if they have their own website. What for? Everything is
centralized.

My dad, who started using a smartphone just 2 or 3 years ago, doesn't fully
understand what the internet is. For him, it's just a set of apps (Whatsapp,
Facebook, and the website of his fav newspaper). Outside that he doesn't
understand there is (or there was) a full world of websites with a lot of
contents.

It makes me sad because "the original internet" will be never be like what we
experienced. I don't know who to blame for, tho. If I were in the shoes of
Facebook or Twitter's founders I would have done the same. But they definitely
have eaten all the webpages around them.

~~~
efdee
People still run blogs. People still run their own forums. Nothing is "lost",
there is just a whole lot of new things that apparently don't interest you as
much.

Personally, I can't really say that I miss any of the sites designed like they
were in the 90s, with their ever-rotating GIFs, Flash-based intro pages,
"Designed for Netscape" badges.

And does an influencer need to have his/her own website? Not more than an ad
needs its own website.

The "original Internet" is still there, and I dare say more people are using
it than back in the 90s. It's just that a lot more people are also using the
newer stuff that you don't like.

And that's fine.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I think maybe they're bemoaning the dichotomy between increased access and
apparent decreased use of the internet for creation of content by ordinary
users -- or at least content that's not being exploited for
advertising/marketing?

I'd warrant a tiny fraction of users have their own blogs now compared to a
decade ago?

~~~
efdee
But that was apparent from the get-go. Most people just want to consume. In
the early years, "going online" already took some effort or knowledge - only
as it became gradually easier did the large swathes of consumers join.

If you lived through Eternal September, you kind of knew this was coming.

But again, just because plenty of people consume, and plenty of companies
cater mostly to the consumers, doesn't mean there isn't another world out
there for those who look.

------
yetihehe
How did it go so wrong - the same way it did go wrong with many other tools -
people used them to better themselves at the cost of others.

> We could try to push the internet back toward its ethical roots. However, it
> would be a complex challenge requiring a joint effort by interested parties
> — which means pretty much everyone.

That "everyone" also includes bad actors.

~~~
tossAfterUsing
> ethical roots

weren't they all working for the .mil?

~~~
jslabovitz
No.

There were plenty of us there who were accidental visitors, curious kids who
found ourselves in this interesting world. Kleinrock mentions this briefly in
the original article, but there was a high degree of trust and optimism on the
early internet, and if one was technically inclined and a little outgoing and
generally a good egg, it wasn't hard to get an account somewhere.

When I first logged into MIT-ITS around 1982, coming in over dialup as a
teenager calling a modem bank near the Pentagon, the login-failed message said
something like, "Sorry, that username does not exist. Would you like an
account?" It was RMS himself who gifted me (and a lot of others) a free
account for the asking.

It's a hard thing to explain to people who weren't there -- I think this is
why so many people in this thread see Kleinrock as naive or worse. My
girlfriend never believes me when I try to explain the early internet; it
seems an impossibility to her, as if I was talking about some pre-historic
hunter/gatherer culture.

------
frereubu
"You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and
reject websites that don’t meet your standards."

It occurs to me that this could be a rough description of ad blocking
extensions, although rather like the Aldous Huxley quote about means
determining ends, ad blockers are the result of an adversarial relationship
rather than a consensual one.

~~~
bilbo0s
Not exactly in my opinion. My understanding of the passage is that he wants to
block the entire website outright. So not, "Look at reddit, but block ads."
Rather it would be, "Block reddit."

Curiously, blocking the entire website outright due to incompatible privacy
policies is a solution I never really even considered? It certainly changes
the dynamic game theoretically speaking. I wonder what the internet would be
like in a parallel timeline where that happened?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This is effectively what we should be doing: Either accept what the site is
offering (content monetized by ads and data collection) or don't. But what
happened instead is entitlement: People decided they had the _right_ to view
that content without paying it's cost, and went for ad blockers instead.

As much as I loathe ads, I am still surprised ad blockers work: That vastly
more websites haven't simply made it impossible to view them without either
seeing the ads or paying money/subscribing.

~~~
matheusmoreira
What cost? Web sites don't charge anyone for the HTTP response. They
distribute their pages free of charge.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Creating content has an inherent cost.

~~~
matheusmoreira
I mean the cost to me as a user. Why don't content creators charge me for the
page view?

------
riazrizvi
In summary, the internet initially reflected the values of its socially
conscientious creators, but as the community diversified it was used for
business (making money, marketing, spam), it suffered cyber attacks, nations
are balkanizing regions of it with censorship firewalls, and businesses are
exploiting our privacy. Users need to spend more time reviewing privacy
agreements. Scientists need to work harder on encryption.

Simply the internet has always reflected the segment of society that used it.
Now that everyone uses it it reflects society at large. So I don’t think this
is an internet problem, but rather an opportunity to see the worlds social
problems being translated into a more transparent codified form. I reject the
author’s two solutions as being low effort addendums. Let us acknowledge we
are not seeing new problems, but rather we are seeing old problems with a new
lens.

~~~
carapace
Conway's Law on the global scale?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)

> "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs
> which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

The Internet as image?

\- - - -

I like it, but then there's the problem of too much, too little, and
_differential_ transparency, eh?

------
_se
Four popups and overlays in 15 seconds. What a trash website.

~~~
efa
Ironic, given the subject of the article.

~~~
izzydata
It further helps demonstrate the point even if unintentional.

------
1024core
He doesn't mention the Worm of 1988[1]. The only reason it spread was because
sendmail(1) would allow any remote sender to _spawn a shell on your system_.
This was by design, and left in place because these researchers were naive and
utopian. Then Robert Morris Jr came along and abused it. To me, _that_ was the
inflection point of the nascent Internet: the naivete of these researchers met
the harsh reality of real human behavior and lost.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm)

------
jv22222
I met my wife on the internet, on a chat site I created back in 1995, we have
a beautiful son, I’ve made countless friends through the internet, had a
fantastic 25+ year career.

I guess I’m saying that the internet has been awesome for this family.

That said, I do agree that it has been co-opted in ways that are not good by a
few nefarious players.

Still, it’s not all bad.

------
brodouevencode
I heard Vint Cerf say similar things at a talk at Georgia Tech many years ago.
Basically it was "we made this decision because of this reason, but had we
known this thing now we would have done it yet another way." Those points were
largely technical in the beginning of his talk, but then he started talking
about it in terms of the philosophical implications which were largely not
realized at the time. It was clear that he (and assuming his team) were in it
as much if not more for the technical challenge than anything else. Its
utility was just as clear, but long term implications were (seemingly) not
considered. It was both funny and a little disheartening.

------
Merrill
Use of telecom networks for criminal activities predates the Internet, and the
use of computer networking for fraud and abuse was recognized long before the
Internet was opened for commercial use. The movie War Games was released in
'83 around the already popular meme of computer hacking. The Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act was passed in '86\. The Morris Worm occurred in '88.

Usenet started in '80 and soon had all sorts of sketchy activity going on.
Corporate email systems in the mid-80s were being used for flame wars over
internal disputes. It was clear by then that computer networking allowed all
the good and bad human interactions that were possible.

------
deskamess
The very nature of networks and the internet has resulted in the concentration
of "information flow" in a few 1000 (10,000?) nodes globally. These key nodes
which act as transit points in the network have become monitoring points for
many agents. In essence, the internet, in an effort to liberalize and
disseminate information easily, has sufficiently centralized information flow
into a few nodes. Encryption can help in this scenario, and hopefully gets
stronger.

Prior to this, the means of monitoring were varied and took effort, often
human. This meant it had to be selectively applied since there was a
burden/cost to all out monitoring; as a result you had to know the
task/persons you were to observer (and get a warrant). Now, capture can be all
encompassing and automated; "searching for issues" is done later. Monitor
everything, ask questions later.

Now this in itself is troubling but another side effect is that these transit
nodes can be disabled by agents to suppress the dissemination of information
from troubled areas. In this scenario, cryptography cannot help as the wire to
the outside has been cut.

As traditional dissemination methods disappear or go online, and our
information consumption is primarily online, these nodes can become very
effective 'information suppression' points.

~~~
derpherpsson
Power hierarchies are part of human nature. We always create them, the super-
nodes.

This is not limited to computer networks. We do it with relationships as well,
how many does not know of Madonna and Justin Bieber, compared to random Joe?
Our very ideas and thoughts are subject to it as well.

There already exist meshing technology that counter our human nature and does
not produce power hierarchies. Decentralized hashtables for example.

Maybe if we hand over the control to the machines, we could solve this
problem. Pretty much noone wants that though... It's limited to some fringes
of our society. The darknets (i2p more than Tor) it, and BitTorrent swarms. It
works here, because the programmers never gave the users a choice.

------
carapace
Just for perspective:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

> Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted
> Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement
> over the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular
> software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper)
> trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links
> and no management of version or contents."

(Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article proceeds to reference a Wired magazine
"hit piece" in the next paragraph. Ignore that, read this:)

Here's an interview with Nelson:
[https://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html](https://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html)

------
mentos
What do you guys think about a kickstarter to raise enough money to buy
Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc and shut it down for everyone's benefit?

~~~
nscalf
I think I would probably be making a Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc competitor
that night. They exist because people want them to exist, even though they
have some bad parts. It's much more effective to work to make them better than
to just throw them out.

~~~
tremon
I would open up their APIs instead. Allow everyone to write their own
interoperable frontend or backend. That levels the playing field, allows
everyone to compete on the strength of their interface instead of the size of
their captive audience.

As you say, the service fills a need (perceived or otherwise). It's the size
of the network, not necessarily the service itself, that causes the problem.
Make the service a protocol, and move it back into the (web 1.0) fold.

------
strictfp
Internet only allowed us to witness another iteration of implemention of the
nasty methods already employed by nations, corporations and other entities to
assert their power over the general population; information hiding, secrecy,
isolationism, monopolies, weaponization of information, denial of anonymity
etc.

The original intent of internet was to establish a honest and open platform
for information sharing, and for me (personally at least) the development so
far has only convinced me that most establishments out there are utterly
incompatible with those values.

------
acoye
If you consider the internet as a reflection of mankind, then maybe seen it as
wrong and broken is only a measure of your belief system against what is
society in its crudest form?

Also I disagree on the "create a new crypto system" to solve our issues trope.
When talking about stolen databases I would argue it is a problem of not using
state of the art to protect privacy as there is realistically no incentive to
do so.

------
droithomme
> websites should provide a privacy policy customized to you, something they
> should be able to do since they already customize the ads you see. Websites
> should also be required to take responsibility for any violations and abuses
> of privacy that result from their services

These sorts of policies will completely annihilate small sites. Only large
corporations and institutions with their own legal teams will have websites.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Why?

Isn't it easier to not use someone's PII?

------
ltbarcly3
> Scientists need to create more advanced methods of encryption to protect
> individual privacy by preventing perpetrators from using stolen databases.

It would be wonderful if this came about, but this isn't exactly a plan
either. Current technologies almost all require you to work against decrypted
data. For example, if I encrypt my laptop, and I use column level encryption
on my database, and use ssl to connect to that database, and use certificates
and two factor authentication and so on, in the end my application can read
decrypted data. All the encryption prevents access to the data through many
mechanisms, but rooting any of the machines involved still gives an attacker a
path to much or all of the data (eventually all the data).

What is necessary isn't more advanced methods of encryption, what we need is
less painful methods of encryption. Encryption should be supported at the
hardware level (ssd's can move data faster than even the most modern cpu's can
comfortably decrypt it, memory is rarely encrypted), and applied everywhere
all the time.

------
nanna
We're marking the 50th anniversary at King's College London with an evening of
critical reflections by the Department of Digital Humanities, next Wednesday 6
November. Open to all!

[https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/happy-packet-switching-
ticket...](https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/happy-packet-switching-
tickets-77325266955)

~~~
The_Androctonus
Completed my MSc at KCL in August and my topic had to do with coming up with a
solution for the issues being discussed here. I think I'll be attending this!

------
shpongled
If anything, the presence of the "dark side" is proof that their creation is a
massive success. Without it, we would not have truly free and anonymous
exchange of information, which is what qualifies the internet as the greatest
invention of mankind. I can carry a device around that had the ability to
access the sum total of human knowledge

------
andrew_
One of many great takeaways from this article, a great new word to add to my
vocabulary:

Balkanization, or Balkanisation, is a derogatory geopolitical term for the
process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions
or states that are often hostile or uncooperative with one another.

------
falcolas
I think it can be boiled down to an even simpler statement. The internet got
big enough to _matter_. As with all things that matter, people will try to
monetize them, disrupt them, destroy them, and abuse them.

Even with all that, it still matters, we just have to really watch where we
step.

------
myth_buster
> With the profit motive taking over the internet, the very nature of
> innovation changed. Averting risk dominated the direction of technical
> progress. We no longer pursued “moonshots.” Instead advancement came via
> baby steps — “design me a 5% faster Bluetooth connection” as opposed to
> “build me an internet.” An online community that had once been convivial
> transformed into one of competition, antagonism and extremism.

This cycle is perhaps fundamental to all __human__ inventions and core to the
theory of disruption.

This played out out the same way with Bitcoin. Ethereum had to step in to
disrupt that cycle and as ETH grows to that size, some thing else needs to
come in and disrupt. Same holds true for IBM > Google > Facebook > ...

------
6510
Ok, fine, ill go there, eventho you will hate me for it... hah....

Everyone should be able to publish and it should enjoy readership depending on
its quality alone.

Platforms like HN and all the others offer guaranteed readership.

For example: If you are to write something about the current subject it would
be a terrible write up if it talked about the Hindi vs Hindu typo. Horses vs
cars would only be slightly less terrible.

My hand picked collection of "articles you should read" about the topic should
not include such works. It just cant.

The difference is like that between getting on stage and sharing some insights
or blabbering some raw thoughts over drinks with friends. We all have both
qualities, which one should we use to write for the world?

------
louwrentius
I'm currently listening to "When the wizards stay up late" by Katie Hafner en
Matthew Lyon.

It's about the origins of the internet, starting with the birth of arpanet and
going from there.

I like it, it's interesting to know how it came to be.

------
alex_young
I like the idea of improving the technology side, but another thing we should
try to bring back is Netiquette - basically civility all users of this global
network used to be expected to agree to.

I think YC is a good example of this working in practice, so why not expose
more of the world to the idea again?

Endless September [0], when AOL connected to the Internet, should be waining
soon since their subscriber base is finally disappearing right?

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

------
marknadal
The internet went wrong when Big Corp stepped in and Bribed the Government
with the DMCA,

Killing off the community powered & hosted internet (Napster, BitTorrent).

Then further, mobile (which is great) made the Server/Client relationship
polarizing & prone to spying on your location.

To fix this, we need lite P2P protocols that can run embedded or directly on
any webpage inside the browser.

Then maybe, we can finally dig ourselves out of this grave.

That's what we're building, and we already have 8M monthly active users
running this network! Come join the fun!

------
Legogris
> Blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin and other digital
> currencies, also offers the promise of irrefutable, indisputable data
> ledgers.

I see a recurring pattern here. While we have huge potential here, there's a
significant danger that the same kind of centralized control emerges out of
decentralized structure just as with the Internet. I hope enough people
working on and using blockchain technology in the early stages learn of past
lessons.

~~~
Sargos
I think it will be different based on the economics of the two systems.

On the early internet it was extremely cheap to host a webpage either on your
own computer or something like geocities and thus an explosion of content was
created in a decentralized manner. Then the internet grew in popularity and it
began to cost a lot of money to maintain all of the servers and bandwidth
needed which cut off all of the smaller groups and consolidated power to a few
corporations who could fund such an enterprise.

With blockchains we are also currently in the amateur stage where anyone can
build something and put it out there but the difference is that dapps cost
nothing to run and anyone can publish one. The cost to the developer of
Uniswap is the same for 10 people and 10 million. The cost is just the
development of the initial dapp. A small group of open source developers could
create the new Facebook without needing millions of dollars to pay for
hardware and buildings.

This low barrier to entry and maintenance removes the centralization point
that corporations rely on. This is to say nothing of DAOs like Moloch and
other novel funding methods that allow non-corporate projects to compete on
the same level as anyone else. It's quite possible that the blockchain space
will have a much longer and possibly lifelong period of true decentralized
content and network creation the likes of which we had on the early non-
corporate internet.

~~~
JohnFen
> On the early internet it was extremely cheap to host a webpage either on
> your own

It still is. You can get your website hosted for $5/mo.

~~~
Sargos
Not if your site is popular.

~~~
JohnFen
True, but $5 gets you quite a lot of traffic. If your site becomes popular,
you can usually upgrade to a $20/mo plan that will be enough for most sites.
If your site is a runaway hit, of course, then the economics are entirely
different.

------
mcv
> _" Citizen-users need to hold websites more accountable. When was the last
> time a website asked what privacy policy you would like applied to you? My
> guess is never."_

Wrong guess. This happens multiple times per day, thanks to the GDPR
legislation in the EU. Annoying, but also correct. I take great effort to
disable everything I don't like (ad tracking in particular), and like the
article says I should:

> _" You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy
> and reject websites that don’t meet your standards."_

There are increasingly websites I refuse to use because they don't work in a
way I consider acceptable.

Some major websites are surprisingly broken. Twitter on Firefox on Android,
for example, is notoriously bad.

~~~
masswerk
Regarding GDPR, this is true for the EU, but the article was published in the
LA Times, though…

It would be nice, if those properties, which can be applied globally, were
already integrated in the browser as a preferences setting (and enforced by
law). Meaning, privacy concerns must become part of the protocol. (What about
some kind of 451 response by the browser?)

~~~
mcv
I would certainly prefer to have my browser handle my GDPR preferences and not
have to worry about all these popups.

------
yawz
_> ethical, open, trusted, free, shared_

Yes, but these concepts were not nearly as overloaded as now. I wasn't around
for the 60s or 70s, but I know the days where the only browser was Mosaic
(early-to-mid 90s). Even at that time, nobody used the term "ethical" or
"open" the way that we use it now. It would be a mistake (and hindsight bias)
to look back and draw strong parallels.

------
new_here
Is it just me or does this page not scroll in Firefox?

~~~
_Microft
Can confirm, does not scroll with Firefox 70 (it has add-ons like uBlock
Origin and Ghostery).

Reader mode works fine.

~~~
seanalltogether
same, thanks for the tip about reader mode, i always forget about that.

~~~
_Microft
In case that Firefox does not offer the icon to open reader mode for a page,
you can visit it in reader mode by manually prepending _about:reader?url=_ to
the URL.

------
newsgremlin
The internet came at us too hard and too fast. We have not had time to
determine what are the pitfalls we've already falling into and how to get out
of them, to name a few; addiction, anxiety, FOMO, jobs market, specialist
skills, internet personalities, fake news, data gathering, manipulation,
privacy, security, peoples rights, ownership.

------
aiyodev
> You've reached your monthly free article limit.

Ironic.

------
youdontknowtho
"Hey, a long time ago, when the only people that used it were just like me,
things were really pleasant."

There is a lot of conflict in the world. As the pool of people on the network
grows and changes they will bring conflict with them into this arena. It's a
kind of naivete that sees the homogenous origin of the network as a better
time.

------
trumbitta2
"This means websites should provide a privacy policy customized to you,
something they should be able to do since they already customize the ads you
see."

No, thanks, I just want it to work.

"Websites should also be required to take responsibility for any violations
and abuses of privacy that result from their services."

Yes, please.

------
SamPatt
"We should pressure government officials and entities to more zealously
monitor and adjudicate such internet abuses as cyberattacks, data breaches and
piracy."

Considering governments are the main perpetrators of internet abuses, this
does not seem like a good idea.

------
lazyjones
This is another good example for a broader issue we're noticing lately: we've
been creating enabling technology and liberal laws, supporting migration,
tolerating religions as well as various modern ideologies and (late) in the
process we suddenly realized that our central assumption, that all people are
sufficiently smart, educated, willing to participate in our society as
positive forces, was completely wrong. So we're now beginning to shut down
liberal policies, least harmful ones first - but it's a) wrong and b) too late
anyway. We need closed, selective communities rather than inclusive,
totalitarian ones - online and "offline".

------
hsnewman
Rather than commenting on my experience with the internet, shouldn't the
discussion be about one of the inventors of it stating that it's gone "so
wrong"?

------
duke360
Strongly agree with the idea that nowadays internet is become very bad. But i
strongly disagree with the idea that governments should do something.

Politicians usually doesn't have enough technical background to do anything
useful here. They do very little in the "real" world to make it a better place
to live, why they should succeed in the "virtual" one?

Internet user should take care of internet with new trust mechanisms,
Operative systems should help users taking care of their data. People should
return nice and polite.

Netiquette (the hard one of the early '90) should be applied and respected.

------
ycombonator
Internet is the plumbing that powers everything from www, telecommunications
etc. I think he is throwing the baby with the bath water.

------
etxm
I’m pretty sure the Internet is The Great Filter.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/qpLlf](http://archive.is/qpLlf)

------
Grumbledour
I wonder if it is the internet that has changed or the world around it. No
doubt this is hard to entangle, because in the last decades one begat the
other.

Sure, today large corporations rule the net and build silos and politicians
try to silence free discourse, often at the formers behest, but this is also
happening outside of the net and especially we, the technical elite who create
software for the net seem to have shifted from "Here is my page about stuff I
like" to "Here is my portfolio which I hope to monetize somehow soon".

So has capitalism just eaten the net, or is it eating the world? But at the
same time, isn't it up to us, to change the net to what we want it to be?
Sure, our parents will stay on Facebook, but that doesn't mean we can not have
quirky websites, distributed systems and interlinked webs of discussions and
pages on specific topics.

And while one might argue, that the net is now bigger than us and this will
change nothing, we have traditionally been the driver for innovation and
trends in this space. Facebook and Google are what they are, because we
evangelized them for years to all our non techy friends. So could this not
happen again over time when we tell people how easy it is to setup your own
webpage or why it's a good idea to join a federated service?

I think we need to be the change we want to see.

------
GnarfGnarf
"All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end." (Thoreau)

------
beat
Someone should tell the author of this article about Alfred Nobel.

------
austincheney
All the problems mentioned in that article can be distilled down to two words:

* _anonymous_

* _broadcast_

If either of those words is eliminated from the technology all of the spoken
problems immediately die, and thus new never imagined problems will take their
place.

~~~
raxxorrax
Why would you think that?

~~~
austincheney
I think that because I read the article. Secondly, I have worked as a software
developer, security analyst, and network operations chief.

------
atemerev
We have built the Internet open, neutral and free for all. Governments all
over the world are now censoring and abusing it. Out solution? Let’s give even
more power to governments!

What a politically motivated piece of writing.

------
tnolet
“Nostalgia ain’t the way it used to be”

------
elwell
Ironically can't read the article because of the paywall.

------
chronotis
I still remember the moment I hit the Yahoo! home page and saw a banner ad for
the first time, and said to myself, "here they come." I didn't project out to
surveillance capitalism though, was still a bit too young for such thoughts.

------
CrackerNews
Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley is a good read on this topic.

------
denton-scratch
The number of people here who dislike the post surprised me. Maybe it's a
generational thing - people who've grown-up with a commercial internet
probably think of it as a huge benefit; people who started using it before
that are more sensitive to the way it has been warped.

I encountered the internet in about 1985, while I was working for Olivetti,
who had a batch feed from the UK AT&T headquarters, across the Thames. I
connected from home in my spare time via a UK geek forum called CIX. I
connected using a 1,400 baud acoustic coupler (they still have some in
museums). It was necessarily text-only, and was populated mainly by
programmers (back then we didn't call ourselves "systems engineers"), pilots,
D&D enthusiasts, and a mishmash of non-normies, e.g. furries, whom appreciated
anonymity.

I could have used it to send email to relatives, but my relatives didn't have
a connection. There were no browsers - there was gopher. It was largely
person-to-person; I got involved in Usenet, which used servers, but
importantly they were highly distributed, and mostly run from bedrooms. When
browsers finally arrived there was no <img> tag. The <img> tag, combined with
the ending of the ban on commercial use of the network, changed everything.
Spam arrived, and never went away. Now most traffic is to or from a server
(back in the day we called them "mainframes", and they were huge, and
incredibly expensive to buy and run). Nobody put a mainframe on the internet,
because you'd never recoup the outlay.

I can certainly see how the internet conferred great benefits; here I sit,
after all, posting a message to a website called Hacker News. It has brought
democratisation, in the sense that you no longer have to belong to a clique of
tech nerds to use it.

But widespread network abuse has brought a wave of balkanisation that is still
growing; that threatens the very principles on which the internet was built
(anyone can communicate with anyone, no "special" hosts, etc.)

I don't really see the benefits of being able to order stuff from a website
and have it delivered to your door; sure, it's quicker than sending a
messenger-boy to the merchant, but that quickness is just an encouragement to
impulsive purchases, which is really just a benefit to the merchant. (Of
course, only today I took delivery of an online order). For most needs, it not
unreasonable to take your time or plan ahead.

With respect to the "cars" analogy (which I choose to twist into "trucks"),
the weight of traffic has now become just too great. Set aside arguments about
global warming; I have a common lung condition (COPD). I notice the stink of a
diesel vehicle that drove down the street I'm standing on a full 2 minutes
after it passed (i.e. it's an almost continuous problem for me). I am
considering moving home (which I don't want to do), but where would I move?
Even small villages around here are no more than 500yds from some 6-lane
bypass. The top of a mountain in some place like Switzerland?

Full decarbonisation of road traffic is at least 20 years away. And even then,
they have to be charged somehow - um, power stations also run on carbon.
Fusion is still at least 2 decades away.

OK, so with much fewer cars and trucks, we'd have to find another way to move
stuff around; gee-gees seems a solution. Of course horses belch methane and
cover the roads in shit; but at least you can compost the shit, to get "good
stuff". And we'd need lots more of them than we needed in 1900; there are a
lot more people.

I part-own a car, with my wife; I hardly ever drive, I'm a cyclist. I don't
travel much. Being much more local - shop locally, live near your work, that
kind of thing - might help a bit. But really I don't have solutions to either
the internet's problems or the traffic problems. Having less people is really
my best shot.

------
zackmorris
Nice headline, not sure about its conclusions. What went wrong (among many
things) IMHO:

* IP->UDP+TCP->HTTP->HTTPS should have been IP->UDP->TCP->HTTP->Skype/Tor/IPFS/Universal-performant-P2P-encryption->HTTPS

* NAT, UPNP and other informal/non-scalable enterprise solutions had no place on the web because they made low-latency P2P communication nearly impossible to implement, so relegated most users to being second-class netizens

* Software patents ruined JPEG, GIF, streaming, file compression and so many other ubiquitous technologies by contaminating protocols with restrictive licensing or DRM, which severely limited use cases and tended towards consumption rather than production, which also relegated most users to being second-class netizens and set us up for:

* Declarative and data-driven innovations like HTTP and HTML regressing back to hand-rolled imperative solutions running natively on mobile devices, which opened the door to:

* Private companies being the gate keepers of which applications and online tools are allowed in app stores

* Free and open online communities funded by advertising being marginalized by greed from ad agencies (including Google) to the point where customer acquisition costs usually exceeded their lifetime value, which prevented most web businesses from being scalable. Which led us to:

* Walled gardens which use surveillance (rather than ads) to extract value from users and sell it, which led us to:

* Extreme wealth inequality where a select few individuals and organizations picked winners and losers by deciding which startup ideas got funding (arguably the majority of startup IPOs today revolve around zero sum games, disrupting key infrastructure companies that employ millions of people, and providing services or service industries which solve pain points instead of providing real innovations in sustenance/basic needs/standard of living)

* Entrenchment of internet service provider duopolies in almost all cities while simultaneously banning municipal wifi via bribery/lobbying

* Filtering of the service/gig economy through unelected referees like Yelp and ad/payment processors like Google/PayPal being able to starve income streams arbitrarily

* Monopolization of almost all publishing/broadcasting, starting with the AOL-Time Warner merger, creeping slowly through canned radio/the loss of DJs/nearly all radio subsidiaries being owned by a single broadcaster like Cumulous, while simultaneously eliminating most independent newspaper journalism by consolidating papers under umbrellas like News Corp/Fox, and culminating with expensive a la carte streaming services grabbing any remaining eyeballs so that travesties like Sesame Street moving from PBS to HBO Max are unsurprising anymore

* Monopolization of almost all online commerce under single entities like Amazon so that if products aren’t blessed by a prime designation, sales fall by orders of magnitude, which led us to:

* Wall street taking priority over main street, rainmakers picking our elected officials and populism being coopted by Stockholm syndrome so the masses clamor for it

I added that last one to illustrate why the loss of the free and open internet
can be detrimental to society.

------
auiya
Capitalism, got it.

------
Ygg2
I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams' quote from Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy

    
    
        Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing 
        all barriers to communication between different races and 
        cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else
        in the history of creation.

~~~
thinkingemote
The huge ironic joke that made Adams a good writer was that the legend of the
Tower of Babel was about nations coming together with a common language (which
got up to haughty stuff)

~~~
unityByFreedom
So, he was poking fun at the notion of a common language causing chaos (as in
the Tower of Babel), right?

------
paulpauper
arpanet was not really the precursor to the internet, rather the precursor to
email. Big distinction. Because the www is graphic rather than text based.

------
angel_j
Nobody invented the internet. It was only a matter of time before computers
sent messages over far distances, like phones had already done. The internet
isn't broken. There are millions of Internets just like the one the author
laments losing, only they are for other people. The mainstream web is what has
people down, because it's a reflection of the mainstream, which has long been
foul. The problem there is using mainstream internet instead of using 50 year
old technology to create your own networks.

------
foolfoolz
I don’t agree the internet had “ethical roots.” Drugs were sold on the
internet since the 80s. And the whole thing was funded in the name of warfare.
Also the idealized notion that the internet allows for more extremism, as if
the thoughts people express online would not be possible in the brains of
these people had they stayed offline, make no sense.

I think the article is correct to assume the internet will become more
balkanized and countries once they gain the ability to will control their
internet very tightly

~~~
Merrill
A difference is that the "unacceptable" opinions people once expressed to
their friends in the neighborhood bar can now be broadcast over the internet
to a wider audience.

The Intenet is only one piece though. The other piece is how digital
technology makes the production of media cheap and ubiquitous. This breaks the
monopoly of media organizations on production, just as the internet and hosted
web services break the monopoly on distribution.

------
rinchik
It feels like author is depressed. It's a bit sad to read. He manages to pull
so much negativity out of the things that are generally have a net-positive
impact, things that drive the progress, that are progress.

Disappointing article. I don't need this negativity in my life.

~~~
pron
Almost every big positive change in society is a result of people feeling
negative about the status quo.

This reminds me of Steven Pinker who goes around saying, please stop whining;
some/many/most/all things are better than they used to be! while somehow
neglecting the fact that to the degree things are better, they usually are
_because_ people didn't stop whining.

~~~
schnable
I think Pinker's point is that many of the people whining are trying to "fix"
things by changing the very things that got us here in the first place -- much
of which was luck, or success after many failures, not just people whining.

