
The Open Web Is Dying - perezbox
https://perezbox.com/2020/04/the-open-web-is-dying/
======
mmaunder
Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly? Then microsoft, then
google?

Or ICQ, then AIM and MSN messenger, then various, culminating in a WhatsApp
owning IM.

Or MySpace’s social media monopoly being replaced by Facebook?

Yeah privacy is important. Has been since long before we were railing against
the Clipper chip in the 90s.

Yeah companies have been grabbing data for a while. And it predates the web
back to direct marketers and before.

Walled gardens and vendor lock-in are nothing new. The publishing platforms of
today are doing exactly what AOL was doing over 20 years ago.

Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open
source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything
they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC,
with total portability.

If you use one of the many platforms that want to lock you in and eat all your
data, that’s your choice. But you don’t have to. Is it that the open minded
consumer is dying?

~~~
nine_k
Open-minded or not, people want to communicate to other people, like their
friends. So they join networks which their friends have joined. This naturally
results in a single, winner-takes-all network.

That network can be federated, of course! Look how interoperable email or
phone networks are. Too bad they are mostly a few behemoths that have to
interoperate because they cannot eat each other, for market and legal reasons.

A federated network is going to always be less feature-rich, slower, and more
hassle to deal with; Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good text about that.

So, unless users make a constant, _conscious effort_ to stay on a federated
network, outside the luring walled gardens, the walled gardens win. And most
people don't even think about all the privacy implications and stuff, they
just want to share cat photos with friends.

~~~
api
> Look how interoperable email or phone networks are.

You are missing a major issue here: spam. E-mail and phone calls are riddled
with spam precisely because these are at least somewhat open systems.

E-mail is unusable without running it through a ton of spam filters or (more
commonly) letting someone else with a larger data set do that for you.

Phone calls are in some ways even worse. I no longer answer unidentified
calls, period, and I keep my phone on vibrate at all times. Any important
calls must be scheduled. I get 2-4 robocalls _per day_. I'm tempted to change
my number but I've heard it doesn't matter.

Spam is a huge reason walled gardens win. Anything open gets abused to death.

Another example is closed OSes like iOS. Consumers love iOS because you almost
never see malware. Open OSes easily acquire malware if the user is not tech-
savvy (and even sometimes if they are), and finding software outside a walled
garden is an exercise in picking your way through a minefield. Have you tried
to search for a Windows app on the open web recently?

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _E-mail is unusable without running it through a ton of spam filters or
> (more commonly) letting someone else with a larger data set do that for
> you._

For someone who can't imagine that email may sometimes come from people who
doesn't have their best interest at heart, sure.

Me, I receive 5-15 spam emails a day, which are filtered only by my local mail
client, with some false negative, and extremely rare false positives (I
spotted one in several years, and I _always_ look through my spam folder).

Despite my lack of Google grade filters, I can use email just fine.

~~~
api
You must be rigorous about not posting your address anywhere. I get up to a
100-200 per day.

~~~
kyuudou
I still use hushmail for "throwaway" type emails where I have to sign up for
something I'm pretty sure will be used as an email marketing platform. Then if
one alias gets compromised I just delete it. hushmail has decent anti-spam
measures also. I wouldn't trust it to send that really important email for
Snowden only but it works great for basically unlimited email aliases. Then I
can also see more easily who's probably selling off their address list and
stop using their product.

------
sjroot
> In its simplest form, it will require a user to input their health
> information into their phones, then health organizations can build apps to
> consume that data. Then, using bluetooth technology, they will be able to
> analyze a users behaviors and whom they have come into contact with.
> Building a web of social behavior information.

I think this paragraph, particularly the last sentence, is misleading. Apple
and Google are working to implement this at the operating system level in a
way that does not share any information about you at all, with anyone [1].

If you want to have technologists read this article and get past that point
without a huge grain of salt, consider reviewing the specs and revising that
description to be a little more correct.

1\.
[https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing](https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing)

~~~
themodelplumber
I agree. And that's just one example from the article that seems to play into
what amounts to a vigorous pitch of various dark, yet still subjective,
perceptions. We just don't know the future, and we have a LOT of really
talented, creative people working on it right now, and most of those people
work within not just one, but a variety of social frameworks that encourage or
enforce ethically commendable behavior.

I also personally love it when authors / technologists / etc. put in the work
to describe the tools needed to 1) put the problem into perspective and 2)
create around it. Either bringing the _spirit_ forward if it's a difficult
technology-arena problem, or bringing the _technology_ forward if it's a
difficult social-arena problem.

~~~
lancesells
The article also has sharing buttons to the "closed" web most likely providing
some company with information. This automatically had me question the article.

~~~
perezbox
Those sharing links don't go to any company, they simply integrate with
platforms to facilitate sharing. It's one of the few tools available to
disseminate. I find it odd that sharing links made you question the article. I
would personally focus on the content of the article, not the ability to share
content.

~~~
lancesells
It might be odd but presentation does make a difference for me. Sharing
buttons make me think this is content marketing of some kind.

------
rv-de
I wonder if it was possible to establish a para-web. It should be designed to
work with very low bandwidth and have a mashable infrastructure - like based
on smartphones, rpis, generally cheap and buildable by competent independent
folks.

The appeal of the low bandwidth - which should be enforced by design - would
be a very text-based communication which would attract user-profiles similar
to those prevalent during the early days of the internet.

This would also prevent/discourage abuse for exchanging c/p or movie
torrenting.

Also the mashability would make the network resilient against infrastructure
breakdowns, government censorship and corporate copyright abuse.

By keeping the specs open all sorts of interfaces could be created by so-
inclined users. Amateur radio people might use that network for hops and
interface it via antennas. Utilizing electric infrastructure might be
possible. Bluetooth repeater. Simplex where necessary and duplex where
possible.

I'm not really competent in this area at all. But it seems doable to me if
there are enough people dedicating to it.

\---

I'm very privacy conscious but I can see how society perceives the internet no
longer as something compatible with the values of the open web but instead as
infrastructure which requires protection and regulation. Yes, I think the gov
should have the right to execute search warrants (assuming the we're talking
about democratic processes at play) and read through letters and documents.
And disk content, mails, chat protocols are just that - only digital. But
every power needs a balancing antagonizing power. And with surveillance
getting more and more capable I fear this is going to get progressively
difficult to do on the conventional internet.

~~~
smitty1e
As a technical matter, the 1s and 0s can be made to do all manner of things,
so: sure.

TFA's point, to summarize radically, is that the individual and the society
remain in tension. Society tends to crush the individual.

But I'm more sanguine. I submit that humanity is a saturated, agitated
solution with societies precipitating and breaking up continually.

What's to be feared is the loss of agitation, but that's beyond our scope, so
do your best where you're situated.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _As a technical matter, the 1s and 0s can be made to do all manner of
> things, so: sure._

To make it explicit in context of:

>> _This would also prevent /discourage abuse for exchanging c/p or movie
torrenting._

Usenet is a system very similar to e-mail in terms of data exchange format;
both are textual and originally intended to exchange plaintext. Both developed
convenient forms of encoding arbitrary binary data. Today, Usenet is in fact
used for piracy, and I wouldn't be surprised if c/p was present on some groups
too.

~~~
smitty1e
More generally: technology is mechanism; evil is agency.

Doubtless someone can name the fallacy surrounding efforts to produce a
closed-form technical solution to matters of agency.

Minimize? Sure. But as long as Bad Actor can fog a mirror, the potential for
evil is present.

------
t0ughcritic
We need to bring back RSS which will improve discoverability of self hosted
content. London real and many youtubers have had content removed, all
political stuff is demonetized as well and we mobile developers go to sleep
praying our apps won’t be spontaneously removed when we wake because an under
paid intern found a violation of some kind to meet their quota to fit the
curve.

consumer web is done, its owned by private companies, which control
discoverability (google ads let’s say) then monetization (google ads) the
Platform itself (android which gains data), membership and enforcement (google
dev account) the government is too scared to break up google or amazon. user
acquisition costs will continue to go up and google as an example for most
queries shows 50% ads and 50% organic. Not to mention the word ‘ads’ has no
background now and is so small that most people don’t notice that it’s an ad.
Well played. Pay to play or get out. Monoply doesn’t exist the product is free
to use for consumers so consumer isn’t being ripped off. Government is
powerless in this sense but the FTC can help with things like you can’t
advertise your own properties in results, you need to provide small business a
chance (so 80% organic results required), Ads need to be labeled with
contrasting colors, for each large company whose organic result shows provide
a chance for a small company to show as well 5:1 ratio. Otherwise most small
businesses are done. Google is the yellowpages, you live or die by it if you
are a small business.

~~~
perezbox
> "We need to bring back RSS which will improve discoverability of self hosted
> content."

I couldn't agree more. It's really tough to write and share on your own
platforms because exposure and dissemination is not what it used to be.

> consumer web is done, its owned by private companies, which control
> discoverability (google ads let’s say) then monetization (google ads) the
> Platform itself (android which gains data), membership and enforcement
> (google dev account)

I sadly, also, agree with this. This is another article I plan to write.

------
at_a_remove
I mean, you can quibble at the examples, and I think the article needs more of
them, but it is not ... wholly inaccurate. More examples ought to include the
_Fahrenheit 451_ nature of the situation. Recall that the government didn't
just decide to start burning books one day in that novel. Rather, people began
going into libraries and tearing out pages which offended them. It was a
bottom-up movement.

Now, so much of moderation comes from the users, and a downvote to show that a
comment is inaccurate is _indistinguishable_ from "I do not want people to see
this opinion, even if it is true," and so a great deal of moribund condition
of the Open Web is due to things like manipulation of rankings. Sure, why not
file a false DMCA copyright claim on YouTube? Get that thing you don't like
off the Internet.

I have no ready solutions to offer.

~~~
lowdose
I think more people should contribute instead of just leaching. The economics
for platforms work when only 1% is producing content while the rest is
consuming. This vocal minority is more and more driving every platform to
extremes, the voting doesn't even work on HN people downvote accurate
comments. Downvoting without clarification doesn't happen IRL you have to
express your opinion.

What about for every comment you get the right for one downvote? More comments
from people why they feel the need to downvote, that would clarify a lot more
and could bring new insights to every discussion in general.

------
est
Not only the Open web is dying, the Intranet web is also dying

[https://blog.chromium.org/2019/10/no-more-mixed-messages-
abo...](https://blog.chromium.org/2019/10/no-more-mixed-messages-about-
https.html)

Since Chrome v80 they forced <video> <img> content to switch to HTTPS, if the
page itself is served https. Is it really a good idea? So for Intranet URLs
with customize TLDs, you have exactly three choices:

1\. Turn off the upgrade-insecure-requests or CSP crap in browser config
completely. This voids all the security features browser-wide.

2\. Install a company wide root cert. Yeah because enabling the company to
MITM all TLS traffic is more secure than streaming videos over http in a
company LAN.

3\. Train the end-users to click "trust certs with invalid Common Name".
That's will teach them.

Did I miss something here? What kind of Web do we live in these days?

~~~
sjy
Can’t you just use a Let’s Encrypt cert? The domain needs to be publicly
resolvable, but it doesn’t have to resolve to the same IP returned by your
internal DNS, and you can use wildcard certificates if you don’t want your
internal subdomains to be publicly resolvable at all.

~~~
est
> The domain needs to be publicly resolvable

The company TLD was purposely built to hide behind the LAN. Been publicly
resolvable is a huge a security risk. Public recursive resolvers will log
where and when a user visits an internal site.

~~~
hedora
Why not have the public resolver resolve everything to a “Your DNS is
misconfigured; contact IT” static page?

------
cletus
I personally find "the open web is dying" to be a tired cliche at this point
("X is dying" in general is a trope). In the author's defense he even calls
the term "overused" but I find these definitions of what the open web actually
is to be unsatisfactory at best.

Regarding censorship, there will always be corner cases where reasonable
people can disagree or even where most people can agree a decision is wrong.
But what's the alternative? It's certainly not a free-for-all as that quickly
devolves into a cesspit of pirated content, porn and illegal content.

The value in a property like Youtube is that it is somewhat curated and not
the Wild West. That's why users go there and there's no right for anyone to be
hosted on and distributed by Youtube. Nor should there be. People may want a
distributed or even federated alternative to Youtube and I know you should say
it's never going to happen but... it's never going to happen. It's a naive
pipe dream.

Now the biggest problem I have with this:

> ... think we can all agree that this level of invasion of privacy should
> never be tolerated.

Nope. No sale. If anything I'd say one of the biggest problems of the post-WW2
era is the rise in irresponsible, unfettered, unaccountable individualism to
the point that asserting one's "rights" is a completely selfish and short-
sighted way is like a badge of honour. Maybe it's part of the rise of anti-
intellectualism? I don't know.

I'll say it: there exist situations where the public interest overrides
personal interests. Shocking I know. In Australia we now have a government-
issued app for contact tracing (edsentially). It's entirely opt-in and has had
a ton of downloads (>1M IIRC).

Not every surface is a slippery slope.

Effective contact tracing is.a necessary precondition to easing pandemic-
related restrictions and even with that we'll still be stuck with social
distancing for awhile.

I actually think using that device almost all of us carry everywhere (ie a
smartphone) with a Bluetooth receiver to achieve better contact-tracing is a
genius idea.

And I really don't see what any of it has to do with the "open web".

~~~
DeathArrow
>But what's the alternative? It's certainly not a free-for-all as that quickly
devolves into a cesspit of pirated content, porn and illegal content.

It's not for monopolistic corporations to take actions about illegal
activities but for law enforcement agencies.

Banning some video on YouTube because you disagree with it is just not right.

If they continue on that line, they will lose customers.

> If anything I'd say one of the biggest problems of the post-WW2 era is the
> rise in irresponsible, unfettered, unaccountable individualism to the point
> that asserting one's "rights" is a completely selfish and short-sighted way
> is like a badge of honour.

What individualism has to do with protecting people's freedom and refusing
mass surveillance and censorship?

------
threeseed
> it’s imperative that we remove our political and personal biases and focus
> on the technology

And then proceeds to use his political and personal bias to write a blog
article that actually ignores the technology entirely.

1) Apple and Google should be commended for their approach to contact-tracing.
It is opt-in, secure, private and does not provide data to governments or
third parties despite a lot of pressure.

2) It is illogical to suggest that Apple or Google could use contract-tracing
to invade your privacy. They own the OS. They can do whatever they like and as
users we would never know about it. If they wanted to do this they would've
done it a decade ago and we likely would've found evidence a decade ago.

3) Spreading FUD about this contact-tracing initiative will literally result
in more deaths. I really wish people would be mindful of this and just be
careful about what they post.

~~~
anon102010
Apple's and Google's efforts are for more privacy preserving than ANY
goverment efforts would ever be.

Speaking as someone who has worked with govt.

Seriously, this care around privacy DOES NOT EXIST with govt agencies.

~~~
holler
ever heard of a thing called HIPPA?

~~~
cjslep
Yes. HIPAA provides the government's law enforcement a large amount of
conditions under which they are able to acquire an individual's medical
records without a warrant.

See 45 C.F.R. § 164.512(f).

Furthermore, the ACLU's position is that HIPAA does not do a good job
protecting people's privacy from the government and may be a violation of the
people's 4th amendment rights. Unfortunately, it hasn't really been challenged
Constitutionally to date, so we don't know.

What we do know is that HIPAA is probably not a good example to "dunk on"
someone else, due to these concerns.

------
rvz
The "Open Web" had already died the moment Facebook and Google had become
ICAAN members and with Google owning TLDs. The moment you host on AWS, GCP or
Azure, those providers reserve the right to terminate your contract for any
reason, including no reason.

And last but not least, you remember WebAssembly right? Transparency-wise, it
is worse than obfuscated Javascript since now you're loading a binary from
someone else's server, making DRM and closing the web much further and easier,
which is why the FAAMNG companies all have a reason to sit at the W3C round
table.

If you have Mozilla receiving millions from Google for its search engine as
the default on Firefox and Microsoft conceding to Google to build upon using
Edge using Chromium, then we know who really runs the web.

------
bosswipe
This argument makes no sense partly because it has an incorrect and vague
definition of the open web. Whether or not the monopoly platforms adopt your
preferred TOS is not what is killing the open web. It is the existence of the
monopoly platforms themselves that is killing the open web, not their posting
policies. If they had the most liberal posting policy imaginable they would
still be destroying the open web.

~~~
DeathArrow
He implies that mass surveillance and censorship wouldn't be possible with
open web.

~~~
threeseed
I've been on the internet since I had a 2400 baud modem ie. pre-Netscape.

It is far more open now than it has ever been. Anyone can launch their own web
app/site for a few dollars a month. Anyone can affordably build and scale the
next Facebook, Google, Youtube on cloud technologies.

And people are far more free to find platforms where they can say what the
want and do what they want e.g. Tor.

Instead people are more entitled. They deserve for their content to be on the
websites they like. They deserve the huge amounts of traffic that they had no
help in creating. They deserve to be featured in algorithms that ruin the
reputation of the website. They deserve to spread their propaganda.

------
jerome-jh
Make me thinking of the old saying: "First they jailed X, Y, Z and that was
OK. Finally they jailed me". Censorship is an extension of both the search
bubble and closed platforms. Contact tracing is an extension of the wide
spread address book stealing by apps, to which many people (including
intelligent ones) seem to have agreed to.

The open web is dying, sure, but this an agony started 10/15 years ago. It is
certainly still worth writing stories about it.

But still, now the web is browsed by just about anybody and that makes a fair
share of people with low education, no scientific background and mostly
computer illiterate (they typically make no difference between their
computer/smartphone and the internet). Governments just cannot make them
understand even the simplest message about how to behave, e.g. during a
pandemic (assuming said government acts in good faith). And that tends to
rationalize discretionary actions by technologists.

------
platz
The concerns raised in the article about covid19/contact-tracing and
censorship have nothing to do with "the open web".

I feel like the title and/or thesis statement of the article is mislabeled.
The arguments are more specially related to responses to covid19 than anything
to do with "the open web" as a whole.

------
8note
Reading the conclusion and introduction, it's imperative that we don't
consider politics in the technology that we build, but it's also imperative
that we do?

The questions of "should we" or "will my future self will hate me" are both
intensely political.

~~~
perezbox
How are those questions intensely political?

------
aklemm
Help wrest away control from the BigCos. Switch to DDG, self host some stuff,
and get on the IndieWeb and the Fediverse. And while you’re at it, throw some
investment money into projects along these lines.

~~~
pat2man
I think the fact that this is very much possible today disproves the argument
the article is trying to make.

------
mntmoss
I think it helps to consider this a problem of "slow vs fast".

Society has displayed ways of sheltering and hibernating through tulmultuous
times and subsequently developing some kind of response.

Chief among this is the reuse of the old. Of course you can build new quickly;
that's what Andreesen calls for. And it's easy, as these things go: Hand some
money and labor to someone who wants to bark orders and throw their weight
around and they'll get a thing made, like Ozymandias building his monument.
History always provides such people.

But reusing old successfully is the thing you need crafty witches and wizards
for, and they usually only reveal themselves when a dragon shows up and needs
a talking-to.

In this case, the dragon is that tendency to push information towards a model
of legibility by the state and for the populace to in turn aim to be
inscrutable, a back and forth that has occurred throughout history. Sometimes
this shapes spatial life, as with the story of medieval taxation based on the
number of windows in the house. At other times it uses political theory and
precedent to assert rights. Here we have the opportunity to be inscrutable by
a rather direct escape from the norm, simply using some less popular
alternative.

This is a crisis mostly in the sense that we still crave to have a popular,
inclusive, fast-moving discussion while being inscrutable to power, and you
can't square that circle so easily. Rather, you have to look towards gradual
redefinitions of reality and possibility to counter normalization. This is
necessarily a slower process than simple surveillance and seizure.

With respect to the Web, it's clear enough that it was built with holes in it,
and much of the resulting stack was further distorted in turn. Why? Because it
was a new thing - and evolved defenses as it went along.

But now it is an old thing, and as a popularizer of concept has succeeded
wildly. The concept is what we'll probably use, and the specific tech only in
parts.

------
dvt
> How do you put this genie back in the bottle?

You don't. It's over and done with. It started with Microsoft shipping Windows
with Internet Explorer. And it probably ended with Facebook buying Instagram
and WhatsApp.

Long gone are silly, goofy, pointless GeoCities sites, webrings, and phpBB
forums for just about every topic you can think of. I mean, just think about
how ridiculous it is that WikiLeaks has a Facebook page or that Snowden has a
Twitter account. The final nail in that coffin is that a significant portion
of the web is accessed these days via phones: which, by Google or Apple
mandate, are extremely locked down ecosystems. You've still got a couple of
crazy idealists out there like Stallman, but they're far and few in between.

The open web is dead. Long live the open web.

~~~
EGreg
Google and Apple have web browsers, and they can be used to build quite a bit.
Presumably, Apple and Google browsers won't block a website. The Web is
probably the most open and permission-less ecosystem there is, among the
widely deployed ones. And it supports more and more features that let you
replace native apps:

    
    
      Push Notifications (engagement)
      Web Payments (monetization)
      Contact Picker API (virality)
      WebRTC (peer to peer data, files and video)
      ServiceWorkers (caching and more)
      Crypto (peer to peer encryption, auth)
      PWAs (add to home screen)
    

Wordpress has been a smashing success for indie Web 1.0 (with tons of hosts
and their one-click install). We also have Drupal, Joomla etc.

But what about Web 2.0? There has to be a sort of "operating system" of
reusable components the same way that MacOS did buttons and menus and windows.

We have amazing hardware. But we rent our software from Zoom, Facebook,
Telegram. Why? Because it's very hard to replicate everything we've come to
expect from Facebook today, and not in 2004.

Well, there are projects out there on the front lines doing it. Like Inrupt
(née SoLiD) from Tim Berners-Lee. I met most of these guys and teams over the
years. We started before everybody, in 2011, so we have had a bit of a head
start. Nearly 10 years and over $700K spent from our revenues. I'm not proud
of how long it took. But it has been a long slog. But yes, we want our
platform to be the next Wordpress and liberate the Web from Feudalism to a
free market:

[https://github.com/Qbix/Platform](https://github.com/Qbix/Platform)

(Here is the larger vision, not realized yet:
[https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-
Operating-...](https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-
System))

~~~
8jy89hui
I've read most of the paper but I just wanted to clarify something: is the
goal of this to invent modern cross-platform HTML/CSS or am I missing
something?

Similarly, despite the fact that the user's data can be hosted on their own
computer (ex: name service), I find it hard to believe that any major site
hosted with Qbux would not still have sign-in pages and de-anonymize their
users. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the on prem data / distributed
approach?

~~~
EGreg
Yes and no. Qbix and QBUX are the next step in the evolution, but there are
further steps.

1\. Qbix is the operating system (available today)

2\. QBUX is the token (monetizing open source and digital content)

3\. [https://intercoin.org](https://intercoin.org) is the next generation
(launched in 2017, still in early stages)

Let's go through the roadmap. So basically, what Qbix does is gives you
_choice_ of landlord. It replaces the Feudalism on the Web with a free market
(of hosting companies, plugins, etc.) There is no one middleman - not even
Qbix Inc. - that prevents you from selling your software, digital content and
services (hosting, translation, moderation) to communities, who in turn take
their members' money and pay for the services.

Once all this is commoditized, there is competition rather than a monopoly or
cartel of large corporations. I should say that, by and large, all the
problems we see from corporations and governments have to do with a lack of a
real open source alternative. At Qbix we wrote an article a year ago that was
largely like the OP one, but used the events of its time. You could write an
article like this any month of the year btw:

[https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-
chang...](https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-change-the-
world/)

Alright so now we have a choice of landlord, which is capitalism and
competition. That's pretty good, but we can do better. We could replace that
with an autonomous, self-healing, end-to-end encrypted framework that has _no_
user accounts and every infrastructure node just accepts cryptocurrency and
stores stuff. One such system is [http://maidsafe.net/](http://maidsafe.net/)
They are probably the furthest ahead. They started before Qbix, in 2006, and
they are still not done. They are far beyond IPFS in their vision.

We started a spinoff company called Intercoin (that one, I can actually say,
is selling tokens in a regulated presale at
[https://intercoin.org](https://intercoin.org)). The goal is to build a
distributed platform and protocol that is cryptographically secure AND
scalable, unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum which are only secure but not scalable.
It would be used for many applications, including payments, micropayments,
UBI, fundraising, but also things like anonymous _and secure_ voting,
elections and governance. Here is my article in CoinDesk from last month about
the details of that:

[https://www.coindesk.com/in-defense-of-blockchain-
voting](https://www.coindesk.com/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting)

So in the end game, "communities" are simply superconnector users, and any
user can grow and become one. They are no longer privileged by virtue of
operating or paying for the hardware servers. Indeed, every Inter.Activity is
end-to-end encrypted and stored on K nodes that run a consensus about its
state. The Inter.Activity can be a chat, or it can be a coin, or whatever that
evolves over time, and every Inter.Action is M-of-N signed by the current
owners of the Inter.Activity . Some of our early thoughts in 2018 can be seen
here:

[https://qbix.com/blog/2018/04/03/onward-to-qbix-
platform-2-0...](https://qbix.com/blog/2018/04/03/onward-to-qbix-
platform-2-0-serverless/)

By now you can see a lot more of the "finalized" architecture here:
[https://community.intercoin.org/c/technology](https://community.intercoin.org/c/technology)

A lot of what I build is "graduating" from the level of technical programming
and more to do with societal programming... i.e. like the US constitution, it
basically has to be architected to shape the growth of communities in a
positive direction. That is a lot of responsibility. I have been thinking
about these issues for at least since 2012:
[http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114)

This is why we've recently taken on advisors from many different schools of
economics, sociology, etc. to understand how our architectural decisions. Our
company's mission is to _Empower People and Unite Communities_.

PS: If you're an advanced JS + Web developer and you'd like to potentially get
involved, email me at _greg_ @ either one of the domains qbix.com or
intercoin.org ... we could use all the help we can get.

------
aww_dang
The open web is still there. In many ways it is better than ever. People can
still publish what they want. There are just so many more users today than
there were 15 or 20 years ago. Many of them aren't interested in producing or
consuming anything outside of the walled garden. You can blame them if you
think that is productive, but don't mourn the open web.

How much are we really loosing when the most vapid platforms continue
increasing their censorship?

Which is more informative, a 5 minute youtube video with a 2 minute intro
(please like and subscribe, I beg you!) or a book on the topic from libgen?

Please don't confound publishing on the open web with platforms centered on
exploiting consumers' vanity.

------
MaxBarraclough
> Regardless of your political position, or where you stand on the COVID19
> issue, think we can all agree that this level of invasion of privacy should
> never be tolerated.

Nope. That's as political as it gets, and plenty of people won't agree.

Same applies to his case against censorship, which fails to pre-empt the
obvious counterpoint: this misinformation is killing people, by the hundreds
at the very least. [0]

[0] [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/iran-700-dead-
drinkin...](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/iran-700-dead-drinking-
alcohol-cure-coronavirus-200427163529629.html)

------
nurettin
Open web is dying because of opinionated mods? Then it has already died back
in the 90s with forums and IRC. People are going to exert authority on their
platforms whether you like it or not.

------
jillesvangurp
I think the open web always was a fringe thing. It never went away, it's still
there in some form and it's about the same size it always was and mainly
consists of a relatively small group of people taking the effort to
communicate outside mainstream channels. It's just that at some point the rest
of the planet became part of the web and it did not take long for regulators
to notice that. Before that, the open web was all there was. But once the
likes of AOL, MySpace, and eventually Facebook and others dragged in the rest
of the planet it stopped being open pretty quickly.

The challenge for open web proponents has always been compelling the masses to
join their open network. The history of the internet is pretty much other
things happening than what open web proponents advertise. Everybody can have
their own website became everybody has a myspace profile, and later a facebook
profile. You see the same with attempts at creating a decentralized web right
now. Same crowd, same ideals, same level of indifference from everybody else.
It's not dying, but also not on any kind of path of addressing this.

------
jzer0cool
I do not think the open web is dying. It is still open.

There are, however, large (and popular) systems on the open web which might
misuse privacy and instill a form of censorship. This is also part of the open
web. What is dangerous is the open web is being dominated by such large system
and the mass are accustomed to only using such systems. Such system may also
encourage, non-anonymous, or real accounts, where in past, people may have
been "accustomed" to anonymity. Not to say one is better than the other, but
there may be places and at the moment the pendulum seems to be swung. I do
believe there needs to be accountability, for cases like defamation. At same
time, being free to be both anonymous or not both have their places.

On Censorship: Of course there is both sides to this. I think here a more
appropriate method can be to "indicate", or inform the content may be
questionable, for example, with an indicated banner or some other form. Rather
than outright censor the content like a modern version of Fahrenheit 451.

------
lovetocode
I agree with the authors intended argument however, this is more proof that
social media is being weaponized as a propaganda machine whilst using the
guise of being a tool for social good and philanthropy. It can still be that
but the censorship on these platforms make them far less credible. The web is
still very much open.

------
mellow2020
> The most practical approach is a decentralized system that protects the web

Oh, I know: (continuing and expanding of) social and technical efforts to make
running their own websites and connecting them with websites of their friends
easier for the average user.

By "social" I mean: it's desirable, it's a good idea, so let's stick to that
and simply keep our "prognosis" of how it's all too late, or how people don't
want that, to ourselves. They should want it, that's the point. How to achieve
it is another thing, that's where wide debate is necessary, but _that_
computing should empower people rather than make them less free -- that should
be a baseline demand that doesn't adapt to reality, but seeks to adapt reality
to itself.

------
rektide
And here's Flutter, with CanvasKit, to try to turn the web into a dumb
platform for developers to push pixels into people's faces.

The web doesn't deserve any of this. It- we- can be so much better. Hypertext
Markup Language has so much potential. But we squander it.

~~~
pjmlp
Thanks to WebAssembly plenty of people are having a go at it.

Flash was attractive to digital agencies because of the tooling that the Web
is yet to provide.

Now with the browser being just yet another general purpose VM, the revenge of
plugins was bound to happen.

------
vixen99
YouTube's unstated assumption is that people in general are not smart enough
to deal with unsubstantiated claims. Offensive though it may sound, that's
true else the world would have erupted in laughter if someone suggested
injecting disinfectant in response to a disease.

Perez criticizes the objection to statements of the type 'take vitamin C; take
turmeric, we’ll cure you’. But 'cure' is the problem since it's
unsubstantiated. There are many peer-reviewed papers offering excellent
reasons based on biochemical evidence, for taking, in some measure, vitamin C
and turmeric (and other phytochemicals). But use of the word 'cure' is a step
too far.

------
carapace
> Society as a whole is not ready for that level of insight.

Too bad. We invented the transistor. What are you gonna do?

> The fact is, as humans, we are susceptible to our irrational, and sometimes,
> ignorant beliefs.

Right, and that's the problem, not machines that can trace viral infections in
near-real-time. _Those_ are going to be the _only way_ to return to some
semblence of normal.

We are _already_ being tracked. Your phone tells "them" where you are at all
times, and you're fine with it as long as they're just using it to bombard you
with ads, but God forbid "they" use it to save you from the covad.

What am I missing here?

------
troquerre
Agree with the premise of the article. That's why I'm excited about Handshake
([https://handshake.org](https://handshake.org)), it's an experimental new
protocol that's trying to shift the root of trust of DNS from CAs to a
distributed blockchain. Outside of creating a more secure root for TLS, it
allows anyone to own their domain name and makes it very difficult to block
access from end-users. It's still very much in the early days of adoption but
nextdns.io already supports it which is promising.

------
freeglider
There are two broad statements made here in this post which I am a little bit
suspicious about them: one is, the genesis of the internet was created to be
free. and second is the internet which is controlled by the government stifles
the innovation.

There is weak evidence that the internet is created to be free. By reviewing
the history and the pillars of the networks which were the primitive versions
of the internet, and by tracing the evolution, I see a centralized, controlled
technology. Second, many of the greatests innovation are backed by
governments, especially in war times.

------
parasubvert
This is both right and wrong.

The COVID contact tracing framework from Apple and Google is just a framework
for using background features of the phone. There’s currently a fight with
some governments (UK and France) over whether this will be mandatory or not.
The UK NHS have figured out a way to run low energy Bluetooth background
activity without this framework and are going their own way. This might
actually mark a turning point in relationships with these tech companies: if
Apple/Google insist on enforcing government activities through their
framework, those governments probably will stop being so hands off with
regulations of the various App Stores and phones. We will see.

Stepping back, this is not about mandating apps against user demand, it’s just
that the open web has not kept up with user demand for a richer experience
both client-side (beyond HTML) and server-side (beyond HTTP and closed data).

Really, it’s a longer conversation, but I’d say that the technological and
economic failure of the Semantic Web is largely why there is widespread
server-side centralization (ala Facebook or Twitter), and the failure of the
HTML standards (and innovation!) process has led to the explosion of
JavaScript use as a market blowoff valve, with native apps being the
culmination of this market demand for richer experiences.

The open web is still at the core of all of this: the URL, MIME, HTTP, etc.
are the glue that holds this haphazard global networked device world together.
The open web is not dead. It is stagnant. It’s ASCII, or SCSI, or PCI, or any
number of boring decades old layers buried in our systems.

It’s a matter for someone to decide to find ways to invert the economic
incentives towards centralization back into the decentralization we were
seeing back in the mid-oughts with RSS, Atom, etc. We hit a technological wall
(the semantic web) and didn’t have the investment to climb it. We got a new
type of computer (the smartphone) and couldn't get past HTML’s history of
being a PC-focused UX. So we all jumped onto the easier answers: Facebook and
native mobile apps.

That doesn’t mean it’s the end of history. Some entrepreneur has to figure out
the business and technical models to get decentralization, open data, and rich
hypermedia back as a priority.

~~~
perezbox
You make very good points here. Thanks

------
IAmEveryone
Yeah, you can't start by saying your personal obsession with misunderstanding
this contact tracing scheme is more important than the worst crisis of both
security and prosperity most people have witnessed in their lifetime...

...and then, in the very next paragraph, disown that comparison you just made
to insulate yourself from any criticism.

Adding that disclaimer is tantamount to acknowledging that this is indeed a
political question. In doing so, the author has preemptively refuted his own
attempt in the next paragraph to claim that it is preferable to argue this
issue on purely technological grounds.

This is a public health crisis that is killing hundreds of thousands of people
and setting every economy on the planet back by maybe 20% to 30%, or the
equivalent of close to a decade of typical growth, at least for the richer
countries. " _Politics_ " isn't a dirty word here: it's how societies try to
chart some sort of sensible path through this. Because balancing competing
objectives is the essence of politics, anyone single-mindedly focussed on just
health, or just prosperity, or just "the open web" is guaranteed to be
disappointed by what will happen, and will become even more cynical and prone
to disparage the idea of "politics" in this manner.

But it is so blatantly obviously _impossible_ to ignore these issues that even
he making that argument failed to pull it off even before he got started.

Specific to this article, I can confidently predict that "politics" will
matter to it in a very practical sense, in that the political process is going
to completely ignore it.

I mean, I kind of understand privacy concerns, even though I find them
somewhat unwarranted, considering the rather elaborate scheme Apple and Google
came up with to preempt them. And I do, in principle, care about the "open
web".

But even after reading this article, I haven't the foggiest idea what this
contact tracing scheme has to do with the "open web".

Last and definitely least: a similar, but lesser, point:

    
    
        Signing/crediting your pull-quotes 
        with your own name is cringy as hell.
    
                              --IAmEveryone

------
MisterTea
This can only be written by someone who thinks that "the web" means commercial
websites. Nope, it's still open. You just forgot you can DiY and let the
commercial companies fool you into thinking that you needed them to web. You
don't. I can setup a server at home and connect to it from my phone be it ssh,
9p, or http just fine.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e35AQK014tI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e35AQK014tI)
:-)

~~~
II2II
I suspect that a large part of the problem are our portals to the web.

The major search engines have a bias towards large commercial sites, likewise
for the articles linked to by major news outlets and the recommendations made
on social networking sites. There are likely good reasons for this. Links to
commercial sites or commercially hosted sites are more reliable and the
content being more generic, thus applicable to a larger audience.

None of that means the open web, or open internet, does not exist. It simply
means that it is incredibly difficult to discover.

------
KCUOJJQJ
After the contact tracing updates, there will be more unGoogled android
devices and unGoogled ROMs from the manufacturers or from /e/ etc. There will
be a chance for new app stores. Apple will sell fewer devices.

I've watched a lot of good videos about C on YouTube. According to one of the
channels one of their older videos had been deleted. I think that's not too
serious. YouTube isn't a lost cause at all!

------
kazinator
The open web is dying precisely because, like the author's definition says, it
has to be "managed by its users", and that's (1) work that (2) requires
specialized skills and is (3) uncompensated.

Everyone wants just to _use_ , and let someone else manage the web. That
situation keeps cranking out opportunities for closing the web.

------
ngcc_hk
Open web -- try that for 1/5 humanity then what is open web?

The bigger picture is some countries especially one can come out but you
cannot go in. If that works (for them), why anyone not work out that there
should be a country based Internet. It is already working like this a bit.

------
olliej
Wow yet another 100% inaccurate hot take on the contact tracing system. "you
will be required to enter your health information" \- nope "it will be sent to
servers" \- nope.

Just getting that far told me that reading this was a waste of time.

~~~
perezbox
How will it work?

~~~
olliej
Have you actually read any of the descriptions of how it works? Health data is
not transmitted. No information ever leaves the device, with the sole
exception of when you choose to notify other that you tested positive. That
uploads enough material for all other users to determine if they were ever in
the vicinity of your device - but no other information. The _only_ thing that
can be determined is whether at some point they were in the vicinity of a
device that subsequently reported testing positive.

------
leotravis10
It has been dying since 2014. André Staltz: [https://staltz.com/the-web-began-
dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...](https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-
in-2014-heres-how.html)

------
renewiltord
No, it's fine. The whole thing is opt-in, my dude. That's enough to okay it. I
can get riled up for compulsory location tracing but:

A. No one is going to use this opt-in shite

B. I don't care if I can just not care

------
mbgerring
I feel like the ship sailed on this one like 5 years ago at least

------
DeathArrow
I very much hope the author is wrong. I fear he is not.

------
pjmlp
The consumer "Web" started with platforms, AOL, CompuServe, BBS,AmigaNet,...,
it was bound to come back to it sooner or later.

------
throwaway777555
The open web started dying over a decade ago with the dawn of the iPhone and
with the advent of social media. Cheap devices coupled with platforms that use
psychological manipulation to keep people addicted are pretty effective in
drawing an audience.

The platforms also don't generate a profit or operate at a loss YouTube
generated $15 billion last year[1], but Google/Alphabet never disclosed
profitability and has only broken even in previous years[2]. Twitter also took
over a decade before it even reported a profit[3]. These kinds of ventures
would be choked out by competition and by a lack of investors normally. But
monetary profits aren't the goal. It's all about control.

Take Facebook for instance. Over half of the US population has a Facebook
account[4]. Facebook is also known to engage in psychological manipulation of
its audience to determine reactions and behavior[5], even shadowbanning users
and content that it disagrees with[6]. This is a great recipe for broadcasting
whatever message the controllers of these platforms want and for reinforcing
those beliefs with positive messaging. I won't even get into the political
ramifications like with the Cambridge Analytica scandal[7] or that Facebook
advertises using your name to your friends[8].

I'm trying to underline the point that Perez makes in the article. It's
incredibly dangerous to trust these platforms with anything. They disguise
their motives in corporate speak and platitudes while shutting out any
dissenting voices. The solution is to get off of these platforms that stifle
speech and thought. Otherwise, we're doomed to live in Edward Bernays' wet
dream.

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-ad-
revenue-15-billio...](https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-ad-
revenue-15-billion-2019-google-breakout-2020-2) [2]
[https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-
go...](https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-google-any-
money-2015-2) [3] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/technology/twitter-
earnin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/technology/twitter-earnings-
profit.html) [4]
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-
based-on-number-of-facebook-users/) (the US population is 328.2 million) [5]
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-
apologises-psychological-experiments-on-users) [6]
[https://gizmodo.com/facebook-patents-
shadowbanning-183641134...](https://gizmodo.com/facebook-patents-
shadowbanning-1836411346) [7] [https://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-
analytica-a-guide-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-a-
guide-to-the-trump-linked-data-firm-that-harvested-50-million-facebook-
profiles-2018-3) [8]
[https://www.facebook.com/help/214816128640041](https://www.facebook.com/help/214816128640041)

------
normalnorm
> This post is not about politics

This is a strange disclaimer. This post is absolutely about politics, and
there is nothing wrong with that. Politics is not some dirty word. Politics is
about the ideas, values and decisions that govern society. I understand what
the author means, politics as in "Trump this, Biden that". Accepting this
reductive version of what "politics" means is detrimental to us all. We have
been conditioned by click-bait media to not being able to have a civilized
discussion about the things that matter the most.

> we the technologists blah blah blah

"We the technologists" have no agency whatsoever. "We the technologists" are
just middle class workers who will mostly do what it takes to secure
employment, hoping to get a promotion as to be able to buy more toys.

The open web existed as a niche. It did not survive contact with the general
public nor with corporate interests. This is because of a more general state
of affairs, that has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with
technology.

------
threepio
This argument against "the proliferation of platforms like Twitter, Facebook,
Medium, Google and many others" would be more persuasive if the surrounding
page weren't embroidered with share buttons from Twitter, Facebook, and many
others.

~~~
robbintt
You are attempting to use a fallacy called an "Ad Hominem".

[https://www.csus.edu/indiv/g/gaskilld/criticalthinking/six%2...](https://www.csus.edu/indiv/g/gaskilld/criticalthinking/six%20common%20fallacies.htm)

~~~
at_a_remove
If you really care that much about fallacies, you should at least pick the
correct one. In this case, what you were really looking for is "Tu quoque."

Note: I have provided an example by saying this.

~~~
RubenvanE
You're right, but technically tu quogue is a type of ad hominem attack. So OP
used an ad hominem tu quoque fallacy to discredit the author.

Even though this might not be the strongest argument from a purely logic point
of view, it can still be a valid critique on the author.

------
chrisallick
Been dead for some time.

------
oliyoung
It died years ago.

------
drngdds
>What could possibly go wrong if society as a whole can now identify who is
sick? Regardless of your political position, or where you stand on the COVID19
issue, think we can all agree that this level of invasion of privacy should
never be tolerated.

We actually cannot agree on this! I have a strong preference that my loved
ones and I do not die in an unprecedented global pandemic. You can't just
state libertarian principles like this as a fact and expect everyone to
automatically agree with you.

------
EGreg
I disagree. All is not lost, not by a long shot. In fact I wrote an article
about exactly how to do it last year: [https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-
web-that-lost-its-way-c...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-
lost-its-way-can-find-a-new-one)

This is just how things work in the early stages before open source
alternatives. Look at videoconferencing. Zoom grew a lot in the past couple
months. Facebook got in the game. Now Google.

Large corporations running the infrastructure to connect us and mediate our
interactions. This is how it’s been from the beginning. It’s the first stage.
Like we had with America Online / MSN / Compuserve.

But eventually organizations want to host their own software and own their own
brand, database, relationships and so on. Maybe customize the experience and
integrate it into their website.

In fact the Web itself came and replaced AOL and others with an open protocol
(HTTP) where anyone can permissionlessly set up their own domain and host
their own website.

The Feudalism of rentseeking corporations has been replaced with a free market
of hosting companies, and trillions of dollars in wealth were unleashed.

Today, Wordpress plays that role for Web 1.0 (publishing) powering 34% of all
websites. But what is out there that will power even Web 2.0 ... namely all
the social networking and interactions we have come to expect from Facebook,
Google, Telegram etc.?

Web browsers already have all the front end capabilities including Web Push
notifications and WebRTC videoconferencing and even PaymentRequest for
payments etc.

There just needs to be a platform that lets people take ready-made components,
like wordpress plugins, but Web 2.0 (chatrooms, events, etc.) that are all
based around the same standardized unified core (user accounts, permissions,
etc.) and are user friendly enough.

That’s basically an operating system. For example before MacOS/Windows
developers all built their own buttons/menus/windows etc. Before UNIX people
built their own file management etc.

These OSes standardized the layer 1 so developers can just use standard
buttons and reason on higher layers. Developers of Photoshop for Windows did
not have to implement custom menus and buttons. And because of the
standardized components, the users across apps were used to a common language,
they knew what buttons and menus did, and even if the app used a custom
version it had to be close enough to be recognizable.

So in this same way we need a social operating system for the web. Like
Wordpress for Web 2.0 — open source and let anyone build their own Facebook or
Google Meet out of reusable components. Ideally the core should be all
designed together, like BSD, so the underlying OS is a good extensive
foundation and not a hodgepodge of components.

Ok. Hopefully you take the below as a “Show HN”

We built it over the last 10 years and we’re giving it away:

[https://github.com/Qbix/Platform](https://github.com/Qbix/Platform)

We are still working on updating the documentation tob be as cool as for
Angular and React. But it’s more than those frameworks. It includes a PHP
backend with MySQL (pluggable) database support, with Node.js optional for
websockets realtime updates and offline notifications to
apple/google/chrome/firefox/etc. On the front end it has integrations with
Cordova for releasing native apps in the store, such as
[https://yang2020.app](https://yang2020.app)

Just as an example if you wanted to build videoconferencing into your website,
you would just do:

    
    
      Q.Streams.WebRTC.start(options)
    

It’s as simple as that. And if you want to have a secure user signup, forgot
password, account management you just do:

    
    
      Q.Users.login(options)
    

If you wanted to have events and schedule videoconferencing for various apps
you build (eg group dating or collaboration) you would use

    
    
      Q.Calendars.addToCalendar()

Reusable tools are placed like this: Q.activate( Q.Tool.setUpElement( element,
“Streams/chat”, options ); );

or with jQuery:

    
    
      $(element).tool(name)
      .activate(options)
    

You can have tools and subtools and pass options similar to React etc. Our
goal is to build a growing ecosystem of well tesed reusable components that
anyone can use, even if they are not very technical. Check out the GitHub
link. And especially the videos there. It’s totally free and open source. You
can build something like Yang2020 in a day. We are using it for our clients,
who want custom work done.

If you run into a snag or want to ask anything, just hit me up at greg at the
domain qbix.com

Finally... if you are a PHP or JS developer, and want to contribute to the
project, please first try to install it yourself and play with with it. (We
have tutorials but we are making more.) And email me. We have lots of clients
who want these custom online communities right now, and we are looking to
equip developers in diff countries to build them using this platform.

Oh and last thing... it’s interoperable with everything else so you’re not
locked in. You can take a wordpress site that uses React and drop a chatroom
or videoconference in there and gradually start to build community features,
an app in the store and reward people for inviting others etc.

------
querez
I disagree with both of the conclusion in this article.

1\. Contact tracing is just a necessary evil, and I for one am fairly happy
with the way Big Tech has handled this. Many nations in the EU preferred a
centralized approach so they could follow the epidemiological development of
covid-19. It was Apple & Google who in the end decided that "nope, not doing
that", thus dictating a more privacy-preserving way of doing this. Likely
because it's in their interest to have this app/data-collection being as
privacy-preserving as possible, to avoid the type of FUD that this article is
trying to disseminate. If you accept that contact tracing is necessary, then
what we are currently seeing is actually the best possible scenario for
preserving everyone's privacy and the web's openness. I'm all ears for better
approaches. What would YOU have the smartphone producer's do?

2\. This brings me to the next point: censorship. It's tricky. Not just in
this instance, but in general in the current development. Personally, I'm
seeing more and more that an entirely "open web" doesn't seem to work out so
well due to all the misinformation we're disseminating, and something's got to
give. The example the article is citing is a very good one, I think the
conclusion that are drawn in the article are wrong:

> They were sharing their observations, and opinions. Right or wrong, is not
> the point.

In my opinion, this is EXACTLY the point! A medical doctor who uses his
authority to spread what he thinks is the right message, but goes against what
most informed scientists consider correct, is EXACTLY spreading
misinformation. The same way we're seeing this with anti-vax, homeopathy,
chem-trails or whatever other nonsense: Yes, science is a discourse, but the
right way of discussing is within the scientific community. So you don't call
a press conference to spread your observations -- especially if the
implications of you being wrong are so dire. You write a paper (NEJM is
publishing a lot of discussion-pieces these days, why not send it there, to
reach the medical audience?) or maybe as a first step you call your friendly
epidemiologists and talk it over with them. Given the circumstances, removing
this video was absolutely the right call.

With that said, I agree that this is a much, much, much larger problem. Given
how important Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are in disseminating information,
it is concerning that they can pick what they want to publicize/suppress
(often w/o chance of recourse to the censored). To me, this is one of the
biggest issues we have in our current times. I hope we'll be able to find good
solutions. But given the current situation we're in (not just Covid19, also
populism and targeted misinformation), censoring might be a necessary first
step to fight our way out.

~~~
mpfundstein
> A medical doctor who uses his authority to spread what he thinks is the
> right message, but goes against what most informed scientists consider
> correct, is EXACTLY spreading misinformation

If everyone would think like you, science wouldn't progress far. Einstein
would have never happened. While Einstein was busy developing his theory of
relativity, the majority of the scientific world thought Newton is the end of
it all. He was the crazy dude who dared to go against the order.. even
annihilating academic friends by doing so.... However, the crazy dude was
right.

Having Majority DOES NOT EQUAL Being right. Always remember that.

You even write 'to spread what HE THINKS IS THE RIGHT MESSAGE' > Thats a mega
important point. If he is convinced that this is how things are then there
must be a (public) place to share those ideas. Even though he might be wrong
in the long run. And that's different from FAKE NEWS, where an actor spreads
midsinformation with a malicious goal. Hence in the FAKE NEWS case, he would
KNOW ITS NOT RIGHT but spread it ANYWAY.

See what I mean?

~~~
querez
> Having Majority DOES NOT EQUAL Being right. Always remember that.

In a democracy, it kind of does. And science is a democratic discourse. If
99.9% of all scientists say global warming is real or evolution "just a
theory", and 0.1% says it is not, the likelihood of the 99.9% being right
is... well, 99.9%. When people mention how Einstein revolutionized science,
you have to remember that he was the absolute, astounding and rare exception.
The very vast majority of people who go against the grain of the dominant
scientific belief tend to be crackpots. Always remember that.

You even write 'to spread what HE THINKS IS THE RIGHT MESSAGE' > Thats a mega
important point. [...] Even though he might be wrong in the long run. And
that's different from FAKE NEWS, where an actor spreads midsinformation with a
malicious goal. Hence in the FAKE NEWS case, he would KNOW ITS NOT RIGHT but
spread it ANYWAY.

I agree with you, "fake news" was a bad choice of words. I think that's the
extreme end of a spectrum of "spreading non-true information", and I
personally think that's what this doctor did. But my beef isn't even with
that. It's perfectly okay (Very, very much encouraged, actually) to voice
dissenting opinions in science! That is how science works, after all. And
hence it is important to voice dissenting options in a scientific manner.
Which brings me to:

> If he is convinced that this is how things are then there must be a (public)
> place to share those ideas.

There absolutely is: Peer-reviewed scientific literature. That's the place
where scientific ideas are evaluated, based on their merit. You don't go call
a press conference when you have a plausibly sounding hypothesis that might
explain some observations you made. You write a paper about it, make your
case, back it up with data and experiments, and evaluate your findings to see
if they hold up to statistical scrutiny. And then an informed discourse among
peers can start, and the facts & data will decide who is right/wrong. And if
you want to prove something that most of the scientific community thinks is
wrong, and when potentially many lives are at stake, then the burden of proof
rests on you, and that burden is rightfully high. Much higher than "I called
some friends and we our subjective impression is that this is overblown". And
_THAT_ is why I think this is misinformation, even if I'm sure it was done
with the best of intentions.

------
notadev
iTs OnLy cEnSoRsHiP wHeN tHe GoVeRnMeNt DoEs iT

------
cryptica
> I love free markets.

I think the author means that he loves the unfair markets which benefited him
personally. I don't think I've ever seen such a thing as a free market.

We have a few large stock exchanges in each country which dominate our entire
economy and dictate which company can or can't be listed. How is this a free
market?

Also, this article is extremely hypocritical coming from someone who co-
founded a startup (CleanBrowsing) whose main line of business is censorship.

------
tiborsaas
Such a powerful claim with no data to back it up, but just a few cases meshed
together with fancy rhetoric. I already knew it will be a great article when
the author started with a disclaimer about what this post will not be about
and then start with a big quote from himself. I was not disappointed.

> It is the idea that the web we interface with should continue to be open and
> transparent.

This is still the case and I don't see any threat that will likely to change
this. Of course, governments will continue to pull off shady things, like
break encryption, but we fight back all the time.

The web is fine. It comes in many shapes and forms, there are endless
communities and the technology is smoother than ever to build on it.

If you look at the graph of hosts on the internet, it seems to be plateaued at
around a billion, almost dead. This could have backed up the author's claim,
but he would have entered the numbers territory where it could be read with a
totally different outcome.

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/264473/number-of-
interne...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/264473/number-of-internet-
hosts-in-the-domain-name-system/)

The web is fine.

