
The End of the Internet Dream - phantom_oracle
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-end-of-the-internet-dream-ba060b17da61#.csugaho35
======
pspace
The internet dream is almost here! Patents and IP have lost their bite
compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever.

More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before.

Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit
slowly).

The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People
care more about commenting and creating content. They care about participating
more than they ever did and this is increasing. In fact, this is a problem
because the quality of participation is diminishing as EVERYONE jumps in.

Existing power structures are not being retained. As the internet enters the
equation new laws are being put into place. Look at Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb.
The only difference in how they are regulated is basically because they are
internet oriented.

Yes we still have work. Infrastructure is still a big issue. If we want to
reduce centralization, we need better infrastructure and equal access to it.
That one is very political.

We got this ;) Stay vigilant friends.

~~~
k__
If you look into our biggest open platform today, the web, you see that we
have almost won. We got the whole power of our PCs sand-boxed and mostly
standardized at our fingertips with ECMAScript, HTTP and company. Most of the
old proprietary demons are defeated with so many companies switching from
native to "the web".

But with the rise of iOS and Android, new problems are rising. And if you look
at the better performance and usability of apps, they also got real substance
behind them.

~~~
anon1385
The web has done more to centralise computing and take it out of the hands of
ordinary people than any other technology. People don't even control their own
data anymore, never mind having control over the software they run.

It's hard to see that as a win.

~~~
parasubvert
The web has done more to decentralize networked computing than any other
technology, because the web is basically decentralized. Only the agreements
(IETF and W3C) are somewhat centralized, but even then we are seeing a
proliferation of REST APIs to encourage decentralized data management. These
usually aren't exactly "RESTful" of course because we are so busy with our own
startups we aren't really working towards interop as a priority.

The only inherent reason we have popular centralized services is that there is
limited economic incentives of funding or adhering to a decentralized social
(or business, or health, ...) network standard - the Web would support it, but
we've got to WANT to build the agreements to make it work.

Tl;dr the Read side of the web is decentralized; the Write Side of the Web is
currently an oligarchy but not permanently so.

~~~
gue5t
The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-
domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users
live.

Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is
_why_ the economics encourage centralization. You don't need "major parties"
to "adhere to agreements" if users just use the software they like to interact
with each other. The problem with the Web is everyone using software on third-
party servers to write rows in third-party databases because everything else
is technically infeasible given the architecture of Web protocols.

You need a DHT or some other kind of decentralized matchmaking service in
order to actually connect users to each other. At that point using HTTP makes
no sense either, and users don't have the time or resources to write
complicated HTML or hire web devs to write it. Web technologies are not really
useful for users-talking-to-users without server-based mediation.

~~~
parasubvert
"The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-
domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users
live."

That's nonsense. Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for
less. Users in the early web - usually not developers! - ran their own servers
just fine.

The question is why they would want to? Especially given how big the web has
become. They mostly would need applications that automated these details away
for a broader purpose.

In fact many stil do run servers in their home in limited contests: their PVR,
their backup appliance, their network printer, their Nest thermostat, heck
even their Xbox with Twitch. It's all about the software application that
warrants having your own server and makes it easy to maintain/run.

"Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is why
the economics encourage centralization. "

Its more than the interactions require software that needs to be written and
evolved and maintained. A decentralized social network arguably has many
benefits, that would lead to everyone buying something (software to run in
their devices, or an appliance for their utility closet) to hook into it.

"You don't need "major parties" to "adhere to agreements" if users just use
the software they like to interact with each other. "

The web IS all about agreements (protocols), as is the Internet. Decentralized
execution of said agreements lead to emergent effects. Sure, if someone writes
one piece of software, everyone by definition has agreement.

But the world of the network is about N versions of software written by
different people and still achieving their ends.

Today we have cases of agreements enforced by single copies of software
(Facebook) on a decentralized network with many many underlying differences in
software (web servers, TCP stacks, firewalls, routers, databases). The only
reason Facebook exists are the prior agreements made on those lower
commodified layers, and economic value moves up the stack.

So why haven't we written the software and agreements to commodify Facebook?
Because these things take time for the economic incentives to work. I believe
it will happen, just a matter of time. The Web's architecture encourages
decentralized sharing and manipulation of information, it's just incomplete.

" The problem with the Web is everyone using software on third-party servers
to write rows in third-party databases because everything else is technically
infeasible given the architecture of Web protocols."

What's the infeasible part? Where you see infeasibility, I just see "work in
progress", or "incompletion".

"You need a DHT or some other kind of decentralized matchmaking service in
order to actually connect users to each other."

Okay, there is a good idea for part of an implementation...

"At that point using HTTP makes no sense either,"

... And a bad one.

As an example - BitTorrent actually relies on HTTP and the web to bootstrap
discovery to a tracker before moving to a an (optional) DHT. The web is an
essential component of the puzzle.

"users don't have the time or resources to write complicated HTML or hire web
devs to write it."

Why on earth would they need to? I can buy an appliance at Best Buy today that
runs Wordpress for me. Why can't that evolve into something more sophisticated
and compelling , that removes the need for centralized services?

I think you're way too hung up on this concept of a server being a socio-
political construct rather than a transient architectural role in an
interchange. Clients can be servers and vice versa. End users already run
servers today, they just don't know it. The real socio-political construct of
the Internet, the nexus of control, is the protocol. That's how you blow up
centralized services.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less._

No they can't. They don't know how, in part because nobody teaches them.

No they can't. They don't have enough upload bandwidth for even a modest web
server. Our links are asymmetric, remember?

No they can't. Residential IP addresses are blacklisted by most mail services.
What good is a mail server that can't get its mail accepted?

No they can't. Many ISPs forbid their users to run a server —by contract.

No they can't. In many regions, most people are put behind a big NAT. They
don't even have an internet connection (which by any reasonable definition
requires a public IP).

Even I can't run my own server, even though I'm technically qualified.
Instead, I loan some processor time from a provider I like to run a VM on
their servers.

~~~
parasubvert
"They don't know how, in part because nobody teaches them."

Or they don't have software that does it for them.

"They don't have enough upload bandwidth for even a modest web server. Our
links are asymmetric, remember?"

Last I checked, BitTorrent was still a thing. IOW, build a killer app and that
will change.

"Residential IP addresses are blacklisted by most mail services. What good is
a mail server that can't get its mail accepted?"

Then you can't run a mail server unless you have a cloud server that isn't
blacklisted.

"Many ISPs forbid their users to run a server —by contract."

Which is a gray area that will fall apart the moment a killer app exists. ISPs
don't block Twitch, they don't block Skype (which is P2P), they don't block
BitTorrent, they don't block my NEST thermostat.

"In many regions, most people are put behind a big NAT. They don't even have
an internet connection (which by any reasonable definition requires a public
IP)."

This is barbaric and not my experience in North America.

"Even I can't run my own server, even though I'm technically qualified.
Instead, I loan some processor time from a provider I like to run a VM on
their servers."

Sure, that's a common workaround and I don't really consider that
"centralized" computing in the manner of a Facebook or Twitter.

My point is that everyone having a server for decentralized internet doesn't
have insurmountable barriers, it requires software that people want to consume
that will change the way the market works. Uber is doing it for a way more
regulated industry (taxis).

~~~
loup-vaillant
Well, a usable Freedom Box would indeed solve most problems. Can't wait.

------
TeMPOraL
The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had
some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies
cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of
incentives to make it worse and little to make it better.

In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and
our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods by torpedoing the
insane ideas our managers and bosses have. I tried, and it's hard, and unless
it's a collective action your boss won't listen to a lone techie telling him
that this business idea of his is actually socially destructive and is abusing
the users.

And that even doesn't begin to solve the problems of _techies_ who went over
to the dark side, who have both the profit-at-all-costs mindset _and_ skills
to pull it off.

~~~
austerity
You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have
their needs satisfied.

I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems
described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed
to say I am driven purely by profit.

~~~
meddlepal
I think it's an often forgotten (perhaps purposefully to push an agenda in
some circles?) part of these discussions about corporations and business
models. They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at
work trying to screw everything and everyone.

Another problem, idealists often ignore the practical realities of a society
when dreaming of their idealist visions for the future. Could the internet
have turned into a purely free and perfect forum for communication? In an
ideal world yes, but not in our flawed world where there are a host of
competing contrasting ideas.

To the authors point. Technology is moving too fast for laws, governments and
political systems to cope with. The political and legal constructs we use
today are not radically different from 200 or 300 years ago. I don't know if
there has ever been a time in human history where the rate of technological
innovation and change has been moving at such a speed that the legal and
political systems cannot stay synced with the change and have no chance of
catching up due to the increasing velocity.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _corporations and business models. They 're just driven by demand. It's not
> some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone._

Oh it's not shady in the sense that it has agency and decides to screw
everything up. But it's very powerful and increasingly misaligned with the
interest of humans. Being driven by demand does not map well to the shared
wishes and morals of humanity, only if because of coordination problems.

I agree with your other points. And I didn't mean to point out that if
Internet stayed non-profit, we'd have a perfect communication platform by now.
For instance I think that if it became powerful, it'd still have problems with
power and influence being a similar incentive to money. I only wanted to
highlight the source of the problems we now have, which are those demand-
satisfying, profit-driven actions. And that to make the Internet a better
place, we would need to refuse doing things that seem optimal from business
point of view but are detrimental to the Internet itself.

A pessimist in me says: this isn't likely to happen, because coordination is
hard. So tragedy of commons here, no way to make a bottom-up group opposition
there; we're screwed by coordination problems.

~~~
mdpopescu
I generally upvote your comments but I think this one is far too pessimistic.
You're worrying about coordination problems _on the internet_? That's like, I
don't know, worrying about dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean.

Oh wait... :P

On a more serious note, though, I think this is just another problem to be
solved. Long-term, I am an absolute optimist: everything will get better,
everywhere. Short-term, I admit there are some speed bumps :)

~~~
anon4
To be annoyingly pedantic, ocean water is unfit to drink, i.e. contains too
much salt, so you can very easily die of thirst in the middle of the ocean.

Just s/ocean/any big lake/

~~~
mdpopescu
That's why I said "oh wait" :)

------
austerity
Good article. However I don't understand why so many smart people fear
decision-making machines. In my experience the decision makers in
bureaucracies, government and private alike, never ever show the "humanity"
ascribed to them in arguments about this issue. Instead they follow their
instruction (which is actually a program written in human language) to the
letter and are usually so obtuse and unempathetic it seems even the present
day primitive AI would be much smarter and more flexible. The reason of course
is not that people are dumb or mean, but that they are driven by incentives
and incentives in these positions are never right. Machines on the other hand
are not afraid to lose their job and are (potentially) capable of much deeper
and broader analysis of any situation than humans while simultaneously being
less prone to error.

~~~
kijin
It is difficult for a machine to be accountable for its decisions. It's not as
simple as holding the manufacturer responsible, either.

With human decision-makers, at least you have a bunch of douchebags that you
can point your fingers at and attach epithets like "obtuse and unempathetic".
And we can hope that if we collectively do something, we'll be able to replace
them with less dysfunctional folks.

With complex decision-making machines, it's not even clear whether a subtle
bias it exhibits in its decisions is a sign of a bug or intentional design.
The machine, of course, is capable of deep and broad analysis, but only of
data that some group of engineers decided would be appropriate for it to
analyze, using algorithms that were probably hand-tweaked by another group of
engineers with their own individual quirks and unconscious biases.

Even the idea that a machine can be "smart" or "flexible" is based on a
particular definition of "smart" and "flexible" that other people might
strongly disagree with. And yet the machine presents an image of perfect
objectivity, and its complexity makes it nearly impossible for outsiders to
figure out exactly who or what is responsible for the many assumptions that
underlie its design.

Moreover, the possibility of losing one's job is prettty much the only thing
that keeps human decision-makers accountable in this world. Take that away,
and we've got a benevolent dictator at best and a mechanical tyrant at worst,
with the exact same quirks and biases, only hidden better.

~~~
qznc
People do point at Facebooks news filtering algorithm, which is "obtuse and
unempathetic". People do complain about Googles algorithms flagging stuff as
spam in an "obtuse and unempathetic" way.

------
afarrell
> • You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your
> rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you.
> Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human
> will really be able to understand why.

This isn't a change from the current state of things. For a hundred years,
each of these decisions have been made by neural networks which we scarcely
understand.

~~~
admax88q
At least these are neural networks that we can hold accountable for their
actions. Networks that exist in a single physical space easily detained when
need be.

Not to mention that they can usually explain their reasoning and behind a
decision.

Machine learning algorithms can't do that.

~~~
afarrell
1) Holding someone accountable isn't actually useful unless it changes
behavior.

2) They can come up with an explanation, but not usually an accurate one. We
are used to giving offhand answers to neurology questions because parents
angrily ask them of their children all the time. But the answers we give
aren't truth-seeking they are punishment-avoiding.

------
wcummings
I think Snowden's disclosures were a loss of innocence for many technologists,
and this reflects that. I can't imagine this would have been written in his
absence.

~~~
mhurron
For the government surveillance parts of the article perhaps, though lets be
honest, people were saying TLA's had been watching everything you've been
doing for a while before that.

Another large part of the article is corporate control of the internet and
that was a problem long before Snowden. That corporations would control the
world and use the internet to create a Shadowrun type world was again
something people had been warning about as less of the content on the internet
was what people put up and more what was curated for you.

The end of the internet as a place for free expression is being driven in
large part by the type of people that frequent this site. They're here to make
money, a lot of it. And they're going to do what they can to lock you into
their way of presenting things to make it very difficult for you to use
another basically identical service. They're going to lock you in with your
own data, sell it back to you and package you up to sell to others. The death
of the internet began long before Edward Snowden showed the world what the
other monster on the wires was doing.

~~~
escherize
The point about many people's knowledge of the surveillance is not a good one.
It's a different situation when the details are known. The battle ground in
the war of ideas shifts from "that doesn't really exist" to "here's why it's
nessicary."

Again, these evil corporations can only exist when they serve a need. If
normal people actually cared about an open internet, they could (usually)*
switch service providers to one that is more amenable to open standards.

* One example where people can't switch is in the US, Comcast bribes the government to enforce its monopoly.

------
Animats
As long as you can read ISIS's Dabiq on line [1], censorship isn't working.

As long as you can read Stormfront's White Pride World Wide [2], censorship
isn't working.

Facebook is not the Internet, even if Zuckerberg would like it to be.

[1] [http://www.clarionproject.org/docs/islamic-state-isis-
isil-d...](http://www.clarionproject.org/docs/islamic-state-isis-isil-dabiq-
magazine-issue-12-just-terror.pdf) [2]
[https://www.stormfront.org](https://www.stormfront.org)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Censorship isn't about total, fool-proof access limits. It's about trivial
inconveniences[0].

"The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful
thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and
slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have
devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it
can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to
set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website."

As long as media won't talk about the topic, and the main avenues of discovery
- Google, Facebook - won't show it to you, censorship works as intended: it
removes a topic from the social conversation.

[0] -
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/)

~~~
im2w1l
>Censorship isn't about total, fool-proof access limits. It's about trivial
inconveniences.

That's because we have won a partial victory. _They_ would very much like a
total, fool-proof access limit.

~~~
TeMPOraL
_They_ don't care, because there's little marginal gain from improving on the
results they already have. Even better, having holes in their wall helps
relieve pressure. It's just like the old Sun Tzu adage about the line of
retreat - you should leave one for enemy soldiers because if you encircle them
completely, they'll realize they have nothing to lose and fight fiercely until
they die.

------
beatpanda
You know, one way out of building an internet none of us actually wants just
because the people with the money tell us to is to organize as a union.

It never ceases to amaze me the amount of leverage software engineers
_already_ have, as evidenced by the wages and benefits that are standard in
this industry, that we nevertheless refuse to use to try to exert some control
over what we are building.

~~~
mbrock
Wouldn't "we" be more likely to unionize if our wages were bad?

And are unions good at this stuff? Here in Sweden, they seem to be mostly
aligned with the industrial profit motive. For example, the big metal workers'
union supported extending our large arms export deal with Saudi Arabia, since
it employs thousands of people.

~~~
beatpanda
Yes, historically unions don't get organuzed unless conditions are bad to
begin with.

But look, what if we just didn't use the word "union"? What if we were talking
about a professional organization like the bar association that set standards
of what its members can and can't do, what is and is not ethical work? That
set certain expectations of providing your otherwise very expensive services
for free to people who need it but can't pay?

~~~
Margh
I really like this idea.

Without knowing too much about bar associations I feel like a programmer
association with a code of ethics similar to the ABA model rules (perhaps
including the Six Fixes[0]) would be a great start to reining in privacy
violations.

I immediately see that it would need to be government mandated for it to have
any effect, and given that many governments routinely violate these terms I
don't know how it could be enforced.

[0] -
[http://idlewords.com/six_fixes.html](http://idlewords.com/six_fixes.html)

------
ivanca
Is unfortunate how she mixes racism and sexism in this essay, which makes the
subject too broad, specially when bringing things like "only 30% of google is
female", firstly because such companies are the ones making the "internet
dream" die, so you are asking diversity by the "enemy", also when the
"internet dream started" it was a lot less diverse than now, the steryotype of
lonely male teenager messing with computers is silly but it IS based on real
life mostly because men are more likely to be loners who seek refuegee in
things like tech, D&D and such "hobbies". And nobody would care for diversity
if this particula hobby (tech) weren't the one shaping the world.

~~~
ivanca
related:
[https://twitter.com/NinjaEconomics/status/662419805509578754](https://twitter.com/NinjaEconomics/status/662419805509578754)

------
Decade
As a lawyer, I don't think Granick appreciates just how the Internet has
become a realm of haves and have-nots.

She talks about right to tinker and end-to-end communications. Back in the
90s, I played with HTTP and SMTP services on my Mac. It was just install a
program and go. No root permissions for special ports. No configuring port
forwarding, because even on dial-up I had a global IP address. And HTTP was a
simple text protocol. Network protocols these days are so complex, I don't
know how kids learn how they work.

One essential component is IPv6. I perceived that centralized control would be
a problem as soon as I heard about how NAT works, but short-term costs have
kept IPv6 inaccessible. This is an immense frustration.

~~~
parasubvert
I grew up through the 80s and 90s too and I'm not sure why you're that
concerned:

\- we mainly all still have global IP access on our broadband

\- HTTP and SMTP are still fundamentally text even if you need TLS (just need
the key to be able to read it)

\- HTTP/2 has clear semantics that can make it look like text with a simple
script

\- NAT is annoying and yet essential ; it will be in an IPv6 world too.

the dream of everything having a public IPv6 address was always unlikely
precisely because people want privacy for their devices, a (misplaced?) belief
they're one step off the grid.

I suspect the work we are seeing with cloud technology around automated
dynamic provisioning of firewall & routing will make its way into consumer
edge routers and ISPs some day when the right app is there. Tinkerers always
find a way.

------
Loic
The best example that the Internet Dream as she sees it is near the end, she
published her essay on medium.com instead of using her own system.

------
tajen
"At Google, women make up 30 percent of the company’s overall workforce, but
hold only 17 percent of the company’s tech jobs"

Hence what? In France prison population is 96.5% male. Does it prove sexism?
That's it, I quit reading women, they can't write without pulling the cover to
themselves.

~~~
chippy
You know I read that paragraph expect to cringe at any implied reasons, but
there were none. In fact, if you read the previous paragraphs, the author
states that the tech community is very inclusive of difference - it's really
not an issue.

To me these paragraphs together indicate that it's not a tech problem that
there are less women in the industry, but rather a wider societal issue. The
tech community is welcoming and inclusive and tolerant of diversity. Any
supposed lack in numbers of women in tech does not prove the opposite.

------
danr4
The way I see it, there's 2 main hurdles for truly free internet: hardware and
encryption.

When normal folks start having personal servers at their home, and have all
their traffic and data fully encrypted on their personal server which is in
their turf, they will have the freedom to act as they like.

The problem with these two hurdles is infrastructure (being ISP dependent) and
regulation (Government can make up rules for personal servers) - if we can get
past those, oh my it will be wonderful. But I don't think it will be possible
until someone forms a "Digital Country" \- a territory with 'open source'
government with some sort of 'digital rights constitution' that would allow
the above to really happen.

------
rayiner
The Internet is not a place apart from society. It exists within society. And
society will exert the same amount of control over it as it asserts on other
facets of life in order to meet social priorities.

------
obrero
Twenty years ago, there were hundreds of Internet Service Providers, and each
large (and most medium) one gave access to Usenet discussions.

Then with increased monopoly and commercialization, the ISP's shut down, and
Verizon and AT&T gained a duopoly over the majority of the US's wired and
wireless last mile. With this accomplished, they shut down their Usenet feeds.

A programmer I know calls it digging ditches with air conditioning.
Programmers are wage slaves, just a slightly more exalted position than the
people who come in at night to empty the waste baskets.

~~~
sotojuan
> Programmers are wage slaves

By this definition, anyone with a job is a wage slave unless they work for
themselves. Unless you meant something else, because in the US programmers
enjoy salaries and flexibility that many other professionals don't have.

~~~
brc
Even if you work for yourself, you're still working for someone else.

An employee has 1 boss. An entrepreneur has a thousand, a million, whatever
the number is.

Working for cash means exchanging value with someone who gives you the cash.

The concept of wage slavery is a tad insulting to those stuck in real slavery.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _The concept of wage slavery is a tad insulting to those stuck in real
> slavery._

Most of the talk around "wage slavery" is about people who're going to spend
the rest of their lives working hard for all their day on stuff that they
don't like, for so little money that it barely allows them to stay fed and
healthy. It's a different thing that the "real slavery"[0], but there are some
important similarities - namely, people using up their whole lives to enrich
somewhere else, with no capacity to opt out.

The reason it's being brought up so often now is that in the past, "wage
slavery" seemed a necessary component of survival of a society. People simply
had to work. But today the necessary work is increasingly being automated,
while we compensate with inventing new make-believe jobs living in closed
loops that together have no useful output. So it's about time we should start
aiming for freeing people from the need to work.

\--

I agree though that saying programmers are wage slaves is... weird. I suspect
'obrero meant something about lack of agency - as a programmer, you're to
implement whatever stupid shit your boss envisions, and you have no say about
it, even if it damages the environment you're working in. We may be getting
paid more than a janitor, but that doesn't mean we have anything more to say
about company's business than a janitor does.

\--

[0] - by "real slavery" we mostly think about a particularly brutal and
dehumanizing enslavement of plantation workers in the United States; slavery
in the past was often not unlike employment today.

~~~
notahacker
To be honest, I'm struggling to think of _any_ profession which less resembles
the concept of wage slavery than programming, Compared with other jobs it pays
relatively high salaries, offers more opportunities for remote and flexible
working, more opportunities as self-employed contractors and more
opportunities to start companies that don't even rely on contracting for
others.

In a company of any size, _nobody_ has absolute agency and complete immunity
from stupid shit that bosses envision, not even the zillionaire owners of the
company who don't have to do performance reviews or attend standup meetings.

------
Paul_S
Back in the 80s on BBSes and 90s on usergroups and finally the Internet a
bunch of techies did whatever they wanted and normal people didn't get
anything. Now they're getting more than any of us got back then and we're not
standing still either, it's just moved on from the web. The Internet dream is
alive and is evolving and whilst the original manifesto sounds a bit childish
to me nowadays it's still part of what drives us. Wherever the mainstream
catches up so do the old hierarchies and we move on.

------
surge
Right now the biggest threat I find is the lack of options in terms of ISP for
most people, and somewhat mass surveillance which will likely be used for
profit rather than prevention of illegal activity. ISP's that are creating
arbitrary data caps, filtering/throttling or modifying content as it comes in,
and little is being done by the FCC to stop it, these are the most dangerous
trends.

Beyond that encryption, etc has allowed us more freedom.

------
natrius
This is one of my favorite topics because I have cause for hope.

The story of internet centralization is one of network effects. Even though
the internet connects every computer on the planet directly, finding people to
interact in the ways we want is difficult. We post things to Facebook and
Twitter because that's where our friends and like-minded strangers are
actually looking for things.

To fight this, we tried federation. We tried building social systems that
allowed people to choose their own provider but participate in the same
network, but federation hasn't worked since email. If you take a long look at
email, you'll see why: federated systems can't keep up with the pace of
evolution that we see in successful social systems. The design-test-iterate
loop that design thinkers use to build products people want doesn't work when
the rest of the federated providers don't keep up, and they never do.

Where federation failed, I believe decentralization will succeed. There is an
honest-to-god renaissance happening right now in decentralized systems, and
the tools to continue the internet dream are reaching maturity. Core to this
renaissance is our new ability to use blockchains to establish universal
cryptographic identities with no intermediary—no federated server to hold back
the tide of progress. When you want new features, you don't switch servers,
you switch clients. They all speak the same peer-to-peer protocol using the
same portable, blockchain-based identities. This has a very useful side-
effect: systems that don't rely on servers never shut down as long as people
keep using them. Decentralized systems are forces of nature.

This combination makes network effects a public good. Second place companies
in network effect industries today have their own private networks that just
aren't as useful. It is in their best interest to make their networks as large
as possible, and treating the decentralized network as part or all of their
network achieves that. It creates a network used by all the competitors who
aren't in first place, even as those competitors die off. I think the immortal
network used by competitors will over time become as large as the front-
runner's. At equal size, the open network is more valuable than the closed
one—the open one can be built wholesale into any other product that benefits
from it. If you want, you can use a ride-hailing app that uses your social
network connections to share rides with friends of friends instead of complete
strangers, and anyone can build that app when the ride-hailing and social
networks are decentralized.

When our industry gets great at creating decentralized application protocols,
it will no longer be feasible to build a business on privately controlled
network effects. It's not a defensible business anymore. Users will be able to
choose which clients they use instead of being forced to sacrifice their data
to a company to benefit from its network.

The internet dream is back, y'all. If you want to help rebuild it, come join
the folks using Ethereum, IPFS, and related protocols to build networks we
can't control.

~~~
simoncion
I'm confused.

What are the most significant distinctions between a federated network and a
decentralized network?

Is one of those distinctions that the latter has a distributed
filesystem/datastore _shared_ amongst most-to-all of its nodes?

~~~
runiq
Yes, that's it. With federated networks, you still rely on another party — the
server you connect to. With decentralized networks, you are a part of the
thing everyone else relies on.

~~~
simoncion
Two things:

1) In a decentralized network where you are _also_ the client, you _also_
usually rely on another party: the party that contains the resource you wish
to access. Not that many decentralized networks give _every_ node a complete
copy of all of the data in the network.

2) In a federated network with open federation (Tor, XMPP, email, etc...), you
can choose to become a server in that network and be a part of the thing that
everyone else relies on.

I'm still having trouble seeing the essential distinction between the two. Is
the assertion that "decentralized" networks _force_ you to be a server in the
network, whereas federated networks leave the choice up to you?

~~~
natrius
In a federated network, your identity is tied to your server. If you have a
domain name, sometimes you can have portable identities that piggyback on DNS.
This is a terrible solution for normal people. The cost of switching servers
is high.

Decentralized systems have cryptographic identities. If you want to use a
different client or a different server that participates in the network while
you're offline, just fire up the new one and give it access to your identity
via your private key or signing a new key.

Low switching costs are the key to progress on a network. It's why browsers
have gotten so good. Similarly, competition will make the clients for
decentralized networks improve rapidly, unlike XMPP or email.

~~~
simoncion
> In a federated network, your identity is tied to your server.

Untrue.

TextSecure/Signal is a federated system. [0] IDs have always been and are
-currently- tied to a user's phone number. [1] If you demand, I'm sure that I
can dig up more examples, but that's the first thing that came to mind at
$WAY_TOO_FUCKING_EARLY in the morning.

[0] The server software is open source, but only trusted operators are
permitted to federate with the official TS servers. However, _anyone_ is 100%
free to stand up their own TS network (even if it's a single server) and
distribute their own patched TS/Signal clients that use that unofficial TS
network.

[1] There is ongoing work (that's probably nearly completed) to move IDs from
a phone number to something that makes multi-device-but-a-single-user accounts
work. I get the impression that it's coming along rather nicely, but haven't
checked out the Github repo in quite a while.

------
EvanPlaice
Yay! More click bait-y doom-and-gloom nonsense from Medium.com. /s

Seriously, what's the deal with these poor quality posts and why do they float
so high in the Hacker News rankings?

Aside: The same can be said for posts linking to theguardian lately.

The internet dream is far from dead. Despite numerous setbacks surrounding
lack of security/privacy, new standards/practices are being introduced to fix
the issues.

The whole personal computer ecosystem that used to be dominated by vendor-
monopolized platforms have continually become more open and flexible over
time.

The flexibility to share data and services across the web in a standardized
manner has never been better. 10 years ago, tools like Zapier that thrive in
the ecosystem of openness never would have been possible. There are public
APIs and microservices for anything and everything nowadays.

The developer tools and platforms are evolving at an ever-increasing rate.
Data silos are crumbling. Patent/copyright trolls are getting paid their due.
Sources of very high quality educational materials are abundant and free.
etc...

We live in truly exceptional times.

------
mark_l_watson
Great talk. I just posted the link to people who follow me on T and G+

As sosuke mentions in another comment, possible alternative mesh networks
might regain some freedom and flexibility but we will all be vulnerable to
embedded IoT technology that tracks us and because of laws prohibiting looking
at embedded code (assuming this happens) it will be difficult for white hat
privacy advocates to check the information shared out by these devices. Cars,
home appliances, electronic gadgets - a lot of areas that might leak privacy.

------
sosuke
Are there any solutions? Is it possible to create a new network? How do you
champion free speech and then try to control the ugly side?

I'd love to read more I guess.

~~~
giaour
Encrypting everything -- HTTP traffic, email, streaming media -- is a good
start.

~~~
TeMPOraL
We need to compensate that with having accessible endpoints - otherwise it
means that things like[0] won't be possible. Security can be one of the most
effective enemies of the Freedom to Tinker.

[0] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10609165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10609165)

~~~
knieveltech
Accessibility doesn't necessarily have to be the highest priority. BITD folks
would jump through ludicrous numbers of hoops just to gain access to the
network. Whether or not this limiting factor improved the quality of
interactions online is an open question.

------
zby
[http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt](http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt)
\- some more technical analysis on what can be done

Another interesting site here is
[http://citizenlab.org/](http://citizenlab.org/) and the idea of 'distributed
security' they champion.

------
randomname2
Are any politicians explicitly defending the kind of Internet/technology-
related civil liberties mentioned in the article?

The ones that are often written about are Wyden (D), Rand Paul (R), Amash (R),
Massie (R), any others?

~~~
zby
Look up Pirate Party.

------
JustSomeNobody
Sadly, we can't go back.

But we can go a different route. Would love to see mesh technologies get dirt
cheep so we could stick nodes everywhere. Develop a new internet such that
nobody would be in control.

------
loginusername
"People are sick and tired of crappy software."

Hallelujah.

~~~
cageface
But they also complain about paying a dollar for an app. They get exactly what
they are willing to pay for.

~~~
zobzu
What's a, say, 200 USD app or OS that isn't pretty shitty? There aren't many.
In fact, I can't mention one on the post.

I know of a few OSes and app that are decent (at least don't try to track you,
show ads to your face, do weird stuff in the name of making profits for a
company). These all cost 0 and are open-source. Weird uhm.

~~~
7Z7
That entirely depends on your definition of "shitty".

Some might care about an occasional ad in an app that they chose not to pay
for, or never paying for software on principle, and will always choose open.
Some might find the need to manage system-level functionality and
installation, or make allowances for miserable UI/UX simply because it is
open, too much to bear.

~~~
zobzu
So there is none is what you're saying. I agree with that, there's none.
F'king exactly.

------
oneJob
During the period being discussed, the constituency of the communities
participating in the Internet has completely changed. The percentage of non-
paid contributors has drastically declined; the percentage of professional
contributors has drastically increased. The percentage of active or
contributing participants has greatly declined; the percentage of passive or
consumer participants has greatly increased. The norms, laws, and conventions
are increasingly made by politicians and bureaucrats and less and less by
community members. The majority of interaction and activity on the Internet is
now mediated and tracked by commercial interests. Even if you disagree with
one or two of my points, I think you'll grant me the general point.

In a strange twist on things, where in the traditional body-politic one says,
"It's the economy stupid", in Internet-politics it's actually the politics.
Who participates. What are the power relations. Who makes the laws or enforces
the norms. I think this is because, where as in traditional economies money
and goods are scarce and so we must have a healthy economy to eat and have
shelter, in the information economy scarcity is fast becoming a thing of the
past and so a democracy is being replaced by a do-ocracy. Whoever builds it,
makes the rules. The law is always two steps behind. So as corporations and
governments increasingly hire and direct all the professionals and bureaucrats
that produce the Internet, it is created in their likeness or in their
interest. So participation, power dynamics, and participant empowerment become
foundational.

Unfortunately, the tech industry often superficially dismisses traditional
politics. When it does engage it often claims the ideology of libertarian or
plays the part of technocrat, seeking purely utilitarian approaches.
Libertarianism, you'll please forgive me for phrasing it this way, is rather
sophomoric. It's rather like that guy in college that had the Che Guevara
t-shirt, but really didn't know what it was all about. Like it or not, we're
in a highly coordinated, interconnected, interdependent society, and just as
fully realized communism was a very romantic notion but would never get the
job done, libertarianism just won't get the job done. We need each other, and
we need participation from each other. And this is, in a nutshell, a political
issue. Technological, disruptive, efficient "solutions" will not solve this
problem. Or worse, the tech industry might engage purely to satisfy its
commercial interests. Think about the idea that, a start-up creates a product,
and then hires lawyers to "legalize it". Then the start-up claims that it is
libertarian or not participating in politics.

We need the equivalent of "The Federalist Papers" for our time. Something
contemporary, but grounded in history. Something academic, but pragmatic.
Something plain spoken, but inspiring. Instead, we've created the TPP.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_We need each other, and we need participation from each other._

Libertarianism does not dissuade (but quite the contrary, encourages)
cooperation provided it is not coerced through means of binary, triangular or
other forms of intervention.

------
InclinedPlane
I don't buy it.

First off, there's always a tendency to overplay the negative aspects of the
present while dismissing the positive aspects and to treat the past with
excess nostalgia.

Moreover, it's very difficult for most people to grasp the significance and
degree of major changes in society, culture, and the economy on short time
scales while immersed in it.

I've been using the internet for more than 20 years and while there are
certainly many negative developments that have happened along the way there
have also been many positive ones. I would not at all characterize the modern
internet as heading toward less freedom, not at all. My impression is that far
more people are far more aware of issues of injustice and oppression today
than was previously the case. It used to be that only a tiny sliver of
"radicals" were really clued into those issues, and many of them also adhered
to one or another nonsensical conspiracy theory to boot, which weakened their
cases when it came to appealing to the modern world. Today I see growing
kernels of increasingly less marginalized and increasingly more powerful
people who have been educating themselves, participating in the conversation,
and speaking out.

No it's not perfect, and it's not happening absent a lot of the revelation of
lots of repugnant behavior. And it's also happening seemingly very, very
slowly. But my perception is that the trend is for the most part in the right
direction and strong. Giving up is the only sure way to lose at this point.

The bulk of this article seems to be completely out of touch with the way
people have been using the internet, especially younger people. It's not
becoming more TV-like, it's becoming more interactive and participatory. It's
not retaining existing power structures. That only appears to be the case when
you look at bullshit measurements based on bogus statistics like paper
valuations and user counts. The reality is that the real power is in the
people. In the content creators, in the groups, in the social networks
themselves. The value layered on top of that or spread in-between to
facilitate it is fragile and small by comparison. It's the same as in Silicon
Valley. Having a billion dollar valuation doesn't mean your company is
powerful or secure any more than having a billion users does. And it doesn't.

I predict that within the next 5 or perhaps 10 years there will be another
great shift and "implosion" of one of the current major "internet powers".
Perhaps facebook, or youtube, perhaps even google or amazon. I don't think
people understand the mobility of the modern technological market. You do not
own users or customers, you retain them through superior service. It will
probably shock people who vulnerable these mega-corps are to disruption, and
once one of these big shifts happens once you are going to see a crapton of
bloviation from the chattering classes about how absolutely unpredictable and
ground-breaking the whole thing is, but it means nothing more than that they
haven't been paying attention.

------
dang
Url changed from [http://boingboing.net/2015/08/18/the-end-of-the-internet-
dre...](http://boingboing.net/2015/08/18/the-end-of-the-internet-dream.html),
which points to this, which is technically a dupe
([https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20End%20of%20the%20Interne...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20End%20of%20the%20Internet%20Dream&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0))
but didn't have much discussion.

------
necessity
Again with this "there aren't as many women in
computing/politics/NASCAR/mining industry as there should be" bullshit. I'll
just paste previous comments because it's always the same irrational shit
people like to vomit to get an audience.

Why are there so few male manicures? Why so few male babysitters? Why so few
female NASCAR drivers? Why so few female in the army? Why so few male in the
wedding dress business?

We MUST to do something about this! People of a certain gender cannot prefer
some activities over others!

This is ridiculous.

Relevant: [https://youtu.be/ENL-Jv8GVkk#t=29m15s](https://youtu.be/ENL-
Jv8GVkk#t=29m15s)

~~~
TeMPOraL
I decided to ignore that angle in order to not start a gender shitstorm _this
time_ and detract from a lot of interesting points made in that talk, but I
believe the author basically answers herself but doesn't even notice it:

"Many of the most successful security experts never went to college, or even
finished high school. A statistically disproportionate number of you are on
the autism spectrum."

She says there are more people on the autism spectrum in the hacker crowd than
expected. Also (I believe is implied) college dropouts, apparently. And it's
ok. So if there are more males in the field, why is it not ok? Shouldn't we be
fighting against the autism-bias and dropout-bias? Surely neurotypical people
and college graduates are underrepresented in tech, by the very definition of
"being statistically underrepresented".

~~~
tzs
Boys are approximately four times as likely as girls to be autistic. That
would tend to make a group that is disproportionately male automatically be
disproportionately autistic compared to the general population.

I wonder if that was taken into account when determining that security experts
are disproportionately autistic?

Assuming that this is based on a proper base population for comparison, and so
autistics are disproportionate among security experts when compared to their
prevalence in a group drawn from the general population with the same gender
statistics as security experts, then a possibility to consider is that
whatever it is about males that makes them more likely to be autistic might
also be something that makes males more likely to be interested in hacking.

That would fit with Asperger's view that autism was at the extreme end of a
spectrum of behaviors normally associated with "maleness".

~~~
tptacek
I don't believe she has real numbers on whether security people, in
particular, are neurotypical. I'm guessing she's invoking studies of
technologists in general (which would make sense in the context of a talk).

