
Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments - cpeterso
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/mozilla-goes-full-incubator-with-fix-the-internet-startup-lab-and-early-stage-investments/
======
lightninglu10
Hey all, Patrick here & one of the mentors for the Mozilla Builders "fix-the-
internet" incubator
[https://builders.mozilla.community/](https://builders.mozilla.community/).

We have 3 different offerings for this Summer. All incubator style, meaning
you meet weekly or biweekly with mentors and we really try to help drive you
from point A to point C.

1\. $75k investment in a startup. MUST be serious about wanting to build
something awesome and put in the hard work it takes to do so.

2\. $16k funding in a much earlier stage project (idea stage / MVP stage).
MUST be serious about commitment it takes to get to launch.

3\. OPEN LABS: these are open to the entire community and you have access to
the mentors. 10 min checkins each week & peer sessions. We've had TONS of
amazing projects for our Open Labs in the Spring and we hope to see TONS more
for the Summer.

In terms of MISSION and what we're looking for:

We started this new incubator out of Mozilla in order to work with & invest in
developers, startups, and technology enthusiasts who are building things that
will shape the internet and have a positive impact without needing to hyper
focus on the bottom line. We call this our ”fix-the-internet” incubator.

~~~
cousin_it
Here's my "fix the internet" idea: build a search engine that is itself ad-
free, and searches over only the ad-free segment of the web. More options:
allow users to exclude sites with ads, sites with ecommerce, sites with
tracking, or simply allow users to build and share lists of sites to exclude.
Rationale: the unmonetized or under-monetized web was awesome, a lot of it
still exists under the radar now, and it would be good to reify it as a
tangible thing. Bonus 1: competitors probably won't copy your features. Bonus
2: spam won't be a big problem, as most of it contains ads.

~~~
pwdisswordfish2
[https://wiby.me](https://wiby.me)

~~~
cousin_it
Very cool! Though it seems more like a hand-picked directory than a search
engine with a crawler, as it doesn't find quite a few good noncommercial pages
that I know exist.

~~~
burkaman
Looks like pages have to be submitted here to be included:
[https://wiby.me/submit/](https://wiby.me/submit/)

------
pwdisswordfish2
The internet could be "fixed" by regulating advertising. In the beginning
there were rules. No commercial use. When that was lifted we started the
descent into where things are now. It began with a lawyer posting an ad about
immigration services to Usenet. It has come a long way since then. All the
while, the web browser has supported always advertising, making it easier and
easier to consume ads, buy and sell via the web.

People in the 1990's who wanted "e-commerce" got their wish. Certain companies
and individuals have become wealthy beyond imagination. Companies are hording
cash. However it is not an equal playing field.

Governments have heretofore been unwilling to regulate. Some, those who are
proifiting from the status quo, might say this is starting to change. Even if
this is true, the change is very slow. In Mozilla Corporation's domicile,
there has been no significant change.

Mozilla is funded indirectly by advertising. Their funding comes from Google.
Google's funding comes from advertisers.

~~~
austincheney
That, historically speaking, is not enough. People will find a away to screw
up advertising, whether intentionally or not, so long as there is revenue to
earn. Perhaps things have gotten better but when I used to dig into that code
for work some years ago it was near negligent incompetent.

If you are going to recommend regulation the only thing that works, as
exemplified by every other profession, is credentials: licensing and
certification. There would be less bad software in the world if there were
less bad software developers employed writing software and everybody else held
to a minimum ethical standard.

Right now, at least before COVID, there was no motivation to write good
software. Many developers, at least web developers whether front or back end,
only goal was employability which often meant tooling to a tech stack and
trying not to write original software.

Edit: I anticipate this will be downvoted extensively, because regulating
minimal developer competence is always heavily down voted. It’s curious though
that people claim there is a problem they want fixed only until they realize
the fix applies directly to them, at which point the problem is no longer
worth the effort.

~~~
searchableguy
I mean I would agree with your position if _most_ institutions were able to
produce competent software engineers and didn't cost a life. And even if they
did, I wonder how many of them work for an ad network while they certainly can
work at any other job with good pay.

On the other hand, other industries with certification and oaths are much more
shady. You can't hammer ethics through academics. If anything, current
academical culture encourages being unethical and liar while disguising as
opposite. In my own experience, people who seem obsessed with degrees and
accredition were the most unethical I had seen. They usually are in management
position or law/government stuff.

So I downvoted this comment despite agreeing because this doesn't seem
practical. This is unnecessary gatekeeping that will disproportionately affect
"poor" people and increase status quo for no benefit in return.

~~~
austincheney
> I mean I would agree with your position if most institutions were able to
> produce competent software engineers and didn't cost a life.

Likewise, not everybody who graduates law school should be a lawyer. Education
in other industries is just a prerequisite of a larger process and certainly
not a qualifier. Other industries solve for this problem with either
broker/agent relationships or through forced internships. Those filtering
criteria are built into the licensing process and result in forced mentoring
at the liability of a license holder.

------
reggieband
This is completely tangental but I think it is wrong to see the internet as
needing another feature in order to be complete. I think we really need a
ground up re-think of data.

I remember diligently cataloging my movie preferences in LoveFilm, a UK
Netflix competitor (when Netflix was a movie-by-mail company). I think I rated
thousands of movies. I did the same in Netflix, certainly hundreds of films
before they changed their rating scheme to thumbs up and "preference rating".
Yet I have no access to this data.

We often talk about how much companies know about us. Google knows what search
terms I search for. Facebook knows what content I slow down on while scrolling
my feed. Youtube knows what videos I watch. My cell phone company probably
knows the location of my cell every minute of the day. And outside of the
horrible interfaces they have been regulated to provide me access to that data
... it is almost completely opaque to me.

Re-thinking data isn't the kind of thing a startup can do. I think we need to
find legal mechanisms to really force companies to make data available to the
originators of that data. IMO, that is the only way we salvage the Internet.

~~~
na85
>Re-thinking data isn't the kind of thing a startup can do. I think we need to
find legal mechanisms to really force companies to make data available to the
originators of that data. IMO, that is the only way we salvage the Internet.

You are completely correct, but unfortunately it's not fun and quite
frustrating to work with government, and you're competing with lobbyists that
Facebook and Google have a financial interest in supporting.

It's a lot easier and more glamorous to just throw some JavaScript at the low-
hanging fruit.

------
kybernetikos
The irony of posting this link, when for me the site doesn't even work because
techcrunch.com redirects via guce.advertising.com which doesn't dns resolve.

It's annoying, but it's not too bad, because after having looked at their
deceptive, user-hostile (and in my opinion illegal in the EU) practices, I'm
pretty resigned to never going to another oath/guce site again.

It's sites like techcrunch and their siblings that are breaking the internet.

~~~
s_gourichon
Feels ironic, could be considered "meta", that the link goes to techcrunch and
my screen shows:

> uMatrix has prevented the following page from loading: >
> [https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=..](https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=..).

Yes, there is a dire need for fixing the Internet.

Oh, by the way, remember, when fixing the Internet tools and protocols... The
following sentence was written thinking of aircraft hull design, isn't a
browser some kind of "netcraft" that has become too complicated and needs a
redesign?

"It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add,
but when there is nothing more to remove." (Antoine de Saint Exupéry)

------
Stoner
Hey everyone, my team is in Mozilla's ”fix-the-internet” MVP Lab right now.

We're working on Vngle, a decentralized grassroots news network combatting
news deserts across America. We're working in Georgia now and will be moving
to other states soon.

Sign up to stay updated at Vngle.com or follow us on social @VngleStories.
[https://www.instagram.com/VngleStories/](https://www.instagram.com/VngleStories/)

~~~
ckolkey
Really trying to be constructive here: consider investing in one or two more
vowels. The "vn" is...rough.

~~~
sjroot
Looks to be a play on the word “Angle” - in the context of news, this is the
point you’re trying to convince your readers of. “What’s your angle?”

~~~
brobinson
I pronounced it in my head as "vungle"...

~~~
saurik
I went with "vingle".

------
gonational
Real talk, Mozilla; would you be interested in funding a privacy-oriented fork
of Firefox with all the unnecessary extras (Pocket, etc.) stripped out?

I’m thinking something just like Firefox, except unencumbered by Google or
other corporate affiliations, etc.

I think this would be the best first step towards any kind of “fixing the
Internet”.

~~~
gkoberger
It's tough.

People at Mozilla care so much about privacy, to the point that (when I worked
there 2010-2012), they refused to do "services" the same way Google did (aka a
login and a central server). So as a result, Chrome "just worked" and Firefox
was completely unusable.

The people at Mozilla really care about privacy. But they also have to build
something people can actually use. That means finding a balance between
privacy and usability.

To you it's "fixing the Internet", but to most normal people it's "removing
features." Like, can you imagine explaining to the average user why they can't
just type a search into the address bar and get Google results?

(More specifically, though, what would you strip? Pocket is owned by Mozilla
and is just a fancy bookmark manager, but sure. Google is just a default
search; data isn't being sent to them. Outside of those, what would you
remove?)

~~~
dependenttypes
> they refused to do "services" the same way Google did

What services?

> More specifically, though, what would you strip?

Telemetry and the normandy/shield backdoor first of all. Then remove the
google analytics from the about:addons page (or at least let adblockers work
on it). Then let adblockers work on the mozilla pages. Then disable things
like pings, beacons, etc by default and integrate more tor browser patches.

Firefox right now is the browser that calls back the most
[https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...](https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165858896176660480)

As for Pocket, Mozilla promised ages ago to make the server foss, still no
luck with it.

~~~
gonational
This is an underrated comment.

------
karlicoss
I don't need money and not interested in founding a startup, but I've been
working on fixing the internet at least for myself, in particular, browser
history. Have a working app & extension. Anyone wants to take my idea?
[https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia](https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia)

~~~
lightninglu10
This is really cool!

------
userbinator
How to "fix the internet"? Stop advocating for JS-heavy/required sites
(including SPAs) whose use requires browsers that depend on a massively
complex specification that can only be implemented fully by a huge
organisation, and advocate the subset of HTML that would be usable from nearly
any browser --- even one that any reasonably skilled developer could write
him/herself --- and the highly accessible and user-friendly "internet as a
hyperlinked web of documents" which it was envisioned to be.

To try to "fix the internet" in a commercial way just feels a little awkward.

~~~
pedrogpimenta
Nothing about that is inherently bad. It leads to bad behaviour, but in and of
itself it's not bad. Also, saying that only a big corporation can provide a
browser is both the nature of things and a lie. There are hugely complex
programs built by "the community" (VLC to give an example).

I want a better internet but I don't want to go back to the past.

~~~
userbinator
_There are hugely complex programs built by "the community" (VLC to give an
example)._

The complexity of a browser and the complexity of a media player are extremely
different. To make a huge generalisation, the latter is far more maths-heavy
and less interactive. I have played around with writing decoders for a few
codecs, and to a first approximation, they are very similar, so it's not hard
to see how something like VLC was created. Media formats are also relatively
stable, it's not like a new one comes out every few months.

On the other hand, the modern browser has many different components that a
very wide breadth of knowledge is necessary, and on top of that, companies
like Google are paying a great many people to do what appears to simply be
churning the "standards" and continuously increasing their complexity, making
it harder for others to even keep up. They invented the absurd oxymoron
"living standard". Their common euphemism for that is "pushing the web
forward".

The great diversity of media players vs. the effective monopoly of browser(s)
already shows this huge difference.

------
Abishek_Muthian
I think alt open-source smartphone operating systems like PostmarketOS,
PureOS, UBPorts would be a great candidate for this.

The need to breach the duopoly in mobile smartphone ecosystem is now greater
than ever if we need to protect the future of mobile computing and the
data(lifestyle) of individuals using it; considering smartphone is the first
computer for ~ > half of world population.

------
kylek
I think the conversation needs to change a bit. People just don't care in the
current state. I've been toying with the idea of calling all this
(seo/ads/blogspam/content marketing and the auto-twitter-bot-ira-shill-to-
cause-controversy-and-mass-media-parroting-it-feedback-loop) "internet
pollution" in order to get average joes to think about it differently.

------
brainless
What is "fix-the-internet"?

I am going through Patrick's post here, and the website but still really no
clue what is "fix-the-internet"?

Wordpress, DDG, Kickstarter have very different purposes. If the definition is
so broad then I could surely fall into it. How does one know?

------
detaro
previous post by mozilla employees:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182232)

------
brainless
I find it funny that Mozilla mentions GitHub on the top messaging but I think
GitLab fits better. Saying this even as an active GitHub user.

------
majewsky
About that prison call thing: My understanding of these prison calling
companies in the US is that they give a split of the revenue to prison
administrators. If that's true, prison admins wouldn't have an incentive to
switch to the free system. Can someone confirm or deny that?

------
kristopolous
I missed this... Is there still an opportunity, anyone know?

~~~
lightninglu10
hey @kristopolous! yes we are JUST starting our new summer program.
Applications are due June 5th.

[https://builders.mozilla.community/](https://builders.mozilla.community/)

LMK if you have any questions!

~~~
kristopolous
Great! thanks.

------
hartator
I thought Mozilla was a non-profit fundation?

~~~
est31
There is Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation. The foundation owns the
corporation.

~~~
fabrice_d
Mitchel is now the CEO of Mozilla Corp
([https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-
name...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-named-ceo-of-
mozilla/))

~~~
est31
Thanks for pointing it out. Seems she's also still foundation chair so the two
can't be differentiated by their leadership. I've edited my comment to remove
the mentions.

------
seemslegit
Like everything that Mozilla did for the last decade or so this is far more
likely to produce false choices than actual alternatives.

------
Causality1
I thought Mozilla was already on financial life support itself. How do they
have money for this?

~~~
hu3
Don't they get half a billion per year from Google?

------
saadalem
Here are some thoughts from Walter Isaacson
[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-broken-starting-
from...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-broken-starting-from-scratch-
heres-how-id-fix-isaacson) :

My big idea is that we have to fix the internet. After forty years, it has
begun to corrode, both itself and us. It is still a marvelous and miraculous
invention, but now there are bugs in the foundation, bats in the belfry, and
trolls in the basement.

I do not mean this to be one of those technophobic rants dissing the Internet
for rewiring our brains to give us the twitchy attention span of Donald Trump
on Twitter or pontificating about how we have to log off and smell the
flowers. Those qualms about new technologies have existed ever since Plato
fretted that the technology of writing would threaten memorization and
oratory. I love the internet and all of its digital offshoots. What I bemoan
is its decline.

There is a bug in its original design that at first seemed like a feature but
has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and
malevolent actors: its packets are encoded with the address of their
destination but not of their authentic origin. With a circuit-switched
network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but
that’s not true with the packet-switched design of the internet.

Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors
of the early browsers created for the World Wide Web. It brilliantly allowed
the whole of the earth’s computers to be webbed together and navigated through
hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But
if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didn’t exactly know who was
linking to you or coming to use your content.

All of that enshrined the potential for anonymity. You could make comments
anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously. Consume content anonymously. With a
little effort, send email anonymously. And if you figured out a way to get
into someone’s servers or databases, you could do it anonymously.

For years, the benefits of anonymity on the Net outweighed its drawbacks.
People felt more free to express themselves, which was especially valuable if
they were dissidents or hiding a personal secret. This was celebrated in the
famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Now the problem is nobody can tell if you’re a troll. Or a hacker. Or a bot.
Or a Macedonian teenager publishing a story that the Pope has endorsed Trump.

This has poisoned civil discourse, enabled hacking, permitted cyberbullying,
and made email a risk. Its inherent lack of security has allowed Russian
actors to screw with our democratic process.

The lack of secure identification and authentication inherent in the
internet’s genetic code has also prevented easy transactions, thwarted
financial inclusion, destroyed the business models of content creators,
unleashed deluges of spam, and forced us to use passwords and two-factor
authentication schemes that would have baffled Houdini.

The trillions being spent and the IQ points of computer science talent being
allocated to tackle security issues makes it a drag, rather than a spur, to
productivity in some sectors.

In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and
you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those
who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The Internet has
proven him correct.

The Web is no longer a place of community, no longer an agora. Every day more
sites are eliminating comments sections.

If we could start from scratch, here’s what I think we would do:

Create a system that enables content producers to negotiate with aggregators
and search engines to get a royalty whenever their content is used, like ASCAP
has negotiated for public performances and radio airings of its members’
works.

Embed a simple digital wallet and currency for quick and easy small payments
for songs, blogs, articles, and whatever other digital content is for sale.

Encode emails with an authenticated return or originating address.

Enforce critical properties and security at the lowest levels of the system
possible, such as in the hardware or in the programming language, instead of
leaving it to programmers to incorporate security into every line of code they
write.

Build chips and machines that update the notion of an internet packet. For
those who want, their packets could be encoded or tagged with metadata that
describe what they contain and give the rules for how it can be used.

Most internet engineers think that these reforms are possible, from Vint Cerf,
the original TCP/IP coauthor, to Milo Medin of Google, to Howard Shrobe, the
director of cybersecurity at MIT. “We don’t need to live in cyber hell,”
Shrobe has argued.

Implementing them is less a matter of technology than of cost and social will.
Some people, understandably, will resist any diminution of anonymity, which
they sometimes label privacy.

So the best approach, I think, would be to try to create a voluntary system,
for those who want to use it, to have verified identification and
authentication.

People would not be forced to use such a system. If they wanted to communicate
and surf anonymously, they could. But those of us who choose, at times, not to
be anonymous and not to deal with people who are anonymous should have that
right as well. That’s the way it works in the real world.

The benefits would be many: Easy and secure ways to deal with your finances
and medical records. Small payment systems that could reward valued content
rather than the current incentive to concentrate on clickbait for advertising.
Less hacking, spamming, cyberbullying, trolling, and the spewing of anonymous
hate. And the possibility of a more civil discourse.

------
nixpulvis
Can someone please sue Apple for anti-trust violations on the grounds that
forcing me to copy and paste all my fucking links instead of setting a default
browser on iOS is a direct attack on health competition in the web browser
space?!

The fact that this issue has gone unresolved for this many years is completely
unacceptable.

~~~
ohyeshedid
While you're waiting for someone to do that, you could always stop giving them
your money, time, and attention; stop using their products.

~~~
nixpulvis
Working on it... it's not quite so simple though. I did however quit working
for them, despite the promise of a nice desk in the space ship.

Apple is in no way the worst offender, but they are in many ways the largest.

With great prominence comes great indifference it seems.

How can anyone defend the decline in quality Apple's entire line has suffered
in the past years. Qualities that enabled my personal development as a
software engineer, creative hobbyist, and overall human being are now trashed
like yesterdays news. Ideas critical to the foundation of the industry, now
forgotten or unlearned.

I'm becoming desperate for action, but remain paralyzed by the scope. Please
forgive me for not throwing away my iPhone sooner.

~~~
ohyeshedid
It definitely doesn't help that there's really only one other ecosystem for
smartphones, currently.

I think we're probably all desperate for action and paralyzed by the scope, in
a number of ways. Don't beat yourself up about it, there's only so much
control you have over the situation. What I suggested is not simple, but it is
possible and may be the only control you have in the end.

------
gambler
_> Developers in a variety of domains were invited to apply, as long as they
fit the themes of empowerment, privacy, decentralization, community and so
on._

Funny. I'm seeing how the Web is being fucked over in exactly these areas, and
yet I don't see Mozilla doing anything to stop it. Quite the opposite, they
contribute to it and follow Google's lead on most of the issues.

Here is the simplest and incredibly impactful user empowerment idea. Assume I
have a computer with Firefox and an internet connection. Can I open the
browser, press "make a web page" button and create a page with a stable URL
(probably a GUID) accessible to other people? Without creating an account some
or doing some nerdy shit. Nope.

Well, the fact that this basic idea still isn't implemented in the age of
"cloud computing" tells you everything you need to know about whether major
player in the market (which Mozilla will soon cease to be) want to empower
their users.

~~~
DevKoala
Who will host the webpage in your scenario?

~~~
gambler
Really, this is the question I'm being asked on Hacker News? Are we at the
point where an average user here never heard of BitTorrent, Tor and other
similar systems? Or is it a way to demand for me to post a complete
description of the protocol that would support the feature above? It doesn't
matter what the specific protocol is. What matters is that _this is not even a
goal_ and it should be.

~~~
notriddle
> Are we at the point where an average user here never heard of BitTorrent,
> Tor and other similar systems?

Tor hidden services don't provide permanent storage. It's just a routing
protocol.

BitTorrent doesn't guarantee storage, either. A popular site will remain de
facto stable, but the long tail is a different story.

Every. Single. Time. This idea comes up, and it always fails because the
economics just don't work out. Someone needs to take care of all those
terabytes of data. Routing is pretty cheap, and can basically be thought of as
solved by Tor, I2P, IPFS, BitTorrent, etc. If you're willing to keep your PC
on 24/7, it's easy, but nobody can expect that.

The closest you can get is FreeNet. Kinda. It's better than BitTorrent, but
still worse than S3, because of course it is, it's free.

~~~
nl
Well put.

A much more sensible response would be "That button lets them pay $2/year for
a basic hosting account which makes the service self sustaining".

