The Open Web Is Dying

341 points by perezbox 6 years ago | 247 comments

mmaunder 6 years ago |

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?

aylmao 6 years ago | |

> Is it that the open minded consumer is dying?

I'd bet the number of open-minded consumers, if anything, is growing and is bigger than it ever was. The problem is the number of not open-minded consumers is perhaps growing faster.

The usual "most people don't care" argument aside (which is debatable, IMO, but a tangential issue), consider the literature— a lot of this open world has been written, discussed and built for the english-speaking world. How can a user begin to care if they are never exposed to alternatives, or don't find the support they need in these communities due to language barriers. All of this is just my own guesswork, and I hope I'm wrong, but as the web grows worldwide, the percentage of open-minded consumers with knowledge of these alternatives will probably keep diminishing unless more active work is actively done in making it available to them.

tren 6 years ago | | |

One interesting search engine is https://millionshort.com/, you can choose to exclude the most popular sites from search results. It would be good if Google etc did this with a subset of returned results, e.g. show 2 out of 10 lesser ranked sites at random in the serps.

apatters 6 years ago | | |

> a lot of this open world has been written, discussed and built for the english-speaking world.

That's true on the software side, but on the hardware side, China has a much more vibrant hacker culture, mainly because they're not afraid to defy draconian US intellectual property laws. And they speak the second most popular language in the world.

_wldu 6 years ago | | |

Your comments are insulting to people who actually do not care and just want to use the same popular platform that all their friends use. A few nerds telling them they are not enlightened won't work. It's the same bunch of nerds telling them to run Linux. Can't the masses just see how wrong they are... yeah, right.

I run Linux and use the open web BTW, I'm just old enough to know that insulting people you are trying to convince of something usually backfires. And, most importantly, you should know that they may not want or need your help. You calling them uninformed/ignorant/closed minded/etc. will just get you kicked out faster.

lkrubner 6 years ago | |

This is like asking, remember when Mercedes Benz was the largest car company in the world? The 1880s were a magical time!

Every industry goes through a period of experimentation. In his 1985 book, Innovation And Entrepreneurship, on page 121, the great business guru Peter Drucker offered this:

In the 1920s, literally hundreds of companies were making radio sets and hundreds more were going into radio stations. By 1935, the control of broadcasting had moved into the hands of three "networks" and there were only a dozen manufacturers of radio sets left. Again, there was an explosion in the number of newspapers founded between 1880 and 1900. In fact, newspapers were among the "growth industries" of the time. Since World War I, the number of newspapers in every major country has been going downhill steadily. And the same is true of banking. After the founders -- the Morgans, the Siemenses, the Shibusawas -- there was an almost explosive growth of new banks in the United States as well as in Europe. But around 1890, only twenty years later, consolidation set in. Banking firms began to go out of business or to merge. By the end of World War II in every major country only a handful of banks were left that had more than local importance, whether as commercial or private banks. ...But each time without exception the survivor has been a company that was started during the early explosive period. After that period is over, entry into the industry is foreclosed for all practical purposes. There is a "window" of a few years during which a new venture must establish itself in any new knowledge-based industry.

The open period for the Internet appears to have been the 20 years from 1990 to 2010, give or take a year. The biggest surprise about this is that there was a constant public rhetoric about the Internet that argued that it would be the most naturally competitive ecosystem ever invented, the one most resistant to monopoly, but in fact the opposite happened -- it consolidated much more quickly than any other major industry, certainly much faster than the examples that Drucker gives.

perezbox 6 years ago | | |

< The biggest surprise about this is that there was a constant public rhetoric about the Internet that argued that it would be the most naturally competitive ecosystem ever invented, the one most resistant to monopoly, but in fact the opposite happened -- it consolidated much more quickly than any other major industry, certainly much faster than the examples that Drucker gives

This is a great great point!

pphysch 6 years ago | | |

Thank you for the historical perspective. Language (communications technology) is power and power is hungry.

kyuudou 6 years ago | | |

9/11 happened, basically. All the money went to surveillance and merging ISPs to make that easier.

Supermancho 6 years ago | |

> Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly?

No. It was ubiquitous, but not a monopoly as it did not control anything. It was the best implementation at the time, similar to how KFC never had a monopoly on Fried Chicken, despite KFC being the only commercial offering in many regions.

x3blah 6 years ago | |

"Anyone remember when Netscape was a browser monopoly?"

I remember when Andreesen wanted to commercially license Netscape Navigator to companies.

I remember when Microsoft perceived the web as a threat and wanted to act as the gateway to it.

I remember when Google was just a search engine and had no business model.

Perhaps the lesson is that there really is no money to be made from consumers, including corporations, for being the "gateway to the web". Rather, the money is in manipulating or selling out those consumers for the benefit of third parties. The money is to be made from third parties, not consumers. Whomever is the gateway is in the best position to do that.

srg0 6 years ago | | |

While it was true for _some_ companies in the last 20 years, it won't necessarily remain the same in the next 20 years. Computer business in 1980 was very different from 2000, and it is very different now. And it's not a given that _most_ of the money is being made from third parties.

Even now, most of the top tech companies are known as hardware companies (Apple, Samsung, Foxconn, Huawei, Dell...). Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook are exceptions. And out of these three, only Alphabet and Facebook thrive on middleman strategy.

Torwald 6 years ago | | |

The money from the consumer goes to the ISP.

nine_k 6 years ago | |

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 6 years ago | | |

> 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?

lisper 6 years ago | | |

Freedom isn't free, and never has been. But it's always been worth striving for.

kart23 6 years ago | | |

And discord has replaced it all.

Nearly every online community I've seen recently has a discord server. And the range is wide and far. Minecraft, piracy, Linux, fashion, literally anything you can think of. And I think their market share is only going to go up. Their numbers pale in comparison to facebook, but their audience is young and trusting. Ask literally anyone below 20, and they will have a discord account.

someguyorother 6 years ago | | |

>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.

What's the conscious effort to stay on email? It seems like most people use email because everybody else uses email, not because it's federated.

p1mrx 6 years ago | |

> Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds

There are fewer IPv4 addresses than people, which means ISPs who haven't deployed IPv6 are a threat to the open web.

imtringued 6 years ago | | |

Worse, each person can have more than one device.

saagarjha 6 years ago | | |

Luckily most VPSes know good ISPs.

ur-whale 6 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.

Entirely incorrect: none of the folks in my immediate social network would be able to do something like this. Only a techie would. And statistically, as a group, techies are a tiny minority.

ACow_Adonis 6 years ago | | |

It's a bit like the old joke of the artist taking 5 minutes to sketch a portrait, but ten years of training to be able to do so.

Sure you can do those things in seconds, as long as you don't account for the 10 years it took to train in the tech background and ecosystem that them let's you do that in seconds.

I'm a techie/data scientist, but it would probably take me a week of reading and experimentation to put up something minimally useful, because I've got no explicit web development knowledge.

To my non techie friends, you might as well tell them to move a stone using the force...

pojntfx 6 years ago | |

It's not a choice. All of my friends, coworkers and family are on proprietary platforms with no way outward; what you call "choice" is really just an illusion of choice if we're being honest to ourselves.

AndrewUnmuted 6 years ago | | |

Plenty of people make this choice, how could it be an illusion?

Social media isn't the only way to stay in touch. In fact all it really is, is a way to automate the means and pleasantries by which we relate with others at the more human/animal level. We "poke" and "react" and "share" on these platforms just like we do via other communicative tools like phones, letters, and telegrams.

With the gamification and addictive nature of these social media platforms, we sort of merge sports and games with socializing, allowing everyone to be a socialite like the ones we all have read about from yesteryear. This devalues social relationships and puts a greater emphasis on MORE of them; an opiate addict always ends up eventually using heroin.

muglug 6 years ago | |

Yup - I remember seeing “type in the AOL keyword ...” in magazines, and not being able to do that because I didn’t have AOL.

rchaud 6 years ago | | |

I remember seeing that in GamePro magazines back in '95 or so. Did not live in the US so I had no idea what "AOL keyword" was. It didn't matter because the magazine already had a site (gamepro.com) that was accessible from anywhere. No walled garden required.

amelius 6 years ago | |

> Is it that the open minded consumer is dying?

In the beginning of the internet, there were more tech-savvy people on the internet. I assume that these people were more open minded than the rest of the population on average. Then came the big masses, and the percentage of open minded consumers on the net dropped. But, with improved access to information the open minded consumer on the net is on the rise again.

buboard 6 years ago | |

Suppose people make the massive move from walled media to their own websites. How long will it be until mobs start going after web hosts to demand censorship? The next security/privacy law will probably make it illegal to publish your ideas.

Its the mindset that has changed. The only way to fight that would be anonymous, secure, decentralised tech

duckMuppet 6 years ago | |

Extremely Well said.

Ideas and articles such as these often come from a more credentialed yet less historically literate/knowledgeable generation.

I think you typically see similar articles conflating these larger private companies and their shenanigans with the state or federal govts who have actual men with guns to impose their will.

For better or worse, words have much different meanings for younger generations.

hedora 6 years ago | | |

I’m surprised the article didn’t go back a few more years, when computer networks were controlled by a handful of companies that regularly censored content.

Before the web browser wars, we had (in the US) three big platforms: AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe. They all had highly censored, walled-garden forums with different focuses. The services had different price points. Something full of well-heeled professionals like Hacker News (bad example, because I’m ignoring the Internet; think quants, or suits) would be on CompuServe, which was far too expensive per hour for students and middle class teenagers.

We’re headed back there, and fast. I’ve heard the forums on some of the paid news sites are quite good for discussion of economic matters, for example.

Apparently, if I want medical information about coronavirus from actual medical researchers, I can no longer go to YouTube, since they’re taking down all content that hasn’t already been approved by the WHO. Moving forward, I guess that’s all going to paywalled inside $$$ medical journal sites.

bernardlunn 6 years ago | |

Yep "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 are not techie and want easy use Wordpress, they use open web standards.

rchaud 6 years ago | | |

Do you mean Wordpress.org?

Self-hosted Wordpress requires a lot of setup for non-technical users. They need to:

- select a web host and set up an account

- use cPanel or some other tool with an ancient, confusing GUI to install WP on the server

- set up their MySQL and WP login passwords. Which in addition to the web host account, means they need to have 3 sets of logins to do one thing.

and that's not even mentioning the security or functionality issues they may face if they don't set up backups, or decide to fill the site with plugins to accomplish basic functionality that WP doesn't provide.

sjroot 6 years ago |

> 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

rv-de 6 years ago |

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.

t0ughcritic 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

> "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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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 6 years ago |

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

https://blog.chromium.org/2019/10/no-more-mixed-messages-abo...

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?

cletus 6 years ago |

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".

threeseed 6 years ago |

> 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.

rvz 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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

threeseed 6 years ago | | |

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.

parasubvert 6 years ago | | |

Which is where he’s being somewhat naive. There are three points in which a network can be surveilled and censored:

1. Retail ISPs 2. Physical backbone/infrastructure providers 3. service & content providers (Facebook, Netflix, twitter etc)

We’ve seen centralization across all three areas as the market demand has outstripped our ability to supply open access standards in any given area. You’d need government-supported decentralization of all three areas to make it harder to censor or surveil, which is in no government’s interest.

The Great Firewall of China allows proliferation of #1 and #3 but provides mass surveillance and censorship via #2. As an aside, It’s really funny to interact with Chinese servers, I deployed a virtual host web server once via wildcard DNS, and it was like rolling the dice for any given dynamic hostname if the firewall decided that hostname needed to be censored or not, regardless of the content being the same.

Snowden also showed that the USA also does mass surveillance (just not censorship) via the network.

The only approach to discourage mass censorship and surveillance is extreme decentralization enforced by law: open access networks, widespread end to end cryptography, and a renewed investment in web architecture and technology to incentivize open activities. IMO the technological and usability failure of Tim Bernard Lee’s Semantic Web drive has been the root of the rise of the Facebooks of the world.

jerome-jh 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

How are those questions intensely political?

aklemm 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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

mntmoss 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

> 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.

aww_dang 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

> 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...

nurettin 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

> 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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

> 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 6 years ago |

Agree with the premise of the article. That's why I'm excited about Handshake (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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

You make very good points here. Thanks

IAmEveryone 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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 :-)

II2II 6 years ago | |

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.

perezbox 6 years ago | |

I run many of my own websites, on my own servers. Thanks for your feedback.

KCUOJJQJ 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

How will it work?

olliej 6 years ago | | |

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.

jimsmart 6 years ago | | |

You might find the FAQ here [1] helpful, but there is also more technical info linked from that page also.

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

leotravis10 6 years ago |

It has been dying since 2014. André Staltz: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...

renewiltord 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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

DeathArrow 6 years ago |

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

pjmlp 6 years ago |

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

throwaway777555 6 years ago |

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... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-go... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/technology/twitter-earnin... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-... (the US population is 328.2 million) [5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-... [6] https://gizmodo.com/facebook-patents-shadowbanning-183641134... [7] https://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-a-guide-... [8] https://www.facebook.com/help/214816128640041

normalnorm 6 years ago |

> 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 6 years ago |

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.

chrisallick 6 years ago |

Been dead for some time.

oliyoung 6 years ago |

It died years ago.

drngdds 6 years ago |

>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 6 years ago |

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...

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

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

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 6 years ago |

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.

notadev 6 years ago |

iTs OnLy cEnSoRsHiP wHeN tHe GoVeRnMeNt DoEs iT

cryptica 6 years ago |

> 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 6 years ago |

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...

The web is fine.

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)