he open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.
Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.
Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that’s not good enough.
Now, the hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what’s still open, and likely won’t rest until they’ve either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.
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The good thing with the internet is that everybody can publish their thoughts. The bad thing is, that everyone actually does XD
Before the open web was an slop machine, it was a lying machine.
Anyone can post anything they want, and it can be read anywhere in the world, and that has made the Internet the most powerful propaganda weapon, the biggest advertising tool, the greatest source of lies and misinformation, the greatest tool for scammers and thieves, and the single greatest danger to the mental and physical health of the public, in all of history.
A lie can run around the world before the truth has its boots on, as the saying goes. Just to give one of a million examples, twenty people were murdered by angry mobs in India after a fake video about Pakistanis kidnapping children off the street went viral. It didn’t matter how fake the video was, or how hard Indian authorities worked to convince WhatsApp users there was no epidemic of foreigners kidnapping Indian children.
The problem is that the internet exists, and that lies and misinformation can be posted on it at all. Because people will be killed - have been killed, over and over and over again - before the authorities can catch and stop the lie that’s motivating the murder. And millions of people will see the lie and not see, or not believe, the correction - how many people in the United States today still believe Haitian migrants in Springfield were stealing and eating people’s pets? Or that horse dewormer cures COVID, cancer, and autism? Or that CCP party loyalists traveled to the United States decades ago and had children on US soil so those children, trained as spies and agent provocateurs, could return to the United States and undermine its elections?
The single greatest impact on world politics the Internet has had so far was the so-called Arab Spring - a so-called crowdsourced, bottom up, revolutionary movement across Africa and the Middle East. And every country that experienced an Arab Spring is worse off today. The “first online revolution” baited out and killed tens of thousands of the most passionate young revolutionaries while either entrenching dictatorships or replacing them with worse ones, depending on whether ambitious leaders or organized opposition movements took control of the mass protests and used them to take power, or just left those mass protests to thrash without organization or purpose until they died in the street.
And the Arab Spring couldn’t have happened without the free and open Internet.
The information revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
And if that same freedom, to use the internet however you want, is what’s going to kill the internet by unleashing swarms of AI bots that force the Internet’s free protocols to change or die, good. Replace it with something that humanity can use responsibly, because we sure as hell can’t use the current one right.
I mostly agree with your point, but whatever will replace the current protocols, I fucking guarantee you that it will be worse than we have today
I could see corporations take over the mainstream public web but the open networking tools will persist to create a new open web besides it.
If the “darkweb” does one thing very well its demonstrating how there will always be a way.
Yeah, the protocols that corporations and governments rely on were (mostly) not their own creations, and they cannot feasibly change the underlying TCP/IP stack itself, which has quite a lot of ‘grey space’ baked into it in terms of controlling traffic. Even China, whose government could much more realistically create another alternative model with a totally different protocols (a la DTNs) and mandate domestic equipment use them (enabling them to block the current suite of protocols), just haven’t even bothered attempting that route because of how huge a lift it would be.
The biggest danger is probably national boundary isolation, which countries have moved further and further towards. This is not actually all that rare, and countries have a lot more ability to control cross-border network traffic than people probably realize (most people probably envision something akin to The Great Firewall, but that is explicitly about still facilitating north/south traffic at-scale).
Totally discrete ‘mini internets’ via e.g. mesh networks or directional wireless P2P bridges is totally doable, but generally not a way to avoid government scrutiny as it’s very easy to detect. If we ever get to a point where you’re not subscribing to an ISP for internet, but to ‘Disney Network’, with just their services (and add-on bundles for other services!), it’ll be in conjunction with regulatory capture to help them ‘protect’ against pirate (as in, un-controlled by government, not as in copyrights) networks.
