A lot of the comments here seem to be quibbling. The analysis/argument isn't exactly how you/I would have phrased it.
But beyond the details, I think it's hard to argue with the main point. The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic side.
My favourite example is wikipedia. If we didn't already have wikipedia, I don't think we'd be likely to get one on today's web. The culture is just far too corporate for wikipedia to be the end result.
Youtube's another sort of example. Democratic media! A new culture factory!...
Youtubes play by the rules these days. Copyright.. business friendly policy, erring on the side of restriction. It's just more manageable. Nudity? Why annoy politicians and advertisers? Just give us the purple hills version. Violence? Do what TV does. Revolution? Maybe, yes. Sure. Up the arab spring! Wait.. no. actually, wait. Hold on, not in america. Look.., no just means not here. Political ads, eh...? How about you leave us out of this.
They are no longer interested in the unfolding and unpredictable consequences of their inventions. Facebook is the world's news stand & coffee house. Youtube's regional political radio, newsletters & party magazine. They do not want this job, so they're pretending it isn't they're job. Pretending they won't have to draw lines between truth and lies, free speech and hate speech, laws and despotism.
The fear driven incumbent mentality.
It's a pity we didn't get more wikipedia's back when the gettin was good. I would have preferred to see a giant wikipedia end up with the fake news problem (which I think these two giants almost created themselves).
Most adtech aggregators / content hosters start out by bypassing copyright law. Then when they have clients and users large enough to care they lock it down. Also crunchyroll has the same model. The issue with competitors to YouTube is the fact that it has a large moat but Twitch shows you can cross it. I think an upcoming competitor that is interesting is Floatplane because they are bootstrapped and have no VC and have no intention of selling out . https://linustechtips.com/main/store/product/147-join-floatp...
"The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more."
I don't know, I can get a VM and a public IP much cheaper now than ever before. It's never been easier to put content or innovation in front of the entire Internet.
Use to be when someone thought they could do something better they'd do it and let the Internet judge. For example, if you want a different social network then build one and get your friends to try it out. If they like it then maybe it'll grow. That's pretty much how every social site that was ever tried (including Facebook) started. Will your idea fail? Probably, but failure is just part of the process.
Seems like here you read a lot of "well Google/Facebook exists so why even bother?". That mentality is the real problem.
This is true. There are also a lot more people using the internet that you can get to. Taking it even further you don't even need a virtual machine or IP to do most of things people were doing back then with a regular machine. You could just use facebook.
I disagree with you on what this aggregates to. Controlling the path of least resistance as FB and Google do in online media (or just media if we project out somewhat) is a lot like controlling the medium entirely. This is (as I said above) not new in media but it is new in online media. In old media a small group controlled most of it. Now in online media, a few people do the same.
I'm not saying why even bother. I am saying (echoing the article in saying) that we're moving into a world where ordinary innovation and competition is simply not going to move these beasts from their entrenched position, not easily.
BTW, you can also start your own TV news show. Cameras are cheaper than ever. Doing a radio show (online obviously) is genuinely accessible since podcasting is still a largely open medium. That doesn't negate the point that entrenched incumbents dominate the market, structurally. HTTP is not how you get the content of your VM & IP to people. FB & Google is.
I don't know, I can get a VM and a public IP much cheaper now than ever before. It's never been easier to put content or innovation in front of the entire Internet.
No one will look at it. I had a Diaspora account. There's nothing and nobody there.
Cheap VM and public IP? Yes. But applies to everyone else as well. That in turn creates plenty of clutter/noise. Which then create the need for an even better idea.
True most ideas are going to fail. But (e.g.) even FB was born in an era where there was a chance of success. I'm not so sure that's the case now. That is, you're like to be stuck in mediocrity, and that can be stifling.
Failure is one thing. Average is another. These seem to be the nature of the beast of our current times.
Hosting costs, especially at their scale, aren't cheap; Wikipedia takes donations, in many different formats - https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give - if you like them, don't assume Wikipedia will simply keep existing, support them!
We didn't get more Wikipedia's because most of us sold out. The allure of 8 or 9-figure paydays, with "FU" money almost within reach, hell yes I'm going to build the best social-media kitten-photo coupon-clipping app for my chance at that instead of slaving away to saving the Internet from ungrateful masses who don't understand the dangers of the corporations.
From that era of the web, we also got archive.org and the EFF (please donate to them too!), both with very admirable missions, moreso these days.
The other site from that era I can think of is Craigslist, and they're still committed to a purple-on-white mostly-text interface and they still don't charge for personal use. (A peek at their own jobs page says they're hiring for React and mobile developers in SF, so maybe they're also changing.)
>My favourite example is wikipedia. If we didn't already have wikipedia, I don't think we'd be likely to get one on today's web. The culture is just far too corporate for wikipedia to be the end result.
I'm confused. It sounds like you're criticising Youtube etc for not being democratic media, but also not for "drawing lines between truth and lies" -- in other words policing speech.
I'm not accusing at all, just describing in a belligerent tone ;)
What I'm accusing (bemoaning?) them of mostly is being big, corporate and basically reserving a big portion of media for that big-corporate voice. This isn't new in media, but it is in online media.
On the point about policing truth (or maybe currating content)..this is just something they now have to deal with. Regimes have fallen on their platform, coups prevented, elections impacted.... They can't hide behind algorithmic moral neutrality as Google 1.0 did, at least least not without taking a bold (costly) stance in a free speech direction.
At the moment Google and Facebook are trying to be neither democratic or undemocratic. Not unbiased, just unopinionated in their role as the media. This is something you could only say in a corporate tone of voice.
These problems are all consequences of being enormous superpowers. I want stuff from GoogleFb, stuff I might feel I have a right to like speech or affiliation. I have to go to them for these. We don't have the "don't like my store, shop elsewhere" relationship anymore because they have all the stores where all the people buying and selling are.
Agreed. The most astounding part is how corporate america, government and the media changed the culture of the internet ( not just social media ) within a span of a couple of years.
The rampant censorship is something I could not have envisioned.
5 years ago, if you told me censorship would be the norm on reddit, twitter, facebook, youtube, etc. I would not have believed you. 10 years ago, if you told me anyone would support banning/stealing of domains ( daily stormer, etc ), I would not have believed you.
It is just astounding to witness the censorship powers of corporate + government + media.
The promise of the internet as an open platform for ideas/speech/etc that I grew up with in the 90s/00s has ended.
Perhaps it's the result of the centralization of the internet in the past 10 years. Hopefully the pendulum swings back towards a more decentralized version of the internet.
I don't use Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other large corporate account--for free or pay. I pay for my email with Fastmail, a trusted name. I've been with them since 2002.
I don't even use Google, Bing, or any other large search engine. I don't need to. I block all ads, tracking, cookies, beacons, and browser fingerprinting pretty well.
The way to win is to not play their game. I give my data to no one. Fastmail doesn't even have my address, just my name. I use Visa gift cards to buy stuff online.
I've been in IT over three decades and my online life is just fine. I don't use or miss any of the big services. Like many, I preferred the Web of old, circa 1998. I miss Geocities, even.
Serious question: How could you possibly not have seen that coming?
I mean, obviously, noone could really have known the exact time frame in which it would happen, but I really cannot fathom how people are surprised by this. When a power structure incentivises a certain behaviour, that behaviour will be what happens, and large concentrations of power always are extremely prone to corruption of any ideals they might have had at some point in their history.
The only way to avoid this is to avoid concentration of power.
The surprise isn't that censorship would exist, but that we would support it. It turns out I won't defend, to the death, your right to copy and paste the n-word a million times and call it discourse, and death threats to anybody, especially journalists, are simply unacceptable. The surprise is that online, people yell "fire!" into a crowded theater for the fun of it, and now that people have died, I now find myself supporting limits on speech - not by the government, but the corporations running the modern day printing press.
It turns out ideas are dangerous, but not in the way we thought - we thought they would set us free and railed against government censorship, but instead people were seduced by the idea that they were born kings, only to have that taken from them by the immigrants/Jews/homosexuals/media elite/Hillary/Trump.
It turns out using the ashes of public education to shine the light of liberty ends up with racist public opinion.
> The surprise isn't that censorship would exist, but that we would support it.
Please don't speak for me.
> It turns out I won't defend, to the death, your right to copy and paste the n-word a million times and call it discourse, and death threats to anybody, especially journalists, are simply unacceptable.
Which are justifications for censorship how?
> The surprise is that online, people yell "fire!" into a crowded theater for the fun of it
Hu? What would be an example of that?! I can't really imagine how that analogy could possibly apply to online conversations (given that those usually don't take place in a crowded theater) ...
> I now find myself supporting limits on speech - not by the government, but the corporations running the modern day printing press.
So, you are convinced that censorship by corporations will overall have a better long-term outcome for society than free speech combined with efforts to change people's minds (instead of preventing them from saying what they think) and other approaches to combatting crimes?
> It turns out ideas are dangerous, but not in the way we thought - we thought they would set us free and railed against government censorship, but instead people were seduced by the idea that they were born kings, only to have that taken from them by the immigrants/Jews/homosexuals/media elite/Hillary/Trump.
Yes, I agree that ideas can be dangerous, and as far as I am concerned, in exactly the way that I thought. I think one of the most dangerous ideas ever is the idea that authoritarianism is a solution to anything. Some use that idea to come to the conclusion that you have to elect a strong leader that will deport all Mexicans. Some use that idea to come to the conclusion that you have to empower a private communication monopoly to decide what speech is acceptable in society. All do it with the expectation that the power they put in place will defend their interests. History tells us that that is a naive expectation.
> It turns out using the ashes of public education to shine the light of liberty ends up with racist public opinion.
Are you sure that you aren't confusing visibility with existence? That is to say: Has unrestricted online discourse led to people adopting a racist standpoint, or has it simply made visible what was there all along?
So are the true daredevils (if you will) just getting bored? That given how "acceptable" things are now too many just don't find it exciting? If so, what are those (young?) entrepreneurial-minded dumping their time and effort in to?
The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party. Tim himself claims the Web is dying: the Web he wanted and the Web he got are no longer the same.
Parent comment:
> The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic side.
The fact that 2014 was cited as the start time of this cultural shift gives me pause, because it also coincides with the start of the campus cultural shift.
As the article points out, The power google is quite scary. The problem is, we depend on it for too many things. I think the solution is to diversify our usage of it. Perhaps, use a different email service, or start using Bing. Find, something else to replace google docs. By diversifying, we reduce our risk.
Same for facebook, perhaps start using a different social network and messaging apps. Sure, no one will see my posts, that is until I send them a good old fashion link, to a photo of my cute daughter.
In this model, all your data belongs to you. Any social network you allow or visit can make use of the data, but it all still belongs to you. And you'll be able to switch from Social network to social network or document provider(docs, spredsheets software) as easily as changing your socks.
And we don't have to completely replace GOOG and FB, we should have to offer alternatives and reduce the cost of switching - That's the key to preventing these services from turning Evil.
Are there any social networks out there currently that do this yet?
I'm hosting my own mail, and running my own server, but I know this is not a viable route for the generic public. Although tools like Yunohost[1] exists for this specific reason.
Telegram is nice for instant messaging: it's simple, cross-platform, does well with resources, and run by a non-profit org. Yes, russians might be spying on it. FB/G are spied by others. Meh. (There's Signal as well, but I like my SMS separated.)
Google Docs are terrible anyway: slow, lacking lots of features. Libreoffice or (god forbid!), installed M$ Office - and share the docs on, for example, Dropbox.
However, it's already very hard to tell people what the web used to be. Just read the entry "I’m 22 years old and what is this."[2] - web devs being in the business for <10 years may not even remember how it was before G or FB. I'd welcome any ideas how to address this.
Yup, I self-host email, blog and all my stuff except with Cloudron [1]. I use wire instead of telegram.
One challenge (at least amongst my circles) is that people do not seem to value diversity and are for some reason obsessed with mono-culture. For example, they are not willing to try another docs or email or phone provider. Even if they try something new, they are quick to jump to opinions in mere seconds (for example, I asked a friend to try mattermost[2] instead of slack and he wanted to go on about how the shade of blue was unappealing...). Many of my friends are also truly vested into converting their entire household into apple or google products (i.e one of them). If apple made a mattress tomorrow, they would immediately buy it :)
In my circle I've found a social stigma surrounding search engine. I use DuckDuckGo, and I've had numerous friends and co-workers essentially retort: DuckDuckGo? Why don't you use Google?
It's amazing how Google as a search engine has developed such brand loyalty to the point that people don't think there can be any alternatives. Personally, I like DDG's results better, and I also simply like diversifying. But as I said, even which search engine you use is highly stigmatized.
People should really be open to trying new things once in a while. How can people be certain that some search engine X isn't better than Google's engine when they haven't even tried it? Same goes for browsers -- years ago Chrome won people over with its speed, and friends I speak to still have this perception that it's the fastest browser out there, when some tests would begin to suggest its losing that edge (no pun intended).
i think what we need is another type of walled garden, what i'm calling a freedom garden. a complete alternative to APPL and GOOG that has media, devices, apps, &c.
free software projects and linux distributions have been around for years, but the focus is often on compatibility and familiarity. i say, we throw all of that in the trash. we need fresh ideas, fresh designs, and interfaces. interesting new devices and interaction models. app stores that engage creators as a revenue channel. there's no reason why liberty and profit should be at odds. [0]
i especially think that we need to rethink how we develop applications. clouds are useful, but why are the developers on the hook for all of that compute? i think we need to radically simplify the tools we use for provisioning compute resources in a way that allows users to leverage all of their compute resources and easily attach more on-demand. this echoes back to plan 9, which has this idea of creating a virtual system out of many hosts.
we're just getting started, and there are a lot of challenges ahead of us. if any of this sounds interesting or fun, maybe you want to get involved with our nonsense. [1]
most of the action is happening in #heropunch:matrix.org i'm on the os side, actually. @mlg:matrix.org is tackling the hardware. we're starting simple with off the shelf parts, but if people like our shit we are def interested in scaling up to make more advanced devices.
also, if you would like to back something that exists right now there's the librem 5
I pay about $1/month for a decent email provider. There is also still free ad-supported competition out there. That's not the problem why people are all at gmail.
The bigger hurdle are the email clients. Both on desktop, android and as webmail, email clients are mostly fairly bad (as in: just as good as the one I had nearly twenty years ago). It's hard to keep up with Gmails UX and features, especially since open source software isn't exactly known for stellar UX.
I have to agree on this. I have yet to find an email client that works as elegantly as Inbox (which is obviously Gmail-exlusive).
I have been considering migrating away from Gmail, but it is a bit daunting, mostly due to all of the logins I will need to update (if that is even possible) and because I would have to go back to manual sorting and categorizing.
I just recently completed migration from Gmail. It does take a while because there are so many things you might forget to update and then you're like, "oh crap," I changed my email address and for some strange reason LastPass didn't store the password.
I hosted my own mailserver for years then at about the same time email to Outlook.com and GMail started to bounce due to blacklisting. I complied with all the SPF requirements but no luck. Turns out you can be blacklisted by simply being on the same network as another blacklisted server. Guilt by association. Try getting a human response from these faceless corporate giants.
Neither of those services blacklist based on bad netblock neighbors anymore. The only one I've seen to that in years is AT&T, and it has only been a problem with them sporadically.
I'm aware. If you mention though, that this doesn't suck their battery (or listen in to their conversation) they might think about it, though I'm having a hard time making people care as well.
Unfortunately FB will then change the API to block the gateway.
It's not in their interest to allow open access to their messaging service. The current status quo means you have to be in their app or on the website to access your contacts and view their ads!
What's needed is to prevent certain kinds of key acquisitions.
The law around acquisitions is too permissive in an age of network effects; acquisition laws were fine pre-internet but don't solve their intended purpose anymore.
Normally, the market corrects against the biggest players because the biggest players are slow to change culture and their business.
But, acquisitions are the mechanism by which the big players are preventing themselves from being disrupted by smaller, more nimble players.
If the big players can simply buy up any new comers (who will want a deserved pay-out for their efforts) on the scene, they maintain complete control regardless of what consumers want.
Otherwise, any "alternative practices" you try to foster will simply be crushed, if they ever become a large enough threat.
The problem of monopolies and cartels isn't new. It's systemic and why government enforced market regulation is necessary to protect the interests of citizens. The newer question is perhaps how you effectively nationalise or even just police organisations that are as international in their operations as google or fb. The most effective approach so far is simply to ban them in your country and grow your own as the Chinese have done.
The problem now through is that these guys are "effective" monopolies, but they aren't monopolies according to the court's definition because they can always claim that the consumer doesn't have to use their service, they have choice to use some other dinky competitor.
The problem is that in the internet age, it is not in controlling supply but in effectively unlimited demand created by combination of zero marginal cost to add customers and network effects of the internet.
I wonder at what point companies decided they could own our data, and we agreed to it.
If I write something on a post-it note and give it to my coworker, will 3M rear its head and demand ownership of that information? No, of course not. So why do we allow Google to own our information when we use their software and/or office equipment?
You can approximate the point at which companies decided to own our data by looking at when they transitioned from client-side software with local file storage and open protocols to web services with proprietary protocols.
Microsoft is still in the process of transitioning. Google, Facebook and Amazon likely never had a data-agnostic phase in the first place.
I wonder at what point companies decided they could own our data, and we agreed to it.
It's been a boiling frog situation, but it's not so much that they decided they could own it as that it's been established that we don't. It helps to think of these companies as scavengers picking up the data we trail behind us on our travels. Even so, by at least the Target breach (2013) the message has been that we have no claim or recourse.
I'm not sure I understand how the PODS would keep your data from becoming centralized. If you allow a service to read data from your PODS, they could simply save it in their own database.
but because the data belongs to you, you could still jump to another social network or another application, every easily. You wouldn't be locked out of your own data, if FB banned you. And if everyone else was doing it too, you'd still be able to socialize with everyone else by going onto any social network of your choice.
This analysis is flawed in that it equates size of traffic with individual user actions. Of course YouTube or another video heavy site like FB is going to dominate when only size is considered.
A better metric would be a measurement of user initiated actions. Now sure how to pull that off, but it would be a more accurate measure of how the net is changing.
There are a lot of other video content websites that aren't YouTube and are struggling to compete with the large players like YouTube and Netflix that can put a box in every ISP in the world.
Seeing this got more attention than I assumed - at Peer5 (YC W2017) we attack this by doing distributed video delivery.
It's very challenging to figure out how to do this in a way that benefits users and improves user experience - we are very careful about being fair to users on mobile connections - but I think that a distributed web platform is the future and the only way we can combat the (lack of) net neutrality.
Agreed, I wonder how many youtube videos are embedded as well.
Bandwidth is expensive and many let youtube host the video for free instead of paying to host it themselves which is why it is no surprise that Youtube tops the list.
This is easily solved by switching to peer to peer protocols, which would work like a charm if our providers did the sensible thing and gave us a symmetric bandwidth to begin with.
Why would that be sensible, from their perspective? Seems to me that P2P is an ISP's nightmare, even if only from the logistical perspective of routing.
Well implemented P2P can reduce pressure on their external pipes by keeping some traffic local. Back before we had "unlimited" caps, my ISP had three levels of caps - International (1GB), National (20GB) and in-ISP (Unlimited) - and some national developers actually made a fork of Emule that could filter and prioritize peers to prefer the closest ones.
I was talking about using Bittorent to distribute videos.
I was also talking about the ADSL tragedy. We should have had SDSL from the beginning. (And yes, the corresponding decrease in raw download rate would have been worth it).
Phones don't have a puplic IP to begin with. That's not even an internet connection. (Not just my opinion, it's also the legal interpretation in France, and I suspect most of Europe: if you're hidden behind a big NAT, that's not an interet connection. Which is why our ads no longer talk about "unlimited internet", but about "data plans".)
If your only connection is through your phone, I have to feel a bit sorry for you.
That's increasingly the case, though. Even on HN I've often seen people saying they only use 4G connections. I had some hope that IPv6 would bring sanity to mobile connections, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
Radio has some unique properties that make symmetric connections tricky. Most people aren't hosting content locally and with good reason. Goodbye 1990s dreams of everyone has a server.
How do you think pervative NATs were enabled in the first place?
First came dial-up modems. Can't have a server with those without monopolising the phone. Then came the DSL. Providers noticed that nobody has a server, and deduced in their immense commercial wisdom that they didn't want a server. So they made the DSL Asymmetric. Now people could have a server, but the upload was so terrible it wasn't worth it. Conclusion: the ISPs were right: nobody wants a server.
There was this P2P fluke, but the copyright lobby kindly explained this was only used for illegal stuff. Everything's mostly back in order now.
Anyway, now we've established nobody needs nor wants a server, we can put NATs everywhere and nobody will notice.
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DSL was the first avoidable mishap in a long string of centralisation trends.
Peer-to-peer has benefits... and cons. It's not a magical cure-all.
How would _you_ implement a secure P2P where you (and only you) can rapidly change content (dynamic web pages) and control who has access to authorized pages?
What about credit card info? Passwords?
I imagine there "are" implementations that solve many of those issues. But it's sure-as-heck not common knowledge if there are "easy" answers to all those problems.
I can't help but feel "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson screaming at me. How do you ensure every bit of the web stack isn't hacked on every computer in the network, as opposed to your own?
In fact, when dealing with P2P, you're more likely than not, to be full of compromised programs. Many unintentional, but many others intentionally. Torrent users who run clients that don't upload. Every P2P game ever made being hacked. (See the entire purpose behind QuakeWorld moving to a client-server model over P2P, over the original quake.) And every Kazaa uploader had viruses on his PC back-in-the-day.
I'm not saying P2P is impossible. But first, you've got to define what application you want to implement (webpage, vs public video hosting) because the solutions are completely different. And even then, you're still walking into dangerous territory when you can't control the machines your relying on.
What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give? You can't simply "install more servers" or "buy more bandwidth" when your "server" is every user connected to your site.
And what happens when you roll out new versions, and some users don't upgrade?
The list goes on. And I say all of this as someone who has considered using distributed computing model for game hosting, where machines assist in computations and bandwidth. It's possible to do, but it opens up entire dimensions of additional problems to solve.
Many of the problems you talk about are off topic.
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The trust problem still applies to HTTP. We still download viruses on the web, and we still lose our credit card numbers to con artists. The only reason there's more malware on current P2P network is because those networks are disproportionately used to infringe copyright. The risk doesn't come from the distributed nature of the network, but from the lack of legality of the content.
Securing peer to peer communications to current web levels is trivially easy: just sign the damn data, and have a certificate authority ascertain the identity of the signer. For static content such as YouTube videos, you can also use a content addressable system.
While that would require some level of centralisation, it woulndn't exceed that of DNS, and would definitely solve the bandwidth issue.
> What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give?
I won't happen, because we enjoy symmetric bandwidth, thanks to our regulators being sensible, competent people. (At least that's the case in my rainbows & unicorns world). Seriously, though, symmetric bandwidth is the ultimate and only solution to many problems: it ensures total upload keeps up with total download, so we get the equilibrium we want.
It's the video itself that throws off the statistics. In that is it hundreds of times more bandwidth intensive that text traffic is. Of course others can host the video, but how many people actually DO that? Its easier and cheaper just to upload it to YouTube and put a link on your site.
a measurement of user initiated actions
how to pull that off
Sounds like a horrible idea to enable such behavior. It’s a quick window into bandwidth throttling, for any number of reasons.
Traffic is traffic, and it’s no one’s business whether I’m watching a video, clicking a button, issuing shell commands, or typing a reply to a message.
No thank you, to the idea of changing protocols, or forcing people onto the application layer, in furtherance of analyzing our already-over-analyzed activities with an electron microscope.
I do miss when there was more web on the Web. I've been wondering if the problem is that I don't search as much as I used to, or if there just isn't as many fun sites to visit these days. There actually used to be hangouts on the web outside of chat and social media, like bizarre, bangedup, or the old 4chan. It used to be a blast just to read through 4chanarchive, to see how many times Pawn Stars got called during the last BattleToads thread. I used to see anons in front of the Scientology building in Cincy on a regular basis. I think that's why I enjoyed HWNDU so much.
You say "more web the Web", but your main example is that your bubble was 4chan; this article implies the exact same thing, but with the bubbles being Google, Facebook and Amazon.
I think his point is more that Web used to be plenty of smaller bubbles, with distinct culture and separate communities. Now we have only giant bubbles, which get homogenised, as everything of that scale is. I share the sentiment.
Yeah, you definitely articulated it better than I could have. But I mentioned other sites besides just 4chan. Even IRC had networks full of active rooms, with people from around the world. I just know there used to be more things that I considered fun, and now I'm hard pressed to find such things. I'm not going into Freenet or Tor just to find something that doesn't violate YouTube or Facebook rules.
I know there's a freenet on IRC, but it seems to be people mostly talking about programming. Which is handy sometimes. But the freenet I was actually referencing was this project https://freenetproject.org
I can’t (and I won’t try to) tell how hair-raising was your experience of 4-chan, but Facebook has groups with… interesting content. Nothing that would get Facebook itself in legal trouble (actual CP & terrorism) but those still exist, if more discreet.
If you object to having your name associated to it, reddit also has fun places.
I definitely reddit, and try to cultivate subreddits I find interesting. But just commenting and looking at funny pictures is only fun for so long. I know that old 4chan carries some other connotations, but I don't think people realize how much other stuff was happening there. It was more about things happening in real life, but just written down for posterity.
It's hard when the search engines you use are actively guiding you to things that are similar to what you searched for before. Try google from a library computer some time and you'll see the bubble that's been created for you.
We've asked you before not to post unsubstantive comments. Here you've crossed into incivility as well. If you keep doing this we're going to ban you, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and clean up your act?
All: Other comments being bad doesn't mean it's ok to make the site even worse. The guidelines cover this issue too, so please read and follow them!
It feels like a centralized organizing service for web content (and by extension, retail goods sold online) is an inevitability in today's internet. If we switched google off, some other search engine would replace them simply because people need to be able to find things on the internet in a way that doesn't involve spending 30 minutes running through different "top hotlinks" lists on obscure web pages.
To me, the real issue is that we have a service which people depend on like a public utility (the internet) whose components are completely privatized and uncontrolled (ISP's, search, social networking). It's not a bad thing that so much of the traffic is being routed through certain pages. What makes this unsettling is that those pages are undemocratically, privately controlled and you've got next to no say in it because if you switch to a different private alternative, who's to say we won't be in exactly the same situation 10 years from now?
Here's a comment from this thread that I am having issues with:
> if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.
And yet, Andre and his blog clearly 'exist' (i.e. can be accessed and read, and perhaps even found in a search engine if search terms are relevant enough). Medium blogs (or other indexable and searchable media) obviously 'exist'. Reddit and Hacker News definitely 'exist'.
Perhaps that comment refers to commercial viability of internet media, or to their overall reach, but what do we, regular netizens, care about such pecuniary stuff? It's up to executives to think about business models and profitability; while it's up to us to use whatever suits us best on the Internet.
A quick Google tells me that Andre's currently at the #2 position on Google (at least in my search bubble) for "The Web dying", #4 for "The Web is dying", and so on. And of course he's at the top by a country mile for the exact article title.
Hacker News regularly dominates Google queries, and Reddit does too.
I do agree that the statement that search engine rank is all misses a rather significant element, that being virality / social reach.
If you can regularly gain enormous traffic from Reddit, Facebook, or even HN, you don't necessarily need search engine rankings. If you can afford to pay for ads, likewise.
It's if you're in none of those three camps that you might as well not exist on the Web. Tree falls, forest, no-one to hear it, etc.
This is a good article. Andre, don't pay attention to the usual HN cynicism. You posed a good thesis and defended it. The web, as we have traditionally defined it, is dying. Or dead. Yes, technically the protocols still work, but the day-to-day structure and use of the web is completely different than anybody expected or wanted it to be.
I think the key place where we went wrong is that we envisioned the web as a utility to help expand each person's mind and communication abilities. Instead it's morphing into a service where large groups of people can clan and waste time around the virtual water cooler. It was supposed to be a brain super-power. Instead it's a shared newsletter for angry mobs. It was supposed to free us up to find out amazing things about the world around us. Instead it's freed up the world around us to examine us in exquisite detail. We don't surf the internet anymore. The internet surfs us.
And yes, that sounds a lot like hyperbole, but such is the nature of essays like this. When I wrote "Technology is Heroin" ( http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is... ) I didn't mean it was literally heroin. I meant it was taking on the role that dangerous drugs had in times past. The web isn't literally dying. It's changing into something so different than what we wanted that it is for all intents and purposes dead. Many folks are getting wrapped up in the semantics of the discussion instead of the underlying meaning.
Many thanks! I share your thoughts that tech is "heroin", in fact I've been thinking that UX is killing us, it has become so good, that it's addicting. This is true clinically too, as social media instant gratification releases Dopamine and its usage is an activity comparable to gambling.
There is a way forward, though. Between the Old Web and GOOG-FB-AMZN's Trinet, we can build something else: the New Web based on decentralized protocols like IPFS, Dat, blockchains, secure-scuttlebutt, and others. That's what I'm working on.
A not-insignificant portion of HN is employed by the three you've accused of killing the web, and with a somewhat convincing argument. It must be a tough pill to swallow when hearing that the employer you love is killing the platform that has defined your adult life.
I have seen articles and repos for various technologies that claim to be the new "decentralized" web, but so far I haven't seen anything that provides a cohesive experience. Could you provide more information as to what you're working on in particular?
I'd twigged on "the dopamine meme" by April 2014, you're right about that.
What creates decentralisation is distance and transport costs, not (merely0 prottocols, and definitely not efficiences: they are inherently centralising.
But if, as you predict, ISPs/infrastructure only support GOOG, FB, and AMZN packets, what good will alternative protocols be? Seems like there will be no opportunity for new information-innovations like Bitcoin.
Seems like the solution is to begin treating infrastructure as a public utility, but I can hardly imagine that actually happening.
Actually, the thesis is quite cynical :) Which doesn't mean it's wrong.
By the way, I found your article interesting too. I do think it has a blind spot, in that you're missing a very big addiction that has stayed with us for a long time: work.
> DeQuincey wrote a later book called “Miseries of Opium” in which he went on at length about how opium completely destroyed his life. But nobody bought that one.
Do you have a link to a bibliography where this book appears?
It's especially interesting when you consider that Google has now, for the first time, a fully globe-spanning own network that can interface with any ISP directly, without relying on any intermediate ISP.
Google now has at least one product in the entire stack of the internet.
You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server.
At this point you can use most of the functionality of the internet without ever leaving the Google ecosystem.
> You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server.
...viewing content authorized by Google DRM.
> "After taking a look backstage, we can confirm that after recent updates Safari is no longer a supported browser for Web Player"
> Riegelstamm further dug into the details of the Web Player, discovering that the discontinuing of Safari support might have something to do with Google's Widevine media optimizer plugin, which Spotify requires for music streaming on the web and Apple opposes due to potential security issues.
Echoing that i felt there was a change in the way they handled Android the day they announce that the Android Marketplace (later rebranded the Google Play Store) would be offering movies (musics joined them a few months later).
Soon after the storage handling in Android got that much more convoluted, making it much harder to get data out of an Android devices without there being some kind of Google daemon sitting between user and storage.
Yeah I remember how much worse it was going from Android 2 to 4 as far as accessing storage was but 4 to 7 seems even worse. I've found KDE connect to be the best option for me so far for accessing android storage. Though as far as I know you need to have a KDE desktop environment to use it.
But also Google is so terrible at making successful physical products in a lot of these spaces, its hard to say the products give them a lot of power in the market. Google Pixel, Google Home, Google TV, do not represent large install bases. If they want a walled garden, it can't be the size of a postage stamp.
Not just physical devices. A lot of the Google stuff I have to use seems half-baked, unfinished or with crappy UI/UX. And Google Cloud is complete shit compared to AWS. I guess that's what happens when engineers lead a company. They'll never have the customer focus that has made Amazon dominant.
Well for a start you have to stop a GCE instance to add a new scope to it. So if your devs want to use a new API and you're running a massive production K8s cluster, you somehow have to stop your instances to add the new scope and otherwise mess around. Of course if you know this in advance you can plan to do blue-green deployments with K8s, but if you don't know that you won't architect for it and it'll bite you.
Their authentication in general seems convoluted and complicated, their console is slow and useless (why aren't all the search results preloaded? I type in 'iam' and it takes several seconds for the results to appear). Oh, and also alpha K8s clusters will terminate after 30 days whether you like it or not (perhaps you're using a feature that's apparently stable but languishing in alpha - I'm looking at you, cronjob). There's a lack of services in general (an elasticache type service would be nice) and development seems to move glacially.
Also, they seem to have multiple versions of SDKs, some with outstanding bugs that were reported years ago but are just closed or there are comments in the README that only critical bugs will be addressed. There's no indication which SDK to use where there are several versions. Oh, and if you only want to use one service in python, you have to install about 40 different packages because splitting them up is too difficult.
We've had DFP buckets have their configs get screwed up so we mysteriously couldn't access them, logs stopped being delivered, etc. Apparently Google have such poor monitoring that we had to prompt them about these things which took too longer to get resolved. I could go on...
An easy workaround for the scope issue is to set a custom service account when creating the instance (template). You can then modify the IAM roles for that service account without having to take the instance offline. Allow that service account to have full access to all APIs on the instance level, then fine-tune what's actually possible through IAM Roles.
Holy smokes I feel you on the cronjob thing. They just went to beta with it in k8s 1.8, so now I'm waiting for that to get stable on GKE. That plus a managed Redis/memcached would be all that I need right now.
My impression is that their purpose isn't to take the market, but to provide an example that others can emulate. If a Nexus is so much better than a Samsung, then Samsung will improve until that is no longer the case, to everyone's benefit. Likewise with Fi and Fiber.
These are minority services and destined to remain so. Google's core competency will probably never by customer service.
I was thinking something related this morning, that one of the reasons uptime is important to google, apart from the usual reasons, is because if they were switched off for a day people would realise the extent to which they have so many of their eggs in one basket, and a basket over which they have no control. I would expect that would trigger some concern, and significant numbers seeking alternatives, and building them.
Interesting perspective but it's missing one big elephant in the room: China. China is a reason why the trinet will not happen globally. Baidu, TenCent, Alibaba and similar services won't be replaced with Google, FB or Amazon. Maybe for better.
I'd wager that FB is at its summit now and it'll become more obvious as more young people who ignore it now continue to do so growing up and the people who use it continue to die.
Facebook is not the blue website. It's also Instagram, WhatsApp and whatever they buy next. And those are not being ignored by young demographics. At all.
It's effectively a kind of hedge fund that dabbles in internet and social-specific assets. The more they diversify their portfolio and occasionally branch out, the harder they will be to fully kill. This is the pattern with a lot of companies. They just become portfolio asset managers with a specific area of interest.
but we don't need to kill them to be successful. It's all about offering alternatives and making the switch to alternatives easier. This keeps platforms competing with each other, which keeps them in check.
Fair point, and I accept it. But, it's important to add that our task is much harder because they get added "synergies" they get from the "connectedness" of their portfolio.
However, Instagram is not really monetizable - I can't see them making real money with it without making it shitty in the process. And WhatsApp is encrypted with Signal and others waiting in the wings, good luck with that. What else do they have? tbh? VR?
Not yet; they're still expanding in developing countries, going as far as building their own internet (same what Google does) so that they can control it. They've already been slapped on the wrist for breaking net neutrality rules there (free access to FB, pay for the rest). And they're doing it under the guise of providing access to everyone, not the real reason, getting everyone hooked on their products and their slice of the internet (not unlike how we were taught how to work with Windows and Office in school and never even heard of the alternatives until later).
Companies create an open platform to get users, then they progressively squeeze the platform for more money degrading experience, some other company creates a new open platform that offers a better experience, rinse, repeat.
Some very interesting points made in OP and comments.
I’ll add one about user experience. Obviously the big web corporations benefit from the natural advantages of scale.
But an overlooked aspect of what makes these platforms sticky is that they all, including Apple, work very hard at making their products easy to use. And these are complex systems (I find Apple’s attempt at maintaining a global user state baffling, just from a user point of view, working with such an unwieldy system must be insane.)
Though this is an old problem, I think it remains: product developers and engineers vastly over estimate a potential users willingness/ability to learn a new system.
This is a “threshold “ problem, with a binary outcome. If your service is “good enough “ you might get some traction. But if you don’t hit that threshold of usability, your efforts are for naught.
The challenge is that usability is often an optimization problem, where one might be inclined to see how the MVP does, before investing the extensive resources in improving user experience. It’s also a big advantage to already have a lot of users, upon which a company can test and iterate.
My main point is that the general public has not become more technically skilled. On the contrary, all this effort by Google-Facebook—Amazon is focused on making these services drop dead easy to use.
Even technically skilled people have limits on how much they can invest in using alternative, less polished systems.
Interestingly ads roughly coincides with the "eternal september", the time when the internet really became public. It means that the greater web, the one that is accessible to all people was born with ads.
And BTW, I wouldn't trade todays internet for what we had in the 90s. Yes, it was cleaner back then, ye didn't have to worry too much about ads, privacy, all that stuff and the SNR was much higher but it doesn't make up for the sheer amount of information that is available now backed by search engines that are borderline psychic.
I would trade. When it comes to searching for things in Google, it feels like the spammers won; there's just not much there that's both relevant and not trying to sell me something.
There's more information, but it's much harder to find anything, and outside of small communities, everyone writing interesting things has either stopped or has happily stepped into a walled garden and become undiscoverable.
I believe this could be easily solved with a simple regulation - mandatory 50/50 sharing of downstream and upstream on customer level.
How Web is supposed to be decentralized if the means of accessing it directly support centralization? You will always prefer external services if your own get capped pretty easily. You cannot have truly distributed web if access points are basically one-way connections.
Great article, one problem: it's yet another lament.
Any ideas how to fix/prevent it?
Maybe we should get our wifi routers into a mesh network. Maybe we should start hosting our own stuff, or make simple tools for this, like YunoHost, iRedMail, etc.
But please, stop writing articles about how bad it is.
"I get things are bad. But what are we doing to fix it?"
— Casey Newton (Tomorrowland, 2015)
This is the ideal solution: Tim Berner Lee's (the creator of the internet). PODS let you own your own data and switch from social network to social networks as easily as changing your socks.
However, many of his later ideas, like the Semantic Web, have not taken off. “Own your data” is not a new idea, but it isn’t happening. Most people don’t care. It takes more than a famous name to change that.
The problem has been defined, countless times. Examples include 'The Web We Lost'[1] from 2012, 'The Web We Have To Save'[2] from 2015 and so on. I think we spent enough time on defining problems, so let's start working on fixes.[3]
Out of those three, I only use Google. I still consider the 'net - and I do mean the internet, not 'the web' as that is but a part of the constellation - to be a useful resource with near-unlimited potential. I shun Facebook like the plague and Amazon is not on my radar in any way, due in part to the fact that I'm not in north-America while Amazon is still mostly targeted at that part of the world. As such any thought of these three having fundamentally transformed the web falls flat for me as they just simply failed to do so in my world. I don't deny that these companies - especially Facebook - have an unhealthy amount of influence over many people's outlook on the world around them and that they have the potential to cause great damage - again pointing at Facebook as the main risk factor due to their rather obvious lack of political neutrality - but for now I just see them as big companies intent on carving out as much of the web as they can.
i think this is only one possible outcome. sure it makes sense but imho this can not happen over night and that is where this theory breaks.
they cant force "their web" upon the rest of the world. there will _always_ be some form of web where one can be anonymous, where you can run your own server without any hardware from "them", using standard-protocols.
maybe the business-people and most poeple who dont care about their privacy will use everything they get thrown from "them". that does not mean the web is dead, it is only that the "mainstream" will live in a separate web. maybe this (their) web will be much bigger than our web. even then, the cool kids will switch to the cool punky web again :D
I think you're totally right. An analogy is the stuff around politicians trying to "ban encryption" all the while not understanding that you can't ban an idea (not meaningfully).
So, yeah, maybe 10 years from now things do like almost entirely like the article predicts, but for most consumers that probably really isn't a problem at all except in some theoretical ethical/privacy sense.
For the people who really do care, they'll just go make their own custom shit like you describe.
I can't assess what this article is saying without knowing the definition of "traffic" that is being used. Is "traffic" the amount of data transferred (i.e., megabytes, gigabytes, whatever)? Is it the number of requests? Something else?
How come the number of websites is increasing if the web is dying? How are these websites getting their attention?
Maybe smaller websites are getting less absolute visits than in 2010, but even if that was true, you should say that the web was dying in the 90's.
It's also difficult to believe the web will stop working, or that people will stop making websites just because more people are browsing just on the "trinet" (remember, 20 years ago people already wrote websites, even if they would expect only 3 visits per month). Would Facebook, Google and Amazon come up with a plan to stop ISPs from serving other domains? Why would they do that?
> It's also difficult to believe the web will stop working, or that people will stop making websites just because more people are browsing just on the "trinet"
Is it? Lots of small companies and social groups rely on having a Facebook page as their primary way of contact and advertisement, where they would have created a web page of their own in the past.
I realized something was wrong when many local web design/development shops started redirecting their domains to Facebook profile pages. Never thought I'd miss outdated Flash-only sites.
Of course, the saying about the cobbler's children still applies.
It is not in Facebook or Google’s interest to have other websites disappear: they make their value and their money from those quite directly and obviously. Executive of both companies have said so, and I don’t think anyone could doubt this: both companies make money by getting their users onto other websites (well… until they have a fully integrated sales system, like YouTube Red and Facebook Marketplace). Both companies provide website creators with a lot of help, some tied into their platform, some fully open-sourced.
What the original post is showing is that a lot of heavy load of the content (videos) and actual access and control (including optimisation for fast loading on mobile clients) is now being controlled. It lowers barriers to entry and success as a YouTuber (no need to fiddle with hosting anymore, like Ze Frank had to). However, having users instinctively connect to a handful of platforms every day, rather than decide to see your content means you might have to pay for most views, pay as high as your margins would allow you to and not make a significant profit.
An equivalent (I’m not saying it’s a perfect metaphor) is if there be more taxis roaming the street but to go from an old model where you used to hail marauding cabs from the curb to a new model where all taxis, to get business, have to be affiliated to Uber and Gett. All the revenues of those taxis are now controlled by Uber and Gett. Those revenues might be shaved down to operating costs thanks to heavy-handed optimisation. Upsides of those include better control (you grope your passenger and you are out/you write that this ethnic group should be eradicated and you are out), more free rides/free articles thanks to VC-sponsored acquisition vouchers/advertising. Downsides include that you might, in the future, have to pay whatever profit VCs expect as soon as competition is kept away with deep moats -- and lack of innovation.
Being uncomfortable with the Big-Brotheresque aspect of Uber isn’t fully solved by having a single competitor, too. So if you do things in the back seat that some drivers object to (say, French kissing); or if you post something that some people find objectionable (say, show your nipples) then you might lose your ability to travel or publish anymore.
Facebook (and I’m assuming Alphabet) employees themselves will acknowledge that they can’t make perfect judgement-calls at their scale. They love (and often actively participate themselves) alternatives. If you see the other options become victims of either margin-squeezing or editorial control, that admission becomes a little too damning.
The fact that the author doesn't see any Chinese companies is an illustration of fragmentation.
However, I think it's worth noting that each of these fragmented sub-nets are have more traffic and servers than the global Internet did even a few years ago (how many? I'm not sure).
Amazon did not, they are just starting here in Brazil, which is a huge player in the internet, not the biggest or the best, but my country is fucking huge and no one knows about amazon, so this is false. Google and facebook? 200% sure they changed the web here. This text and opinions are from people from 1st world castle countries, not the real world
> On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account.
A punishment worse than jail in the New World Order.
So, how does the web go from being a benevolent dictatorship to something more democratic, when the entire kingdom is busy playing with shiny new toys?
"It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic."
The web needs to really become decentralized. Even Tim Berners-Lee has said it [1]. He has started a project to re-decentralize it called Solid [2].
Email was decentralized but now it's become super centralized with GMail etc. And look at how easy it is for the NSA to vacuum all that up from one spot.
Wordpress powers 20% of the decentralized web. Because it's a free, open-source piece of software with a plugin ecosystem that runs on a popular runtime - PHP. We need stuff like that, but for things like SOCIAL MEDIA. Nothing currently exists that can rival facebook, google+ etc.
I believe that the software can change the internet's topology. Right now all signals go through giant centralized server farms. Consider how people use Google Docs for collaboration Facebook / Slack for conversation or Dropbox for their files. The default is to immediately connect to "the cloud" which is in reality some company's server farm. AWS just capitalized on this trend and made it easier.
In fact, you can do all of it LOCALLY by default. There's no reason that bits need to go through Google's servers for a classroom to collaborate on a document, or for an African village to plan a community dinner. Except one: lack of open source software that can run locally, and rival Facebook, Google etc. in ease of use.
We are building that software and started around 2011. My company Qbix [3] wants to decentralize not just the web, but also identity [4], data [5] and social networking [6]. We look to partner with companies who want to decentralize cellphone signals (like gotenna) and energy generation (like solar panels) so human networking in the future has a LOT more local options to utilize before ever jumping onto the public internet.
PS: Whenever I post this topic, with links to back it up, I get downvoted heavily. But I never get any explanation why. If you are an HN member who disagrees with this thesis, first of all that's not enough reason for a downvote. And secondly, I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHY you feel so strongly against what I'm saying here: that the web, cellphone signals and energy generation should be decentralized. Contribute constructively to the conversation, and explain what alternatives do you think are better. Are you so ferventlu against developing software to run on local networks as to militate against comments advocating it? Am I breaking some HN rule by linking to our work that we passionately believe in and spend most of our time on? What are the words behind your downvote?
The problem not a technical one, it is a social/economic/political one.
It is how the big players gets to dictate policy virtually unchecked.
Email, on the protocol level, is still decentralized. But Google and a few other big players have via their spam filters dictated how every email server on the planet is to behave, or else.
And we are seeing similar things happening with web servers and browsers, just look at the railroading the W3C DRM spec got.
W3C DRM happened because of Tim Berners-Lee himself. And I agree that, since W3C is a central point, it is the target for attacking. But it's possible to decentralize things in a way that stays decentralized, for LOCAL communications.
Email spam is only a problem across the global internet. Not within local networks. Same goes for other types of communications.
Human speech for example has remained peer to peer even as radio was invented :)
I really think the problem is a technical one. The social and political outcomes are almost inevitable, just like the two party system is a nearly inevitable outcome of the first-past-the-post ballot.
Lots of paradigms changed as technologies were introduced. The phone, radio, the printing press etc. Technology has a great impact on society.
Google has gone from a welcomed tool (indexing a priori data) to telling what should be the data (ranking). It switched naturally and logically so, but it's a problem IMO.
Lastly, when a domain becomes a social organ, everything changes. It has to be regulated, will cause tension, economic impact ..
google never really recovered from SEO. once professionals started pouring money into gaming the system it stopped working.
google search results are actually terrible these days. nothing but commercial sites, ads, and a few hand picked non-commercial sources like wikipedia, stack overflow, etc.
i cant remember the last time i found an interesting new site searching on google.
I think it's not Google or google being gamed by SEO.. I think the web went from a cute jungle of documents into a boring market filled by baseless content.
Today my heuristic is: the older the HTML the better. Often the horrendously crafted website were the work either of naive individuals that had no hidden agenda beside having fun with webpages, or passionated ones that would put long articles full of interesting facts.
i would strongly disagree. I think there is far more good content on the web now than ever before .... but .... the signal/noise ratio is lower. The good content has increased but the crap has increased much more.
Google's original algorithm of giving weight to inbound links was a very good way of surfacing good content programmatically but I don't think they ever solved how to make it work in an adversarial environment.
Google's other algorithmic approach is to measure user response to sites (what do they click on, how long do they view it, does it satisfy their query, etc). that algorithm is great for maximizing revenue but is bad at surfacing new original content.
In the end they also had to hand curate, which is what failed to work before them, and what they originally replaced, so really we are back to DMOZ and Yahoo now. Just with a very sophisticated monopolist as the gate keeper.
The hand curation is coming back and not only at Google and there's a weird feeling that in the end we want "humans" as much as "results". Even the most satisfying algorithmic result don't have the same as a collection made by a group (considering that algorithm cannot pass some SEO version of the Turing test of course).
This will be horrible for freelancers and people who want to learn web development. There will be no incentive for those people as the globalist mega tech corps create a boring homogeneous internet.
Amazon/AWS is mentioned as one of the big three in the article, since they're far and away one of the largest. That said, if it weren't them, it'd be someone else.
A tiny nitpick, but what's with the trend of using stock symbols in non-financial context? GOOGL isn't much shorter than Google, same with AMZN and Amazon. It just looks... annoyingly out of place.
Regarding the article itself, the topic of Facebook/Amazon/Google domination is much spoken and written about and this post doesn't really add much new. This issue is well known for a quite a long time, especially in the HN and similar social circles. What most of the posts are missing is how do we escape this? But that might be too late.
A not-so-subtle way of pointing out that these are all profit-seeking companies? A lot like how people used to write Micro$oft, back when Bill Gates was the nerds' devil. We're all sophisticated financially-aware grown ups now, so we've moved on to ticker symbols, as a way of signalling our enlightenment.
Just the opposite. It actually started in the 90s during the dotcom mania when what a company was doing, for good or ill, became eclipsed by how much money its stock could make the reader base. Ostensible tech sites turned into The Wall Street Journal. During the early 90s it was "Microsoft announces a new version of Windows. Here are the features you can look forward to (or dread)!" The late 90s turned more toward "Microsoft (MSFT) experienced a stock price jump when it announced a new version of Windows."
I tend to agree. It's a way to signal that one is above the everyman and everywoman who don't indulge in the cants and argots that abound in the industry.
On average, when people can, they do try to sound more sophisticated than necessary to express a message, including in this message.
"in chats". This is a blog post, a forum, not an SMS conversation with 1998's prices. Acronyms look-up on Google gets old really fast. I had to look for YANBU yesterday and it was not fun to get back to the orignal text after that.
Sure I do. But if one has an aim to be understood, it's better not to make everyone lookup what you're referring to. If something has a well known name, use the name!
You can do your part as a developer and tell managers about the dangers of AMP. It is a stupid idea technically (we have HTML, you can build a slim sites, Google can rank them higher) and stupid business wise by giving away the control, branding, options.
I have convinced one project manager to not implement AMP and will continue to try in the future. Please do your part by spreading word of the dangers of GOOG and FB.
Depends on the user – if they like fast page views, AMP's 100KB of render-blocking JavaScript is a problem, and if they care about sharing the fact that it makes the real URL hard to get is also annoying. If they like not being phished, AMP is really bad since it leads a lot of people to believe they're reading something Google has vouched for.
This is the inevitable conflict from Google putting their marketing needs ahead of the user experience. If they used site performance as the rating metric, AMP would just be one option for better performance but since the goal was to keep traffic on google.com we're stuck with a worse experience because that's better for Google.
I'm really concerned with this current crop of "have to please Google" that is become so prevalent by SEO. The current trend is one of reactionary fear. "We have a great website... it would be a shame for its ranking to slip". I can't say that Google is actively, passively, or even part and parcel to promoting that fear. Unfortunately, the biggest reason I see AMP being adopted by many, has nothing to do with it being faster or a better experience. It has everything to do with pressure by Google. (and a belief that it'll improve search ranking)
Google is most definitely actively encouraging that. Right now the proposition is that you either use AMP and let Google host your pages on their server or your competitors' content will appear above your content on search results pages. The fact that they're technically not changing the search ranking isn't significant as long as the prominent carousel which appears first is restricted to hosted AMP content.
Andre, you're a swell developer and running into you in open source repos and here has always been educational. I would love reading what you write a lot more if there was less click-bait and sensationalism.
This problem (the fact Google has a large majority in web browser and mobile device sales) is very concerning to me - the data is interesting and the points are relevant but I have a very hard time reading past titles like "the web is dying". I hope you read this with the intended respectful tone I wrote it in.
When a thread becomes as much about a title as this one has, it's in HN's interest to have a different title on the front page, so we've changed this one.
Suggestions for a better replacement are welcome. 'Better' in this case means accurate, neutral, and using representative language from the article itself.
I'd rather the original title of the article if it's not too long or is deceiving the HNers. The original title is kind-of clickbaity but not really deceitful at all, so I suggest we keep the original title here.
I have to disagree with this sentiment. He's describing a future in which the web no longer exists and only google, facebook and amazon's network exists. This is a very literal interpretation of the term "web is dying", the web will no longer exist. If he's providing evidence that this is the case then the title is descriptive. That aside, we don't even really need additional evidence that this is the case, these companies have made it clear their intention to pull the ladder up behind themselves time and again, just look at Google's reversal of being opposed to net neutrality in general, this can only result in the consolidation of power in their hands. At most you can accuse this title of being apocalyptic.
I.e. If people generally knew that Bono was dying already through other sources, a headline of "Bono is dying" would be shocking by the nature of what it is, but ultimately not clickbait.
This is not the first time consolidation of power has happened. Intel and Microsoft pulled all kinds of stunts to hold on to their monopolies. Are you worried about your chip and OS today?
I don't see Google(Search/Chrome/Android) and Amazon in the same sphere as Facebook/YouTube/Twitter in doing damage to the web.
I am much more worried about the societal chaos that Facebook/YouTube/Twitter are producing across the globe than any net neutrality issues.
YES! with my cpu running 2 kernel rings deep that the OS is not aware of. What is even worse if you try to disable it and the cpu kernel detects it will disable the hardware. Makes me truly worried where person computing is headed, aka I'm not in control of my device I paid for!
As a matter of fact, I am. And we have palpable consequences today, with that trusted computing débâcle (backdoors on CPUs that threaten to turn into full blown vulnerabilities…)
As a GNU/Linux user, I'm not too worried about my own OS. But I am scared that Apple managed to locked down its systems in a way that would have Microsoft sharded into oblivion. Numeric prisons are now not only acceptable but downright fashionable.
There was a good reason to be worried about Intel and Microsoft back in the day, and it's good we didn't let them get to full monopolies. Remember the Microsoft anti-trust trial?
The anti-trust trail didn’t result in much in the end. The market forces that clipped Microsoft’s wings were a magnitude larger, and would have been the same regardless. The DOJ was nothing compared to Ballmer laughing the iPhone off, or Linux dominating embedded devices and internet servers despite all the FUD.
I don't think the picture is quite that clear. There's a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that Microsoft was genuinely gunshy about wielding its monopoly power thanks to the trial.
Yes, Google and Apple found ways to break that monopoly, but a chastened Microsoft wasn't prepared to wage the type of scorched earth campaigns that it became famous for.
> This is a very literal interpretation of the term "web is dying"
Does smtp 'exist' now that most of it is over google, yahoo, and microsoft? Or linux considering RedHat/Cent/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian are responsible for most installs.
I think its rational to accept that big players will, naturally, take big slices and that doesn't mean you're kinda sorta making a 'x is dying' argument. If anything, the natural distribution of the network effect probably falls onto a ~80/20 relationship where the bigger players take 80% of the market and many smaller players take the remaining 20%.
The web will be no exception to this. It just took a little while to get here. Its already happened to ISPs, remember early on when every city had multiple competing DSL resellers? PC operating systems (is anyone even pretending that Windows and MacOS as a distant second will ever have real competitors anymore?), PC GPUs (two real players now), 3D game engines (2 non-in house engines dominate), does Linkedin even have competition now?, etc, etc.
Worse, the network effect for Facebook is tremendous. Its power isn't that its a great service, its mediocre at best, but its a such a pita to get everyone you know to switch over that it'll probably never happen.
Back in the old days, bloggers had to get their own domain names, find their own hosting, write their own html/css/whatever, manage their own CMS (and install it on a linux system hosted somewhere and via the commandline/ftp/whatever), etc. This meant a lot of the early web was techie-oriented types who could perform these tasks (endless sites and discussions on who is the best Star Trek captain or which was the worst Star Wars movie, not many on fighting childhood malnutrition in the 3rd world). I'm not sure how this was 'better' than what we have today.
Democratization will often lead to a network effect which will lead to consolidation. Philosophically, to some, a perfectly distributed system is 'better' but to pull that off you'd probably need communist-level social and economic controls and if you had that you most likely would never had the internet or the web.
Just the fact that we use aggregators like HN or Reddit means that we accept a whole lot of consolidation without question and often see it as better than the old system of managing a dozen different topics spread on on various specialist sites and usenet. Or are we giving special exceptions to techie approved sites like Reddit (the 4th most popular site in the USA), which is missing from the article?
The web thrives on competition, but the author is suggesting that the major tech companies just stopped directly competing with each other and focused on their little bubbles. That shift, as posited by the author, happened around 2014 based on certain strategic decisions by FB and Google. And as a result, the competitive forces tapered off
This is one of the caveats of debating in the HN echo-chamber... People start making bizarre analogies using 'parallels' from tech (in this case, SMTP), for the sake of it, hoping that the blatant inaccuracies of their comparison will fly over the heads of the audience, in favour of their esoteric appeal.
Take some figures plucked from thin-air and you have a recipe for retort success!
Thankfully, it's only a caveat that happens 20/80 of the time, sort of like how TCP does such a good job of filtering out the riff-raff. /s
"People start making bizarre analogies using 'parallels' from tech (in this case, SMTP), for the sake of it, hoping that the blatant inaccuracies of their comparison will fly over the heads of the audience, in favour of their esoteric appeal."
I thought the analogy to SMTP was a very good one and, considering the audience, was not esoteric at all.
My mail usage is far more agnostic to its protocol than my web usage is. Google may hold far too much data to generate a profile of me and relevant ads, but using GMail doesn't fundamentally affect the content of my email or inbox, or even how I use email. But if I switch tabs to YouTube (i.e. The Web), targeted content and traffic funnelling is immediately apparent.
You proved my point about esoteric appeal because my argument was opposite to how you viewed it: that us techies get blinded by irrelevant concepts because we can relate to them, that are otherwise esoteric outside the HN bubble.
Respectfully disagree. The end of the post is absolutely true and supports the title:
> On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account. As private businesses, GOOG, FB, and AMZN don’t need to guarantee you access to their networks. You do not have a legal right to an account in their servers, and as societies we aren’t demanding for these rights as vehemently as we could, to counter the strategies that tech giants are putting forward.
This specific part (that dominant companies can ban individuals with no recourse) shouldn't be tolerated.
I'm sorry, but I can't get behind the idea that you're entitled to an account on a private company's site. Are they obligated to protect accounts for shitposters, to the detriment of everyone else's experience?
Nobody is stopping you from starting your own blog and posting your views there. But, just like no one is obligated to seek out a flyer you post on a telephone pole, no one is obligated to seek out your writings.
Click bait titles have a bad reputation because they either lie or don't go in-depth into the topic. That's not the case here. I wrote with depth and research, and the body of the article is truthful to the title. I believe the title is, although sensationally shocking, true.
It's _not_ click bait if it describes exactly what the thesis of the article is.
It's a simple explicative sentence.
Maybe you folks have just been conditioned enough by click-bait now that you can't distinguish the difference, and I don't mean to denigrate you by stating that.
I agree with what you're saying, but you can't know if the title is sensationalist until you actually read the article. Which is the point of click-bait titles.
Not remotely true, the web isn't dying, it's changing, but that's less clickbaity :) For such a hard claim you have to specify what do you exactly mean by "the web".
"The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party."
This web is still alive and well, nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish. Tim was a bit naive that he assumed profit seeking won't mess with his creation.
The underlying protocol is still the same as it was 20 years ago. With 3,885,567,619 internet users this dying platform is the best thing in computing we had so far. Of course it's changing, but the web is much larger than GOOG, FB, AMZN.
Yo are ignoring the long tail and that tail is very long.
> nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish.
plenty does!
if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.
you could try sharing it with friends on facebook and hope for a social network effect, but just ask the journalism industry how organic reach is working out as of late
selling something online? your only hope is FBA. where the A stands for Amazon. I guess etsy might work too. so, okay...duopoloy!
and even if you don't care to be found, and aren't selling anything, it is TRIVIAL to take down any kind of not-expensive hosting (your raspi @ home, your DigitalOcean VPS, or colocated server) with a DDoS attack.
AWS, GCP, & Azure can weather most attacks, but it will cost you. And if it's large enough they'll shut you off anyway. and then send you a bill you can't pay.
so no, there is plenty stopping you from launching anything on the internet. the cost structures (be it time or money or both) greatly favor the massively entrenched incumbents. and not a little bit of favor. they favor them....bigly.
You're confusing "making money" with launching/publishing. I can publish anything I want to the web in under a minute. Who's stopping me? Getting people to read what you've published has been difficult since the early days of the web, but publishing is trivial.
And, yet, network effects being what they are, how does anyone with an independent thought rise to visibility, outside of someone else's platform, when the "web" completely dominated by 100 web properties?
I don't know, make it be the individuals problem to spread their individual and original thought. That might sound harsh so I clarify a bit.
If I have a big, world changing individual thought and I create something good, then it will probably be picked up by the endless blogs, magazines, journals. I can place it on GitHub or buy a $10 server and I'm good to go, in that case I manage almost everything about it. It's not the web's jobs to filter out the gems.
If my individual thought is not much better than "Mondays suck" then Twitter is probably a good place for it to be forgotten.
That's a different question and has nothing to do with the web dying, which it isn't. The freedom to put your voice out there has never included the right to be heard or popular. You have more ability today to be heard than ever before, but you're one of billions, it's not supposed to be easy.
"This web is still alive and well, nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish"
True, you'll be able to do that, but if most of people will have "free internet package" that will allow them to access GOOG, FB, AMZN only, having the domain will not make much sense.
Exactly.
This reminds me of the 1990's AOL's walled garden model that ultimately lost to the open Web.
I wonder though, if we really descent into a multi-tier internet and if a version of a "legacy" internet survives in some form (even though not accessible by main stream FB/GOOG users), if that legacy part of the internet will become cleaner and once gain open to grass roots innovation?
Today most people have a paid access to the internet. How many people do you think will downgrade to free and get rid of 99% of the available websites? For newcomers it can be problematic, but I don't see it happening on a mass scale.
> the body of the article is truthful to the title
With all due respect, I don't see how the article backs up this utterly exaggerated claim.
Unless, of course, you're using the word "dying" in the sense that everybody and everything will die at some time. But I don't think this is meant here, as that wouldn't be "shocking" at all.
huh? He's describing a future where the web no longer exists. Only Google, facebook and amazon's network exists. This seems pretty representative of the term dying.
Your argument is that the web is now mainly controlled by two companies, not “dead”.
The technology is still there but the diverse hosting options and the creativity that many of us associated with it (what could be called “the spirit of the original web”) could be in peril.
I don’t think that you are arguing that Google and Facebook are fighting HTTP/HTML - although they are offering alternatives that they present as technologically preferable.
Agree - Staltz seems to assume that nobody will disrupt GOOG-FB-AMZN. It does feel like it's getting harder to disrupt over time, because the incumbents are ever more powerful. But technology's lever also becomes more powerful over time.
Companies' have achilles heels. They are built into the way they think in the era when it was started, when it was agile and fit in the mind of one person, before it got big and cumbersome, impossible to steer, profit-magnetized and impossible to even think longer term than a quarter. This business cycle is inherent to our laws and culture, it happens to all companies eventually.
Startups 20 years from now will be built by today's toddlers who pinch-zoom magazines and "Alexa, play Spice Girls" an empty room. The incumbent generation can't imagine what the next generation will bring, almost definitionally. But they will have disruptive ideas too. They will probably look stupid to us old people and we won't see it coming until it's too late.
Open-data-web is a good today-generation example. There are chickens and eggs to be solved, maybe the economics are impossible. Or maybe just nobody figured out the path yet. There were a hundred crypto currencies before bitcoin that went nowhere. But if someone figures out a strategic path that gets there, we know that person won't be Facebook, because open data will wreck Facebook's core business.
The key concern here is the collusion from ISPs. If they were to truly sell prioritized traffic to GOOG-FB-AMZN at a hefty discount, then it stands to reason most businesses will stop wasting their time trying to build things that don't leverage those avenues. Even as it stands today, how many "SEO gurus" are optimizing for Bing? If you want to be seen, you optimize for Google. So while I agree that all companies have an Achilles heel, this one is fairly sturdy for the foreseeable future.
Good point. I generally share the same view. On one hand, there were so many corporate consolidations in the past few years. On the other hand, people's discontent probably also led to the rise of Blockchain tech.
Why do you have a hard time reading that? It's generally better to solve problems before they happen. An dead Web isn't coming back, and we are trending very much in that direction.
Should note: much of the web is now 'mobile' and on mobile people use apps considerably more often.
So - while possibly not 'the web' as in 'browser' - it's arguably 'the web' nevertheless because almost all these apps depend on a great deal of http-ish interactivity etc...
Also - though it's hard to say how much change there has been on the desktop - remember that people do use desktop apps for socially and webby oriented reasons etc..
Imagine: Spotify App vs. Spotify Web, Gmail vs. local client - etc. etc..
This is quite a demarcation.
Finally, one might consider also that 'web experiences' have expanded.
We may not be uses 'other things' less, rather, FB is a new experience that is taking up addition time allocated to the web.
So - we had 'the web' - now we have 'the web + FB web'.
The web isn't dying. The web isn't going to die. The day to day, month to month, or even year to year web trends are not indicative of the future of the web.
The irony here is that if anything were going to kill the web, it would be stupid articles like this one. Thankfully, the internet is bigger than all of the short-sighted johnny-come-latelys in the world.
Frankly, if you weren't using the web before CSS, then you shouldn't be wasting people's time with your predictions.
Boo, your moderation has utterly ruined HN. People can't even disagree anymore without you interfering. I'd be willing to bet there's more interesting content in all the detached threads than the content that survives your censorship. HN was a better site before you became a mod.
You've routinely violated HN's rules, we've given you countless warnings and requests to stop, and you've responded by being nasty and abusive. I'm not quite sure why we bent the rules for you as long as we did [1] but enough is enough and we've banned this account.
Confirmed, you suck as a moderator. Can't take any critique, no, must be my fault you're such a snowflake. You're quite literally what's wrong with society these days, you outright reject anything that might potentially hurt your feelings; you don't have a right to not be offended you overly sensitive little fucking man baby. Grow some balls you poor excuse for a man.
Because those private companies earn unspeakable wealth off the societal infrastructure we have built and provide them with. They would be nothing without the shoulders of giants they are standing on. Those giants are us, collectively, which is required to negotiate with them since an individual is completely powerless against them.
I gotta say this breathless free-market purse clutching is getting a bit tiresome.
Property is a social invention, maintained and enforced by government, whose laws are controlled by the people.
We have free enterprise not because freedom is absolutely right or an absolute right, but because we've determined that's the best way to get a decent outcome for the most people.
Should free enterprise start oppressing the people, we'll change the rules. Because we made the rules.
> Property is a social invention, maintained and enforced by government, whose laws are controlled by the people.
Yup.
> We have free enterprise not because freedom is absolutely right or an absolute right, but because we've determined that's the best way to get a decent outcome for the most people.
False. We have free enterprise because there is no freedom without the freedom to exchange labor, goods, and services. It's the natural order of things to trade, always has been and probably always will be. It's not about the best outcome for most people, never has been, and never will be. It's about the right of self determination and autonomy.
> Should free enterprise start oppressing the people, we'll change the rules. Because we made the rules.
True, but Google and Facebook and Amazon aren't oppressing anyone, so your point is moot in this conversation.
> We have free enterprise because there is no freedom without the freedom to exchange labor, goods, and services. It's the natural order of things to trade, always has been and probably always will be. It's not about the best outcome for most people, never has been, and never will be. It's about the right of self determination and autonomy.
So I think we're getting to the root of the disagreement here. All of this your opinion, not fact. Quite a few of us do not believe property and free exchange are unconditional freedoms, but rather ones whose definition should be tuned to best serve the freedoms of the individual. A few countries (like Germany) even explicitly encode this belief into the constitution (previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317712).
If you disagree with that, fine, but note that history, Constitutional scholarship, and case law are not on your side, so you should not go around saying that your opinions are absolute fact.
As neither of us are supreme court justices, everything here is opinion, that's what we're discussing, our opinions. I shouldn't need to prefix everything I say with "this is my opinion" just as I don't force you to prefix everything you say with the same. So put that aside, it's a useless thing to point out and adds nothing to the conversation.
> Quite a few of us do not believe property and free exchange are unconditional freedoms
I believe you are in the minority. I believe the vast majority of Americans would disagree as our Constitution only allows the federal government to regulate interstate commerce, I believe the case law is on my side as is the law but I'm not remotely running around claiming things are facts so please get off that high horse.
And by the way, trying to claim Constitutional scholarship and case law are not on my side is a poor and fallacious attempt at argument from authority; try addressing my arguments, I have no interest in your fallacies. I don't live in Germany, I don't care what their constitution says about property; I care what my Constitution says and more importantly how it came to be; it codified not what my rights are, but what the government can and cannot do.
My right to trade pre-existed government. If the governments of the world all collapsed tomorrow, my right to trade would still exist, I would have to defend it by force, which I would, but it would still exist as a naturally recognized right of any human to engage in trade and we'd all each defend this right by force if required. And I'll call you a liar if you claimed otherwise, you'd defend that right for yourself as well and you know it.
You're being massively downvoted, as it is happening with me in a lot of posts when I disagree with these radical leftists that appear to have taken control of HN.
I think this wasn't so fully dominated by SJW and communists two or three years ago as it is now.
Downvotes were not so commonly used as censuring mechanisms for contrary political opinions also.
I think in this case you're both being downvoted for calling up some of the right's favorite bogeymen(SJWs, communists) without any real cause for it here.
Characterizing everyone with a different opinion than you as "radical leftists" or "SJWs" only demonstrates your own ignorance and close-mindedness.
What we're talking about here is a perfectly ordinary application of antitrust law, which has been a well-supported framework of law for over a century. This is not some radical new idea proposed by a fringe group.
And while it is off-topic, HN "dominated by SJWs"? Good grief, you cannot be serious. Just to give one example, the HN commenters overwhelmingly supported James Damore and thought Google was in the wrong for firing him. Regardless of the merits of that opinion, it is not what you would see in a community "dominated by SJWs".
My comments were about the downvotes the other guy was receiving, for which I could only see political motives, not about the matter.
It is pretty clear in the HN guidelines that downvotes shouldn't be used to punish people you disagree with, but I see an army of politicized people doing it consistently, so it makes sense to identify these people with what I personally think from certain political groups. The discussion could continue from that point, with other people disagreeing with me and saying that the downvotes had a reasonable motive or whatever.
Once companies gain enough monopolistic control and power over their customers/users/market, they essentially function as government entities, and should be restricted and regulated as we would restrict and regulate the government.
None of these companies have a monopoly, and even if they did monopolies should only be regulated when they sell things we must have to live. Monopolies for luxury things are not a problem. Access to google and facebook are not essential things you need.
You don't need access to Google and Facebook to access information, there is an entire giant network out there for sharing information beyond Google and Facebook; there is zero valid reason to regulate these companies.
> Every monopoly should be regulated and, preferably, broke up.
No, they shouldn't be and the law doesn't agree with you. You have to be a bad actor before such laws apply, you shouldn't be broken up merely because no one else can compete.
Because the public has a right to regulate private companies or, indeed, restrict freedoms of private individuals, if it so chooses.
Private companies don't have the "freedom" to dump chemicals into rivers (or they shouldn't), they don't have the "freedom" to not pay taxes (or they shouldn't).
Likewise, once the well-being of individuals largely depend on having a Google account or a Facebook account, or once the ability to go from one place to another rests on having an Uber account, or the power to buy anything, including groceries, supposes one has an Amazon account, then those companies, private as they may, should be regulated so that they cannot unilaterally decide to ban individuals (real people), with no appeals process and no alternative.
I agree, but we're not in a situation where Facebook and google accounts are necessary elements of life nor is that likely. Everything you've mentioned has viable alternatives because none of these companies are a monopoly on those things. You have to first make a case that alternatives don't exist for necessary services and no such case exists.
It's a huge stretch to go from we the public have a right to regulate private companies-which I agree with-to those companies require regulation.
How would you define 'necessary elements'? Honest question.
Hypothetically, if there was plenty of alternative, but in practice everyone used FB/Google/etc., would that change things in your mind? It's not a technical monopoly, but practically it would be.
Mind, I'm not saying that I think this is the case, and I think we shouldn't preemptively do something about it quite yet. But I do feel the article at least makes me uncomfortable about the possibility.
Basically, I guess my question is: does it matter whether something is technically not a monopoly when, practically, it is? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Does anyone require a Google account to live, no; it's a luxury item. Unless and until not having a google account prevents you from living in this society, i.e. unless it becomes a basic utility which without you cannot function in society, then I don't believe you have any right to regulate Google. It matters when something is a monopoly when its service becomes no longer a luxury but a necessary element of life in society. If I can't get utilities to my house because they rely on a Google account for authentication, then you can regulate Google.
That still doesn't really satisfy me. What divides 'living' from 'luxury item', at least in the context of places like Western Europe? Or is that already a point of contention?
To make things even more extreme: assuming that practically speaking all internet users get 100% of their content via FB (whether FB proper or WhatsApp), and perhaps Google, and assuming that FB and Google were free to do as they please, in that extreme case would you still argue that because technically a person could enter a non-FB or non-Google URL, buth FB and Google should not be regulated in any way?
Again, I'm honestly asking because I respect your views. I do realize that as far as making any kind of case this a reduction ad absurdum. I would just like to hear more elaboration to bridge the gap between your point of view and that of others here (many, based on the downvotes you're getting)
Yes I would, again, not having a Google account does not threaten your ability to survive and you do not have a right to someone else's services and labor except under extreme special circumstances. As long as you can setup a blog and self host, you will never have a right to Google's services in my opinion. No one company will ever own all possible channels of broadcast, and your right to free speech means only you cannot be jailed or punished by the government for your views; it does not grant you a right to be serviced by broadcast medium possible. You do not, and should not ever, have a right to a Google account.
They are both getting pretty close though, to being the only option in their area (social network - especially considering how many apps rely on facebook for authentication - and search).
The areas themselves however are luxuries, you do not require access to a social network or internet search to live your life. And no, Google isn't the only option for search, nor Facebook the only option for social networks. There is no justification for regulating these companies that isn't infringing on these companies rights to do business. You do not have a right to their services, their services are not something people require.
Freedom for 800-ton corporate gorillas shouldn't be privileged over the freedom of the average individual. And the word "freedom" is empty sloganeering if you pretend it's separate from power.
But what if they do in the future? Suppose the author is right and ISPs don't support any packets/protocols other than FB, GOOG, and AMZN.
Are you arguing that in sum total, humanity is better off allowing private organizations to control communications in order to adhere to free market principles than the reverse?
Depends on your starting point. One could take an ethical point of view, and argue the baseline is public domain. Compared to that, copyleft does restrict one's ability to put further restrictions.
Permissive zealots argue that such a restriction is unacceptable, on the grounds that any restriction is unacceptable. Apparently they don't even approve of the insurance policy that prevents the very restrictions they say they loath.
The present thread has the same structure. Someone says it's unacceptable for an entity (not even a person!) to restrict one's freedom of speech with no recourse, and the moral equivalent of the Permissive Zealot snaps that forbidding that power to forbid is unacceptable, "because freedom".
Do libertarians realise that permission without ability means nothing?
That would be true if I had alternatives to begin with. If I'm banned from the only communication network in existence, I'm effectively banned from communicating altogether. No more freedom of speech, no more freedom of information, that's pretty heavy stuff.
I very much like the idea that no one has the "freedom" to deprive me of my citizens' freedoms. I mean, that's supposed to be the job of judges and juries.
You do have alternatives, and no law grants you the right to alternative versions of luxury products. You don't need a social network at all to be a functioning member of society, it's not a right. You're not banned from the only communication network in existence as none of those companies are that. They could all ban you and you still have access to the internet, you can still setup a blog and publish your thoughts to the world, you have not been limited in any way.
> No more freedom of speech, no more freedom of information, that's pretty heavy stuff.
I don't think you know what freedom of speech even means to be saying that here. Freedom of speech means the government can't limit your speech or punish you for it, it doesn't mean you have a right to every broadcast medium that exists for speech.
> You don't need a social network at all to be a functioning member of society, it's not a right.
I was talking about the trinet hypothesis, where (roughly speaking), Facebook is the internet. If I was banned from that, I couldn't even have a blog.
> Freedom of speech means the government can't limit your speech or punish you for it
Replace "government" by "no one", and I would agree. (I'll accept one exception, though: judges, when punishing me for some bad deed.)
> it doesn't mean you have a right to every broadcast medium that exists for speech.
Correct. But it does mean I have a right to at least one broadcast medium. By the way, freedom of speech only become real when the masses got internet access. Before then, only a select few could exercise that right: those with write access to radio, television, or journals.
> Replace "government" by "no one", and I would agree. (I'll accept one exception, though: judges, when punishing me for some bad deed.)
No. In the U.S. which is all I care about, no one but the government can violate your right to free speech. You do not have a right to not be censored by anyone nor should you.
> But it does mean I have a right to at least one broadcast medium.
No it does not; it doesn't remotely mean any such thing.
> By the way, freedom of speech only become real when the masses got internet access.
That's nonsense. Anyone anywhere can walk out into any public area and speak to the crowd; freedom of speech does not in any way imply freedom to wide area broadcast mediums, it means only that you can't get in trouble from the authorities for holding unpopular views. If your views are popular, they will gain an audience from word of mouth alone. You never had a right to TV, or the paper, or any other medium.
> it means only that you can't get in trouble from the authorities for holding unpopular views.
That's freedom of thought.
Reducing freedom of speech to the kind that doesn't have any influence (that would be "speaking to the crowd") is utterly ridiculous.
You can't be that stupid, and I'm not sure I mean that well.
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PS: I don't care about the legal definition of the term "freedom of speech", it was defined at a time when it couldn't mean anything significant for the common people. Just understand that I'm talking about something broader, more powerful, enabled by the internet. Maybe you don't care about that broader freedom. But then imagine for a second being stripped of all your accounts, including your blog if you have one. We'll see how you don't care.
Don't be absurd, thought can't be policed absent being made public via speech so it must necessarily involve speech to even be an issue. You're stammering to find a position because your own isn't logically coherent; that's what's happening here.
> Reducing freedom of speech to the kind that doesn't have any influence (that would be "speaking to the crowd") is utterly ridiculous.
No, it's what's always been intended; no speech is guaranteed to have influence, what an absurd notion to even ponder. Such a thing cannot ever be guaranteed.
> I don't care about the legal definition of the term "freedom of speech"
Well I don't care about this nonsense freedom you're making up because it imposes on other people's rights and can't be called a right. You do not have a right to other people's services, period. This broader freedom you're proclaiming is actually toxic abuse of private property, it's not freedom.
> But then imagine for a second being stripped of all your accounts, including your blog if you have one. We'll see how you don't care.
You don't have a right to have accounts on other people's systems. If every business you have an account with bans you, you're the problem, not them.
We do, and that's wrong; there shouldn't be any protected classes. You don't get to a place of treating people fairly by specifically protecting certain classes of people, that's the same irrational logic that led to nonsense legal racism we call affirmative action.
The need to limit our freedom to harm others through our freedom and the need to protect the majority from the power of the singles are two concepts specifically stated in the universal human rights declaration
My country is bound by the Constitution, not by some bullshit the UN came up with. I don't believe in one world government and never will nor does our own supreme court which in 2004 declared that the declaration "does not of its own force impose obligations as a matter of international law."
The fact that you believe you have no obligations to other people's right to "not be harmed" by bullies it's the reason why you're the only country in the world where kids kill other kids with shotguns.
That kind of shit doesn't happen anywhere else, not even in the so called third world.
Until all peering agreements become null and void, you can always create another ISP to compete in a free market. Sure, it's expensive and complicated to bury fiber, and radio spectrum is limited. But it's not technical or logistical difficulty that keeps people restricted to specific providers. It's usually political, and incumbents always have a huge upper hand.
The reason OSPs like AOL became so ubiquitous in the 90s was they made everything easier, and people were willing to pay for that, even if it effectively locked you into a 'smaller internet'. It still provided you internet access because that by itself was still a value-add. Will ISPs & OSPs charge you differently to access different content? Of course, because they know their customers don't give a shit about some romantic vision of unrestricted peering agreements.
There's one big elephant in the room that nobody talks about in discussions like this: Content. Whoever controls the Content gets to swing a multi-Billion dollar dick around, and they keep a hundred-Billion dollar advertising dick on a leash. Most people are obsessed with media & entertainment, a 700-Billion dollar industry, and the rest is cat memes and bargain bin chinese vacuum cleaners.
The leading lights of the web barely break the budget of a fraction of M&E. They are constantly dogging at each other because the web industry knows that without content, they have no leverage. Which is why Amazon & Netflix make their own content (though a very small amount, and not very valuable). If Google lost its advertising catbird seat, it would die screaming (almost all of its money comes from ads). And you can't sell ads if you can't get access to eyeballs or earholes.
I'd like submissions with clickbait headlines to get deleted instantly.
If your post needs clickbaity embellishments it's probably not worth my time to read it, if it doesn't need any, the post should be able to reach frontpage without them.
But beyond the details, I think it's hard to argue with the main point. The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic side.
My favourite example is wikipedia. If we didn't already have wikipedia, I don't think we'd be likely to get one on today's web. The culture is just far too corporate for wikipedia to be the end result.
Youtube's another sort of example. Democratic media! A new culture factory!...
Youtubes play by the rules these days. Copyright.. business friendly policy, erring on the side of restriction. It's just more manageable. Nudity? Why annoy politicians and advertisers? Just give us the purple hills version. Violence? Do what TV does. Revolution? Maybe, yes. Sure. Up the arab spring! Wait.. no. actually, wait. Hold on, not in america. Look.., no just means not here. Political ads, eh...? How about you leave us out of this.
They are no longer interested in the unfolding and unpredictable consequences of their inventions. Facebook is the world's news stand & coffee house. Youtube's regional political radio, newsletters & party magazine. They do not want this job, so they're pretending it isn't they're job. Pretending they won't have to draw lines between truth and lies, free speech and hate speech, laws and despotism.
The fear driven incumbent mentality.
It's a pity we didn't get more wikipedia's back when the gettin was good. I would have preferred to see a giant wikipedia end up with the fake news problem (which I think these two giants almost created themselves).