There was never an ‘open web’

There was never an ‘open web’ because at a fundamental level the web enforced
hierarchy via how URLs were defined to work. Instead, the…
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There was never an ‘open web’

There was never an ‘open web’ because at a fundamental level the web enforced
hierarchy via how URLs were defined to work. Instead, the ‘loss of the open
web’ is an eternal september situation: most contributors to the content of the
web were no longer people who had the time & money to buy their own domains &
host off their own machines.

It’s still a problem, and the problem does not lay at the feet of the influx of
new users. Everybody in 1990 should have been able to see that by 2000 lots of
people would be online and the people who were up for buying a domain name
would be the same ones who had one in 1990.

Instead of making it easy for people to host things on their own machines &
optimizing for inconsistent connections in the dialup era, we took the easy way
out & relied on ISPs to host user content. That seemed OK because we were doing
the same thing with usenet back then. We never really fixed this as the dailup
era ended.

Of course, we’re addressing this a bit now with IPFS and DAT and similar
things. But, it might be too late. Already, hosting content is “something that
nerds do” and “something that big companies do”, never “something that I can
do” from the perspective of non-technical users.

Everybody has a browser cache & so it’s pretty stupid that we don’t have cache
sharing along bittorrent or something built into every major browser and turned
on by default. Like, we could have done that in 1995 (not with bittorrent but
just with full-file hashing or something, among users with the same ISP, with
the ISP coordinating). Federated peer-to-peer cache contents sharing is a lot
easier to gradually transform into a hostless fully distributed storage thing.
Instead, when ATT WorldNet stopped hosting our home pages we turned to
geocities, and when geocities stopped we went to MySpace.

By Rococo Modem Basilisk on April 24, 2018.

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Exported from Medium on June 17, 2018.