[HN Gopher] Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History
___________________________________________________________________
Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History
Author : Amorymeltzer
Score : 126 points
Date : 2021-01-12 11:47 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| eternalban wrote:
| > _The place we compute shifted from a central location to
| anywhere; the time in which we compute shifted from batch
| processes to continuous computing._
|
| An interesting case of a true statement that is (imo) actually
| turning facts upside down.
|
| Yes, it is true, "the place" where we _access information and
| computing services_ is now "anywhere", since we carry a jazzed-
| up dumb terminal in our pockets.
|
| All computation is now actually happening in central systems
| called "clouds". This was Larry Ellision's vision as articulated
| in late 90s.
|
| The kicker of the analysis is this:
|
| _What is notable is that the current environment appears to be
| the logical endpoint of all of these changes: from batch-
| processing to continuous computing, from a terminal in a
| different room to a phone in your pocket, from a tape drive to
| data centers all over the globe. In this view the personal
| computer /on-premises server era was simply a stepping stone
| between two ends of a clearly defined range. _
|
| Centralized clouds are not the "logical" conclusion of what
| happened in the 80s and 90s. Personal computing was precisely
| that: Personal. Your machine, your code.
|
| My personal speculative understanding of this transitional period
| in history of computing is that PC caught the policy makers by
| surprise. What we have now with clouds was the vision of IBM in
| 60s and early 70s.
|
| The 'black swan' of PC, which was coincidental with public
| cryptographic breakthroughs (PGP), placed serious obstacles in
| terms of projected policy goals, which certainly included
| considerations pertaining to sensitive national security
| capabilites, such as dissemination of information, and ad-hoc
| network communication. (Raise your hand if you remember clipper
| chip efforts, for example).
|
| So yes, the "range" was "clearly defined" per policy
| recommendations coming out of think-tanks, then PC happened and
| we spent 2 decades watching the co-option of the PC champions by
| Big Tech and SV money, and now we're treated to convenient "this
| is where we were supposed to be folks!" narratives.
|
| Try again.
| the-dude wrote:
| Raises hand :-)
|
| But the point I wanted to make was : making web requests _is_
| batch-processing. These are short-lived executions of code and
| it does not matter if the process dies at the end. It can be
| restarted for every web /batch-request.
|
| Which is something fundamentally different than an application
| ( video-editor, game etc ).
| eternalban wrote:
| Noted! (We're not in disagreement regarding the mechanics.)
| danrl wrote:
| You have to have a really weird business model or otherwise
| borderline content to risk getting kicked off from AWS. Sure, a
| risk for businesses to track, but surely a very low risk (with
| admittedly high impact).
| [deleted]
| rhino369 wrote:
| We don't know what the line is going to be going forward. If it
| is refusal to take down calls for violence or other illegal
| content--well that seems pretty fair to me.
|
| But we should be skeptical of what exactly big tech will do
| this power going forward.
| user22 wrote:
| I think the test is pretty straight forward and is basically an
| issue of risk and is not really directly related to the
| internet.
|
| If having anything to do with X creates the perception of Y
| being liable for any legal and civil improprieties, then Y will
| dissolve any of its relationships with X.
|
| <my take> For the parler case, Amazon didn't want to be held
| responsible for hosting content that (maybe) caused the
| problems in that nations capital, and certainly doesn't want to
| be held responsible for any future content/actions.
|
| I think this can be justified by preservation of shareholder
| value. </my take>
| [deleted]
| zeroz wrote:
| > Germany and France attacked Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc.
| after U.S. President Donald Trump was shut off from the social
| media platforms, in an extension of Europe's battle with big
| tech. German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions,
| saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing
| free speech and not private technology companies.
|
| > Rights like the freedom of speech "can be interfered with, but
| by law and within the framework defined by the legislature -- not
| according to a corporate decision."
|
| As much as I support this pure democratic view of Angela Merkel,
| and as much as I hope Ben Thompson is right with his Internet 3.0
| "Return of technology" and "open protocols" idea to have a
| counterweight to big corp, I think it's really difficult to
| escape Internet 2.0 economics.
|
| e.g. EU Cookie law - Good intention and poor implementation.
| Whatsapp vs. X - We all on HN know, we want better, but network
| effects are really strong.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Merkel's view might be interpreted as pro-free speech at a
| glance, but the corollary of what she's saying is that no
| single entity should wield as much power as Facebook, Twitter,
| and Google at all. It's to be interpreted in the sense that
| additional legislative weight should be put behind disrupting
| the quasi-monopolistic dominance of these entities.
| kodah wrote:
| Having followed Angela Merkel's comments in the past I did
| not read her comments as "pro free speech". I read them as a
| concern about power. What happened this week, in the long
| term, will likely be looked on poorly by history.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > What happened this week, in the long term, will likely be
| looked on poorly by history.
|
| It might well be, but it's worth keeping in mind that this
| isn't mutually exclusive with what happened _last_ week. I
| don 't just mean the armed insurrection in the Capitol with
| the tacit support of a sitting president who lost his re-
| election bid; I mean that, for a full week, no government
| agency _even made an official statement_ about that
| insurrection.
|
| The real story of January 2021 may well be that private
| companies have stepped in to take action not merely because
| they could, but because the government refused to do so.
| While I share Ben Thompson's discomfort at private entities
| having this kind of power over the public sphere, the even
| more uncomfortable truth is that we -- both (primarily
| American) citizenry and (primarily American) government --
| have ceded that power to them.
| kodah wrote:
| > but because the government refused to do so.
|
| This is just narrative. Immediately after the Capitol
| riots people were trying to create narratives that the
| FBI and Capitol Hill police intentionally didn't do their
| job. That turned out not to be true, as the piece by
| Brian Stelter showed. This reasoning seems to be a
| further manipulated form of that. I would not expect the
| American government to be making public statements.
| Generally it's the president that addresses the public
| and obviously in this case he didn't.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| s/just narrative/plain statement of fact/
|
| I didn't mention the FBI or the Capitol Police. There was
| an armed attack on Congress while it was in session and
| the federal government has not made an official public
| statement about it. Maybe you think there's nothing
| remotely weird about that. I do. Maybe you think no other
| administration would have had multiple briefings from law
| enforcement by now. I don't.
| kodah wrote:
| > Maybe you think there's nothing remotely weird about
| that. I do. Maybe you think no other administration would
| have had multiple briefings from law enforcement by now.
| I don't.
|
| I do not. I would expect that in any terrorist incident,
| like 9/11 or others, that the President would be
| orchestrating a response. Clearly the President has been
| implicated in these things so that's not going to happen.
| You have Congress preparing impeachment documents and the
| FBI has responded to journalists, many of which created
| immediately hostile narratives about law enforcement. I
| do not know what else you're expecting them to do at this
| point.
|
| If I were the FBI I would not be saying anything either.
| I'd have agents out in the field collecting evidence and
| arresting people, getting the story and having them turn
| in their coconspirators. If you make some sort of
| statement it prompts them to destroy evidence.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| All right, with the longer explanation I see where you're
| coming from on this. I would still stand by my
| observations (the part you quoted), though; there hasn't
| been even the most anodyne public statement expressing
| sympathy, calling for unity, vowing to make a full
| investigation, or the like. That this administration may
| be resisting making such statements because they are
| implicated in the attacks is pretty extraordinary.
| qsort wrote:
| > It's to be interpreted in the sense that additional
| legislative weight should be put behind disrupting the quasi-
| monopolistic dominance of these entities.
|
| I tend to agree with your read, i.e. this has nothing to do
| with freedom-of-speech type issues and everything to do with
| Germany (and Europe more generally) positioning themselves
| against Big Tech; my only question is _why now_.
|
| I'd love nothing more than to see Facebook/Twitter take a
| beating, but _in this particular case_ there isn 't really
| any strong argument that the government should have
| intervened and prevented Twitter from blocking Trump. Is this
| just an extreme case of carpe diem?
| qsort wrote:
| > As much as I support this pure democratic view
|
| Honestly I really struggle to see why this would even be
| 'democratic'. There's a pretty strong and convincing argument
| that it would be better if Twitter hadn't blocked Trump, but
| the notion that the government should be allowed to _force at
| gunpoint_ a private entity to amplify speech that such entity
| disagrees with doesn 't strike me as particularly democratic.
|
| I get it, Twitter bad, I agree. But the implications of this
| idea are frankly much scarier than any "corporate decision"
| will ever be.
| zeroz wrote:
| With constitutionality free speech the government shouldn't
| be allowed to force a private entity to amplify or censor
| speech. And don't get me wrong. I was happy about the ban in
| this moment.
|
| On the other hand I wouldn't like to give all moderation
| power to private entities alone. If not opportune with
| current business model, company ethics are quickly changed
| (e.g. don't be evil). As long as you have small decentralized
| shops and platforms that's ok. With concentration of power a
| private company nearly acts like a utility. Maybe some kind
| of neutral and elected ethics committee could help large
| private platforms to maintain transparent and democratic
| standards. Would they have blocked him even earlier?
| qsort wrote:
| > With concentration of power a private company nearly acts
| like a utility.
|
| I agree this is a problem. I believe the more rational way
| to solve it is to break the monopoly, i.e. using antitrust
| powers more aggressively and letting the market decide,
| rather than having some committee decide what's kosher.
|
| > elected
|
| Holy cow please no. I'm willing to believe you have the
| best of intentions, but anything elected would 100% become
| a stupid political game from day one. And even if it
| didn't, popular votes on issues that potentially impact
| individual rights are a terrible idea: if 51% of the public
| votes $VERY_BAD_THING, do we have to go along with it? We
| enshrine fundamental rights in constitutions precisely
| because we don't want them to be endangered by the current
| political wind.
| piaste wrote:
| > the notion that the government should be allowed to force
| at gunpoint a private entity to amplify speech that such
| entity disagrees with doesn't strike me as particularly
| democratic.
|
| "Private entity" is a very broad category that encompasses
| everything from individual citizens/entrepreneurs to
| trillion-dollar multinational corporations with armies of
| shareholders, lobbyists, and lawyers.
|
| I think there are plenty of scenarios where the law should
| discriminate between the latter and the former, and this is
| one of them.
| qsort wrote:
| > I think there are plenty of scenarios where the law
| should discriminate between the latter and the former,
|
| I don't see why this is the case. Private entities are made
| of people. If Twitter vehemently disagrees with something,
| I don't see any reason why the government should force them
| to go against their wishes.
|
| > very broad category that encompasses everything
|
| This is exactly the problem. While there is an argument
| that Twitter was wrong in the specific case, the
| implications of having the government _force Twitter to say
| /amplify things they don't believe_ are __chilling__.
| Restricting speech is bad enough, but often understandable,
| this is frankly several steps beyond what I'm comfortable
| with.
| twmiller wrote:
| > There's a pretty strong and convincing argument that it
| would be better if Twitter hadn't blocked Trump...
|
| There is? I haven't heard it.
| qsort wrote:
| From a strictly utilitarian perspective, Twitter's actions
| generated backlash that was probably avoidable had they
| continued with their previous policy of placing a label
| that basically said "this guy is an idiot" on every tweet.
| This obviously has to be balanced against the damage caused
| by letting him break very rule without (apparent)
| consequences. I'm not sure where I stand on this issue, but
| I can see an argument for both sides.
|
| This is however a completely disjoint topic. "Should they
| have done X" and "Should they be able to do X if they so
| choose" are _very_ different questions.
| twmiller wrote:
| From my perspective, we're still talking about the actual
| events of Jan. 6, rather than whatever inane thing Trump
| would have tweeted this morning to deflect that
| conversation. In my mind, that's a HUGE win that far
| outweighs any backlash. I also, personally, wonder how
| overstated that backlash actually is. I don't know anyone
| IRL that is lamenting the fact that Trump lost his
| Twitter account.
| greatgib wrote:
| This is the usual hypocrisy of european politicians.
|
| Things are ok and not problematic when it is them that do it
| because they have the power. But when they are the subjects of
| similar things, then they don't like and want to have this
| power for them.
|
| There is a very good and ironic example of that in France:
|
| The former president Nicolas Sarkozy created and pushed a lot
| of nefarious 'security' laws when he was president. For
| example, the possibility for police to monitor phone calls
| without a warrant and things like that.
|
| To critics, he was replying that the state is 'trustful' and
| that only bad people could fear for their privacy.
|
| Back now, a few years later, police wiretapped a phone line
| that he opened under a fake name to secretly discuss about
| another police investigation that is currently targeting him
| and he allegedly used this line to abuse of authority and try
| to get insider knowledge from law officials in exchange for a
| special position.
|
| At his trial and in medias, he cried everywhere that it is
| unfair and abused that his phone lines could have been
| wiretapped like that to provide evidences against him. Like if
| he is a victim and not the person that pushed these bad
| security laws against the population despite a lot of critics
| of people concerned by freedom and privacy topics.
| oscargrouch wrote:
| > This is the usual hypocrisy of european politicians.
|
| If a chimp somehow learned that 2 + 2 = 4, would you point
| out that given he is a chimp and "chimps don't not math",
| that the statement about the subject is wrong, even that is
| clear it has a merit in itself and who says what basically
| don't matter when we think about something being right or
| wrong?
|
| This is not as simple as 2+2 of course, but i rather prefer
| that the merit of what being discussed is taken the proper
| focus while who says what, only have more prominence when
| hidden intentions that can actually cause harm cant be
| neglected.
|
| And i think this is clearly not the case unless your name is
| Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey or anyone who will profit from
| this digital neo-feudalism power grab.
|
| People seen to forget easily how and why sovereign states
| with the rule of the law were built, and how, if we forget
| the lessons of the past, it will be very hard to get out of a
| state where we all have no recourse against our new lords
| once we go through this path of powerless, anemic sovereign
| states.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't know that I'd call it hypocrisy. Most European
| politicians who've commented on this seem to be expressing a
| strong, principled view that the state is on top and nobody
| should be allowed to exercise power over it. This sounds
| strange to a lot of us in the US, where we don't generally
| believe the government deserves special respect, but it's our
| attitude that's atypical from a global perspective.
| greatgib wrote:
| I can understand that from far you could have this
| impression that they have good will and for them "the state
| is on top and nobody should be allowed to exercise power
| over it".
|
| But make no mistake, this is just communication/propaganda
| and what makes me say that it is hypocrisy. Politics here
| are champions of double talk. Despite pretending to be
| democracies, a lot of leaders are now trying to grab the
| maximum power and undermine citizen decision power.
|
| For example, in France, normally the President and
| government is just here to execute the laws decided by the
| national assembly. But in the past decade, majority members
| of the national assembly are now in a party whose purpose
| is to "support the president" and so, you could be excluded
| if you would not vote like the president want you to.
|
| Also, more and more the government decide new laws
| unilaterally, sometimes in secret or after secret
| negotiations with lobbies, and will do everything needed to
| force the assembly to approve it.
|
| Sometimes it is just pressure, sometimes it is
| manipulations like presenting multiple time the same law,
| even if it is rejected, until it will pass. Or a present it
| at a specific time, like at night when there are other
| events, so that opposition will not have time to come to
| vote.
|
| They are also more frequently using anti democratic tools
| when they can't manage to have their law to pass, like
| something call 49.1 that enact a law without vote of the
| national assembly.
|
| And lastly, we have seen the case a lot with "fake news"
| and "hate speech", where governement or governement member
| will spread "fake news" or send bad "hate" messages.
|
| But when you have breaking news of bad behavior of them,
| then they will pretend that it is "fake news"/"hate"
| message, and that the state should be able to censor that.
| In this regard, they are very similar to Trump.
|
| To give one last example, during the first part of the
| covid crisis, the government knew that they did not have
| enough mask, because of bad management, and instead of
| telling the truth, they said that pharmacy were not allowed
| to sell them, because people would not know how to use them
| and that they are useless to deal with the covid.
|
| Later the proof was given that they were voluntarily lying.
| itsthefnlacctdn wrote:
| We get to vote for who represents us in government, do we
| get to vote for which laws Twitter , Google, FB choose to
| enforce? Can we vote with our wallets out of this one?
| Why does it feel like advertisers crowned themselves
| arbiters of truth and a lot are ok with it because they
| currently don't like the same bad things.
|
| Govts are of the people for the people, corporations are
| for making profit over anything, do we hate people
| (ourselves) this much?
| qu-everything wrote:
| Fuck lawmakers. it's their platform, they can ban whoever break
| their TOS.
| galuggus wrote:
| Do you think you shops should be allowed to refuse service to
| anyone they want to?
| qu-everything wrote:
| if they break rules, yes
| dominotw wrote:
| they can come up with whatever "rules" they want. So its
| superfluous to say "if they break rules" .
| oscargrouch wrote:
| To give more context to this: imagine a seller that
| defines as a rule to discriminate clients by their skin
| color.
|
| The rule of the law prevents we get back to the rule of
| the jungle which resorts to the more powerful actors
| forcing their will against all others.
| dominotw wrote:
| > Fuck lawmakers.
|
| you are against anti trust, anti labor, anti discrimination
| laws that were passed by "lawmakers" .
|
| I pray this thinking doesn't go mainstream.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I don't see a way out of this that doesn't include government-
| funded technology services.
|
| If Twitter is a free speech platform to be used by the people,
| there is no way to exercise that consistently without violating
| Twitter's rights.
|
| I know the US built a public postal service because we saw mail
| delivery as a requirement for a functioning country. Is the
| infrastructure necessary to run an Internet now falling into
| the same category?
|
| And not just the cables, but the routing technology, hosting
| technology, etc. More like AWS than Comcast. Where is the line,
| other than for protected classes?
| bcheung wrote:
| I would much rather see something more decentralized. It
| seems like politics is increasingly looking like whichever
| party is in power uses their power to get more power.
|
| There is definitely an argument to be made that the Internet
| is so much ingrained in society that denying people Internet
| access is like denying people access to grocery stores and
| electricity.
| zpeti wrote:
| Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will never
| compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs
| creating products. They just can't move as quickly, or deliver
| good enough products.
|
| What I think internet 3.0 will be is websites and services
| segregated politically, just like the media is. Just like we have
| CNN and Fox, we will have Twitter and [Parler?] Facebook and
| Rightbook.
|
| It will take time to build. But the assault on half the country
| will result in the market taking care of this. Just like parler
| almost did.
|
| (It's not clear exactly what Ben means by his internet 3.0, his
| article could be interpreted this way as he says
| "decentralised".)
| generalk wrote:
| > Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will
| > never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore
| > entrepreneurs creating products.
|
| Nginx and Apache httpd are, in that order, the most used web
| servers. Both are FOSS, and both serve HTTP, an open protocol.
| There were definitely attempts to build proprietary protocols,
| none of which were successful, and in the long run the
| proprietary web servers ended up second place to the open
| source projects.
|
| Here in the US, I get reminders via SMS from my bank or my
| doctor telling me that payments went through or that I have an
| upcoming appointment. More thorough messages are sent via
| Email. Every form I've filled out since the turn of the
| millennium asks for my email address, none of them have asked
| for my MySpace, Twitter, or Facebook handles.
|
| I edit my code in either Emacs, Vim, or Visual Studio Code --
| one of those is an open-source product by a very much for-
| profit company, the other two have survived decades as powerful
| editors/IDEs.
|
| If I had to make a prediction, I'd say that over time open
| protocols will end up winning -- not because of some kind of
| ideological purity, but because they permit people to build
| platforms that interoperate with one another. The Fediverse is
| young yet, and Twitter/Instagram/FB are making adversarial
| interoperability hard, but the entire history of the Internet
| and the World Wide Web is one where open has won over the long
| haul.
| haolez wrote:
| Entrepreneurship is not about putting a price tag on
| everything and making closed proprietary stuff. It's about
| making a profitable business using the tools at your
| disposal, which might even be open source (like in the "open
| core" business model). It may be part of your strategy to
| open source your product, as many do.
| blippage wrote:
| > If I had to make a prediction, I'd say that over time open
| protocols will end up winning
|
| I think Alan Kay made a prediction to that effect a few years
| ago, so you're in good company.
|
| I certainly hope you're both right. Patience is required,
| though.
|
| I imagine it's something of a cycle. Companies try to lock
| users into their ecosystem, but there are opposing forces
| that want the protocols to be free.
|
| I certainly hope that the internet of the future looks a lot
| different than its current form. We regularly hear of data
| breaches; something that people take in their stride.
|
| When will people wake up that the current model is not a good
| one? I don't know. It's not certain that they will, but my
| sense is that current practises are not sustainable long
| term.
|
| We now have "IoT" devices that are beholden to company
| servers. That's utter insanity, in my books. Will we wake up
| to the fact that it is a deeply flawed idea?
| msla wrote:
| > Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will never
| compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs
| creating products.
|
| Meditate on the fact you're posting this on the Internet, as
| opposed to CompuServe's or AOL's own networks, and say that
| again.
|
| In addition to the fact you're drawing a false dichotomy
| between Open Source and open protocols and business, no
| business has ever created a fundamental communications network
| of the scale or success of the Internet, and none have even
| come close even though they tried. AOL, CompuServe, Tymshare...
| they're all dead and buried or absorbed into the Internet to
| the point they no longer have an independent existence on the
| technical level.
|
| You can say this about programming languages: Compare the
| success of Python to the success of AutoLISP or even the
| success of Lisp Machine Lisp to the success of Emacs Lisp. I
| can't think of a single widely-used programming language which
| is only available in a proprietary implementation. (And by
| widely-used I mean beyond a single OS and beyond a single
| industry.)
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I think the events of the last week will give a boost to things
| like ActivityPub. It has over a million active users, and two
| of the big projects (Mastodon and PeerTube) came out of EU
| countries. They have their problems, but if I were an official
| looking to reduce dependence on the US, that's where I would
| start.
| conradev wrote:
| You are presenting true entrepreneurship and open protocols as
| a false dichotomy
|
| This has been changing for some time now: MongoDB switched to
| an open source model a decade ago, and a number of companies
| have followed suit. The strategy is hard to pull off, but even
| in the case where Docker the company very much failed, Docker
| the technology did not.
|
| The next wave of these are blockchain companies. I think the
| jury is still out on these open source companies becoming
| breakout successes, but they did succeed so far in one critical
| aspect: the funding model. These companies have tens of
| millions of dollars at their disposal to build open protocols,
| and a plan for how to make more once they ship usable products.
|
| Yes, building centralized tech is easier. No, that doesn't mean
| it will inevitably win. These things take time.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > MongoDB switched to an open source model a decade ago
|
| ...and then moved back 2 years ago.
|
| From the https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/README
| :
|
| > MongoDB is free and the source is available. Versions
| released prior to October 16, 2018 are published under the
| AGPL. All versions released after October 16, 2018, including
| patch fixes for prior versions, are published under the
| Server Side Public License (SSPL) v1.
|
| AGPL is open source: https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0
| SSPLv1 is not listed, and SSPLv2 does not seem to have been
| approved either at last mention
| https://opensource.org/LicenseReview122018
| seneca wrote:
| > non profit open source projects will never compete with true
| entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products.
| They just can't move as quickly, or deliver good enough
| products.
|
| How do you reconcile that statement with the absolute dominance
| of Linux? I don't think they this is universally true. Maybe
| with the qualification "... for consumer products".
|
| I think the rest of your comment is probably, sadly, accurate.
| geodel wrote:
| Seems to me Linux success is largely due to commercial
| vendors developing many features as aggressively as they
| would do for closed source products. If it were just
| engineers working gratis on saturday afternoon Linux wouldn't
| be where it is today.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Isn't that an argument for it being free and open? Whether
| contributors get paid is orthogonal to freedom and
| openness.
|
| It's hard to imagine what would have happened if there was
| no GNU Linux, Apache, SQLite... [insert gigantic list of
| open source technology that almost everyone in our field
| relies on].
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| >Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will never
| compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs
| creating products. They just can't move as quickly, or deliver
| good enough products.
|
| The best products don't win (Windows's monopoly is proof of
| that, Linux not being based on Plan 9 is another), and then you
| have the game theoretic threat (lock-in, insecurity,
| existential jeopardy) of proprietary products thrown in to
| boot. Those are usually more important for fundamental,
| backbone kind of things though (OSes, browsers, servers,
| crypto, etc. -- as opposed to your music player or a game).
| leppr wrote:
| Just a nitpick but not "half of the US population" follows
| Trump.
|
| Not even getting into the fallacy of attributing more than can
| be to participants of a binary choice dilemma, the American
| Republic presidential elections are not "1 person 1 vote" like
| most other democratic Republics.
| api wrote:
| You're not wrong, but the reason is more fundamental: open
| source and open protocols do not have an economic model
| sufficient to finance the _immense_ amount of brutal work
| required to make products that are easy to use and appealing
| for the general public. FOSS and open systems will always lose
| (outside nerds and certain power user audiences) because closed
| systems have an economic model in the form of either paid SaaS,
| commercial licenses, advertising, or surveillance capitalism
| (or some mix of these things).
|
| ... or in the case of Parler perhaps paid propaganda financing
| from far-right wealthy financiers...? Of course political
| propaganda is a form of advertising so it fits under the adware
| / surveillanceware category.
|
| In software, making something work in the algorithmic and
| technical sense is usually less than a quarter of the work. In
| the case of social networks and chat apps and similar stuff
| it's probably only a single digit percentage of the work. The
| vast majority of the work is in the domain of user interface,
| user experience, and product design.
|
| Even worse, this is usually the type of work that programmers
| don't enjoy. It involves endless tweaking, endless rewrites of
| user interfaces to hone in on something people like or to chase
| trends, and the soul crushing drudgery of bug fixes and
| workarounds to edge cases. Because this work is not fun, people
| generally must be paid to do it. Because it's the majority of
| the work, the cost of paying people to do it dwarfs the cost of
| building the technical underpinnings of the product.
|
| I used to think that the failure of decentralization was a
| technical problem. I wasn't totally wrong there either. There
| are major technical challenges around decentralization, but
| I've realized since then that the lack of an economic driver to
| finance the UI/UX aspects are the real issue. This issue is not
| solvable because nobody is willing to actually pay for
| software.
| jchanimal wrote:
| Does anyone else think building product is not that hard? You
| make or break on the Alpha release when the direction of the
| product is set. The hard work comes after you know you've got
| a good bet.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Aside: Some people pay tons of money for software due to
| addictive game design, social and UX patterns.
|
| But I agree. Building good UX is hard, iterative work and
| requires a connection of right and left brain thinking via
| communication or generalists.
|
| Graphic, UI, UX and game designers are typically not as
| engaged with open source as programmers and engineers. Is
| this a cultural issue or is it inherent? Ultimately any given
| UI is a concretion, but I've noticed a strong trend to
| abstraction in these fields. Design Systems/Language, Design
| Thinking and so on. I mean the term "UX" is in of itself an
| abstraction. And the digital tools that designers use today
| are much more powerful and varied than just a decade ago.
|
| Maybe it is a matter of time until there is more engagement
| in open source from the design world.
| gumby wrote:
| > What I think internet 3.0 will be is websites and services
| segregated politically, just like the media is. Just like we
| have CNN and Fox, we will have Twitter and [Parler?] Facebook
| and Rightbook.
|
| That defeats the connection desire of user-generated content.
| I'm on FB mainly to learn what my friends/family are up to (and
| see cute animal pix and some maths jokes). If a bunch of them
| were on {right,left}book and I were on the other I'd miss out
| as would they.
|
| If the political claptrap self-segregated into verticals that
| would be fine by me. FB would still work. Of course such
| arrangements are not stable as terms like "left" and "right"
| aren't really meaningful (the 1950s "right" and "left"
| enthusiasts would not recognize how those terms are used
| today).
| RhodoYolo wrote:
| This brings up the question - What is the role of government?
|
| Ensure contracts are upheld, to harm bad actors (via prison,
| fines, etc.) and to protect us from foreign invasion.
|
| so, where did that fall apart in our current American system and
| what can we do to save our democracy? As the article has hinted
| at, regulation has gotten too esoteric for a bipartisan split in
| congress. When you have almost 500 people arguing about the use
| of SPACS for going public, limits on PPE loan, rights of citizens
| and business in regard to the pandemic, etc. etc.
|
| John adams said 'God forbid we be 20 years from [..] a
| rebellion.'
|
| We as Americans need a bit more of a centralized system and move
| a bit more towards an oligarchy. Same things that plagued the
| roman republic (Bipartisan politics) are plaguing our system.
| Augustus' answer? bring it down to him and 30 other people who
| where the most important people from each 'area' and the only
| thing that gave him more power than the rest was the fact the he
| was the only member who didn't rotate. Otherwise, it still came
| down to voting albeit with a forum that allowed for open
| discussion without rambling into nonsense and listing to 500
| people say the same thing over and over.
|
| Eth can uphold contracts
| osgovernment wrote:
| I for one have been a huge fan of platforms like Kubernetes,
| because at least they abstract the cloud away from specific
| providers to some degree. Had they additionally used IPFS for
| storage, switching cloud providers wouldn't be much of a burden
| at all. Most enterprises building redundancy also have to think
| of what happens if one of their cloud providers go offline.
|
| The problem is that many companies are so invested in AWS that
| they don't know anything else. Many companies are building
| their entire IT around AWS. In that regard, unless we create
| legislation that requires unified APIs and an open standard for
| cloud services; then we are going to have to start treating
| cloud providers like utilities.
|
| I supported Twitter kicking Trump off its platform. I think AWS
| kicking Parler off is practically crossing the line, and that
| legislation needs to be made to tell cloud providers that they
| need to create an open standard for their services or be
| considered an essential utility.
| devmunchies wrote:
| I would like to see a rise in decentralized services, but it's
| not possible while Apple and Google's curated stores are the only
| way to install apps on a smart phone.
|
| As soon as you can install an app from a file like you can on
| desktop, then we can have some real progress.
|
| I'm thinking of Apple saying "we won't let you download that app"
| for my macbook. How did we let them have that power on mobile
| computing?
| kiwidrew wrote:
| It's still perfectly possible (for now) to use an alternative
| app store like F-Droid on Android phones. It requires
| sideloading an .apk (literally "install an app from a file")
| and jumping through a couple hoops (basically: changing your
| security settings to allow installing apps from a file) to get
| started, but it's not an insurmountable barrier.
|
| Apple is of course a totally different story, as their devices
| are 100% locked down walled gardens where Apple is the sole
| arbiter of what software you're allowed to install. It
| continues to astound me that a substantial number of HN users
| see absolutely nothing wrong with this.
| MR4D wrote:
| > it's not possible while Apple and Google's curated stores are
| the only way to install apps
|
| I disagree. We have DNS, email, and HTTP. That's a pretty
| capable set of distributed protocols that have been on those
| phones since the beginning.
|
| The stores are not a problem here (although they are in other
| ways); rather, there is a lack of apps that people want to use,
| or perhaps a lack of people using those apps.
|
| I use Riot (now Element), which uses the Matrix protocol across
| all my iDevices, and it runs just as well as on my Mac. but
| hardly anyone I know is on it. It's much more private of a
| solution that WhatsApp, and although not as refined, it works
| pretty darn well for my use cases.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| > Companies, meanwhile, will note the fate of Parler.
|
| This is one of the most significant things that I've already
| seen. Many discussions in the past few days about how this
| represents a business risk. E-mails from providers about TOS
| updates, some even saying that if a client gets caught up in
| something or indicted, we get kicked. Many similar stories from
| others; companies starting to invest in at least making their
| tech multi-cloud or multi-cloud-ready. This may drive a shift
| from cloud computing as well: it's more difficult to shut off a
| company that runs its own data center.
| Abhinav2000 wrote:
| Thing is, cloud computing is actually quite expensive. There's
| a reason why Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM are all lining up
| to grab a piece of the pie.
|
| Yes there are economies of scale which means overall the cost
| should be lower, but once you factor in profit margins, I'm not
| sure.
|
| The main benefit is definitely not requiring as much technical
| acumen or teams to build your infrastructure, but as more
| skilled workers enter the labour force, I think that too will
| start to get marginalised to some degree and teams will shift
| back to having their own IT departments. Just a guess.
|
| I personally hate the cloud, way too expensive for me and the
| design choices they do are geared towards profit maximisation
| and not building a partnership with customers where both win.
| E.g. so many different modules, each with limited
| functionality...when I can just run my own virtual server and
| do everything myself much better
| dominotw wrote:
| > but as more skilled workers enter the labour force, I think
| that too will start to get marginalised to some degree and
| teams will shift back to having their own IT departments
|
| I am not sure if this would the case though. Why would an
| employer use skilled workers to do something mundane like
| setting up a kubernetes cluster vs something that actually
| differentiate their own business from others.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Large and established businesses hire high-paid high-
| skilled workers to coordinate their legal affairs, maintain
| their accounting, manage their public image, and control
| their finances.
|
| None of those things are part of the core business or
| product differentiation. Yet large corporate orgs still
| expend enormous amounts of resources on those activities.
| In fact in most companies the second highest-paid executive
| is the COO, which pretty much just means the guy in charge
| of all non-core activities.
|
| I think the simple answer is that most corporates are
| _highly_ risk averse. Being in startup culture blinds you
| to this. Startups are comfortable with existential threats
| in the background, because they 're constantly on the verge
| of failure anyway. They might neglect their liability,
| public image, or cloud TOS risk. Fast innovation in the
| core product is a far higher priority for a hypergrowth
| startup.
|
| In contrast, large and mature organizations are going to be
| extremely sensitive even to small risks. The typical large
| company is slow-growing but highly profitable. The number
| one priority is to avoid killing the goose that lays the
| golden egg.
|
| Think of the most conservative, bean-counting , button-down
| loan officer in suburban Topeka. Once "Cloud TOS Risk"
| enters the business lexicon, said beancounter is likely
| going to insist that the company in question has a plan,
| before releasing the tens of millions in loan refinancing
| that modern corporate America relies on in their leverage
| capital structures. It doesn't matter how big of an actual
| risk is. These processes are driven by "check-the-box" CYA
| theatre.
| OzzyB wrote:
| The fact that all the top-line Cloud hosts are really
| (really!) expensive just adds insult to injury; so perhaps
| this will start to accelerate the plans of those looking for
| contingencies. The good news is that we now are in the era of
| K8s and cheap(er) CPUs (AMD), so there are a lot more options
| now than just "betting on AWS".
|
| Funnily enough, I'm now starting to think that the only
| reason AWS proliferated as much as they did was to only fuel
| the VC capital boom of the last decade and not much else.
| Startups we able to promise huge valuations and returns based
| on the belief that AWS would "scale for us" and they didn't
| really need the inhouse expertise needed to grow. Just sell
| the growth.
| BGthaOG wrote:
| A though on the author's words:
|
| > Megalothymia is "the desire to be recognized as superior to
| other people", and "can be manifest both in the tyrant who
| invades and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will
| recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who
| wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven";
| successful liberal democracies channel this desire into fields
| like entrepreneurship or competition, including electoral
| politics.
|
| Trump can be described as someone who has megalothymia, wielding
| his money and more recently politics to assert his perception of
| himself as 'superior'. This, along with what I opine is blindness
| of the heart, leveraging this megalothymia as a tool to worship
| his ego.
|
| These recent days, a number of tech companies, of course made up
| of people, flexed back when they felt their reasoning outweighed
| the risks of such a decision. Is this tyranny from these powerful
| people (Companies et al.)? And thus we are seeing folks (Trump &
| Companies et al.) taste each others tyranny, taking turns? Or are
| companies et al. simply claiming a piece of that same echelon
| Trump claims for himself, as an act of fighting back against a
| tyrant? Or some third or fourth option... etc.
| RGamma wrote:
| To be fair, concerning Western civilisations it's the North
| Americans who have become the most crazy; always have been
| quirky, but in the past decade ever more so. Turbocapitalism
| might have something to do with it...
|
| Always worth remembering, that sane societies with sane
| institutions and conduct exist. One has to consider the "human
| element" if one wants to keep it that way.
| bumbada wrote:
| Centralization works for a reason: It makes prices go down.
|
| For a company like Google, Twitter or Facebook it matters very
| little if they have 100, 1.000 million users or 2.000, or 3.000.
| Most of the cost is in salaries and the salaries are the same
| because the technology is scalable.
|
| Once they have the market of hundreds or billions of users,
| almost nobody can compete with them because even paying enormous
| salaries the price per user is very small.
|
| The problem with decentralization is that they don't have scale,
| so it is a serious problem just paying a single engineer salary.
| f430 wrote:
| They were built in the early days of computing but now our
| smartphones are far more powerful than desktops of 5 to 10
| years ago.
|
| Moore's law suggests that this trend will continue (unless
| purposefully downgrading performance to increase repurchases)
| and with 6G coming, we shouldn't need to be so dependent on the
| classic datacenter-client architecture wich is the very source
| of FANG's power.
|
| The new Internet and decentralization completely shifts this
| power-balance towards the masses. It is democratization of our
| data instead of being arbitraged by FANG who pay pennies on the
| dollar to resell it to others.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Is there any significance that he chose "Internet 3.0" rather
| than "Web 3.0".
|
| I think it is important to distinguish between websites/broadcast
| SMS (Facebook, Twitter), hosting providers (AWS, GCP) and "app
| stores" (Apple, Google). I hope readers understand the
| differences.
|
| Here is a thought experiment: How large of an audience, i.e., how
| many daily visitors, does a website need to have before an act of
| banning a contributor becomes a free speech issue. What is that
| magic number, the threshhold over which the website comes to be
| perceived as a home for "free speech". Most websites fall below
| this threshhold. For example, journalists, bloggers, politicians,
| etc. do not debate hellbanning on HN as a free speech issue.
|
| What is this number. Or is it something else.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| > Is there any significance that he chose "Internet 3.0" rather
| than "Web 3.0".
|
| I think so, the closing point of the article is that we are due
| for a return to decentralization, even if that is spurred on in
| the short-term by "competing centralized solutions." The
| primitives required to run distributed/federated services that
| can compete with the big web giants probably aren't there just
| yet, but they are starting to emerge.
|
| With cloud hosting providers, K8s is a big step forward,
| because you can deploy an open-source system end-to-end an
| arbitrary cloud k8s platform. Part of the pain of switching to
| more open alternatives in the past has been managing
| operational deployments which this begins to address.
| Blockchain technologies, for all their misuse and hype have
| brought us some interesting innovations such as the
| InterPlanetary File System (which probably isn't going anywhere
| but is a start). None of this is better than the current crop
| of closed system, compare Diaspora to Facebook for example, but
| we have the start. But you can only have the "Web" applications
| he envisions if you have the "distributed internet substrate."
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > For example, we do not debate hellbanning on HN as a free
| speech issue.
|
| You clearly don't have showdead marked. There are persistent
| (and, I should say, entirely incoherent) complaints about
| speech suppression in the gray comments at the bottom of many
| threads (often still riddled with the slurs that actually got
| the user banned).
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Point taken. I will have to enable showdead and see what I'm
| missing. However that is not what was meant by "we". I have
| edited the comment to be more clear.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It's time to make political viewpoints a protected class in the
| US. Tyrants silence dissenters, not the other way around.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| That is an impossibly broad category. Anything could be
| construed as political in one way or another. This would result
| in no one being allowed to remove anyone at all from their
| property or platform.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I cannot help but suspect that such a move would go down in
| history books as the reigning champion of Reasonable-Sounding
| Laws With Terrible Consequences.
| [deleted]
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