[HN Gopher] Demonopolizing the Internet with Interoperability
___________________________________________________________________
Demonopolizing the Internet with Interoperability
Author : samizdis
Score : 263 points
Date : 2021-09-25 09:05 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pluralistic.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (pluralistic.net)
| marginalien wrote:
| This is already happening in banking (Europe): Google for PSD2
| and Open Banking. Financial institutions are required to provide
| Third Party Providers API-acccess to customer data (if the
| customer has provided his/her consent to do so)
| oblak wrote:
| It pains me to see even technically literate people referring to
| the web as the "internet". They are NOT the same
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What is the distinction?
| tialaramex wrote:
| The Internet is the current incarnation of the Network, this
| time as a digital packet switched network (its predecessors
| being the Public Switched Telephone Network, and the
| Universal Postal Union which enables letters to be sent
| around the world). The Network is a tremendously powerful
| technology which enables civilisation on a much larger scale.
|
| The Web, or World Wide Web is an application of the Internet
| made by (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee about thirty years ago to
| deliver hypermedia over the Internet.
|
| The Web is to the Internet as "premium rate" chat lines were
| to Signalling System Seven.
| lioeters wrote:
| > The internet is a global network of billions of servers,
| computers, and other hardware devices. Each device can
| connect with any other device as long as both are connected
| to the internet using a valid IP address. The internet makes
| the information sharing system known as the web possible.
|
| > The web, which is short for World Wide Web, is one of the
| ways information is shared on the internet (others include
| email, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and instant messaging
| services). The web is composed of billions of connected
| digital documents that are viewed in a web browser, such as
| Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and others.
|
| https://www.lifewire.com/difference-between-the-internet-
| and...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't know that!
| asim wrote:
| Basically the only way this really works is if we define standard
| APIs for all forms of cloud services. From infrastructure all the
| way up to social media and beyond. In prior eras protocols were
| custom designs on top of the IP protocol. That's not going to fly
| today and it also won't let us move fast enough. Most API
| definitions at the likes of Google are now defined in protobuf,
| another alternative is openapi. Either would suffice but I think
| protobuf is less verbose and potentially easier to evolve.
|
| It also requires open standards for defining those services and
| potentially open implementations. See github.com/micro/services
| as an example.
|
| Ultimately it's going to take a long time and significant
| coordination between multiple players for it to happen. I do wish
| we just had an open set of services anyone could run and
| contribute to. Then we could either go through the pains of
| hosting ourselves or paying someone to do it for us.
| noncoml wrote:
| > is if we define standard APIs for all forms of cloud services
|
| Nope. All it requires is for each company to provide
| unrestricted access to the APIs of their services. Plenty of
| interested parties out there to complete the plumbing
| jacobobryant wrote:
| Yep, the good old adapter pattern.
| NHQ wrote:
| Interoperability needs to be brought all the back to the
| protocol. Force ISPs to give people static, public IP addresses.
| Then the tech industry has to build local-first, P2P apps, and
| what was once a dominant social network is now just another
| interface competing with features people actually want.
|
| What is broken about the internet is that we don't have our own
| addresses, like in real life. (Cue security red-scare and
| condescending technical types who think it's too complicated for
| the user.)
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I think that would cause a lot of problems if forced to give a
| static IPv4 address. However, I agree that they should give
| people an IPv6 address. Furthermore, they should have any
| dynamic mapping accessible via DNS by default (with an opt out
| process for people who don't want it). Ideally IPv6 address
| assignment should be done without NAT as well since NAT is a
| way bigger hurdle to overcome than dynamic IP addresses.
| [deleted]
| jahewson wrote:
| > static, public IP address
|
| That's basically a super-cookie.
| NHQ wrote:
| Everything would be a different paradigm than we have now.
| Security, auth, sharing; we can only imagine how things would
| shift if we turned the model we have on its head. Super
| cookie? ISP is a private VPN proivder now.
|
| Cookies are a good example. That browsers give up a cookie at
| all--who consented to this specification? GDPR could have
| changed browser specs so that cookies were truly opt-in; it
| regulates company behavior instead, which is weak.
|
| Fundamentally, our choices are being made for us at the
| protocol level, and everything we have as a result is
| emergent, and so people argue about regulating the emergent
| properties.
| jahewson wrote:
| > ISP is a private VPN proivder now.
|
| Reality check: ISPs sell your information. They're pretty
| much the last people you should trust.
|
| > who consented to this specification?
|
| Third party cookies (the "tracking" kind) were a bug. The
| original specification did not include them.
| NHQ wrote:
| > Reality check: ISPs sell your information. They're
| pretty much the last people you should trust.
|
| Exactly why we should regulate IP address and protocols,
| so that every company that handles them is beholden to
| the same conditions for preserving our privacy. Instead
| we play whack-a-mole regulating individual company
| behavior, while they continue to control the protocols
| and addresses and everything on top of those layers.
| neiman wrote:
| I work on a project, Esteroids, who has a goal of creating a
| democratic Internet. I also wrote about it in my previous project
| Almonit (currently discontinued).
|
| https://almonit.club/blog/2021-01-08/self-governing_internet...
| sbt wrote:
| Another problem is that Big Tech owns the relatively corrupt US
| government.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Yes but only authoritarianism can make big business kneel. But
| that has it's own problems.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > Yes but only authoritarianism can make big business kneel
|
| I'd say this only applies within a capitalist mode of
| production.
| aabaker99 wrote:
| Health care software is being forced to be interoperable soon in
| the US. The 21st Century Cures Act requires it
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Cures_Act). One
| interesting and, to technologists, disappointing aspect of the
| regulation is the complete lack of a standard by which to
| interoperate. There is no prescription for any data format for
| any type of health information. Health software companies are
| only required to provide a hyperlink to a web page that describes
| the data format.
|
| This is a step in the right direction but it certainly doesn't
| enable the anything that looks like the developments we have seen
| around the internet due to its open protocols. Health care will
| be "interoperable" without any of the compatibility or interfaces
| the TFA wants. We need regulators who understand the technology
| and have a much higher standard for interoperability if we are to
| demonopolize the internet.
| jeswin wrote:
| That's not true as a generalization. The newly mandated HL7
| FHIR standards are a huge step forward in interop [1], and
| we've seen varying but progressively improving levels of
| support from all leading EHR vendors. The immediate deadline
| mandates patient information to be made available via FHIR,
| with more data segments to follow.
|
| Prior to this each vendor had a custom API, and getting
| integrations working was an enormous effort. There are a bunch
| of companies who offer a standardized API around various EHRs,
| such as Redox https://www.redoxengine.com/. Now most of them
| have started supporting FHIR, as a way to ingest and expose
| data. FHIR isn't comprehensive yet, but it'll get there at its
| own pace.
|
| 1: https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-
| Guidance/Guidance/Intero...
| aabaker99 wrote:
| I confess I don't know much about CMS. What is in scope? Or,
| what is available in FHIR? The Cures act includes all PHI
| plus anything that could be used to make medical decisions.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| We're much better off letting the market decide on the best
| standard. Imagine if XML had become the only legal standard for
| data transfer. Or SAML the only one for authentication. While
| one single standard is preferable, regulators should give the
| market time to evaluate which standard is battle proven.
| aabaker99 wrote:
| I agree requiring XML could have been a disaster. Still, the
| law seems to need to require more of we are to more
| meaningfully achieve interoperability. What's stopping
| companies from coming up with pathological data formats or
| generally making the data available but not easily available?
| Could the law specify some necessary characteristics of the
| data format? What if there already is a popular standard
| (http://fhir.org)?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| If the standard is open (so that anyone can read the
| documentation and write a fully capable parser), it really
| doesn't matter what the standard is exactly.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Plaid for healthcare startup?
| redmattred wrote:
| Redox + Health Gorilla both do this
| tyingq wrote:
| I'm skeptical that will do anything. Healthcare tried to be
| interoperable with the HL7 protocol. Which worked out so well
| that software companies sell "hubs" to translate between the
| different vendor flavors of HL7.
| erikerikson wrote:
| See also CloudEvents[0].
|
| This post misses mentioning the incentives of incumbents who have
| seen the innovator risk filtering pipelines constricting.
| Inviting more people to play feeds their futures.
|
| [0] https://cloudevents.io
| barnabee wrote:
| I strongly believe platforms should be forced to allow
| interoperability and it should be illegal to prevent or frustrate
| access from other clients or services.
|
| The idea that someone hosting a product on the internet should be
| able to control how I access my data or services is utter
| nonsense and it's amazing that we've allowed it to become the
| norm.
|
| This should include interoperability that allows "unbundling"
| such as using a site/app's messaging feature alone with a
| different client or service and replacing the platform's feed
| curation algorithms with your own or third party algos.
|
| If they can't make money under these conditions, tough. They
| either need to start charging for the core product instead of
| extracting value in hidden ways, improve their own money making
| services so people don't go elsewhere, or die.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| What happens if platform A wants to interoperate with platform
| B and requires information from person C's account about person
| D (because they are friends)? Person D has likely not accepted
| any kind of privacy policy of platform A or consented to the
| exchange of data about them.
|
| This would very quickly turn into a massive GDPR headache.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, mandatory interoperability, transfer of data in and out,
| and required all directions are the same difficulty (and the
| same for transactions - no single-click signup and 3hrs on hold
| in five tel calls to unsubscribe)
| WallyFunk wrote:
| > If they can't make money under these conditions, tough. They
| either need to start charging for the core product instead of
| extracting value in hidden ways, improve their own money making
| services so people don't go elsewhere, or die
|
| Agreed. It is possible to have FOSS software that is not
| _gratis_. Ever heard of a business model called: 'Making
| something of value and charging for it'?
| Taek wrote:
| You can't call your license FOSS if the code isn't entirely
| gratis to run and distribute. It's the first requirement
| defined by the OSI.
|
| It's also the only requirement that I disagree with
| fsckboy wrote:
| > You can't call your license FOSS if the code isn't
| entirely gratis to run and distribute.
|
| you're introducing some confusion here: first, OSI doesn't
| define FOSS, just their subset of OSS;
|
| and someone can offer to sell you, and you can buy and then
| resell, FOSS code (both Free (GPL according to FSF et al)
| and Open Source (BSD, MIT, according to OSI et al)); you
| are simply not required to pay extra ex post for reselling.
|
| from OSI webpage https://opensource.org/osd
|
| "1. Free Redistribution
|
| The license shall not restrict any party from selling or
| giving away the software as a component of an aggregate
| software distribution containing programs from several
| different sources. The license shall not require a royalty
| or other fee for such sale."
| clcaev wrote:
| This is a distinction without a difference.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| There is actually a difference.
|
| The person who wants a change can pay you, or anyone
| else, to implement it. Then everyone gets it, but you
| still get paid for it.
|
| Which is actually a sustainable business model. One
| corporation pays you $5000 for change A, another pays you
| $3500 for change B, an individual pays you $100 for small
| change C, you make $8600 this month and the whole world
| gets A, B and C.
|
| In theory you might now have corporation A waiting for
| someone else to pay for the change instead of paying for
| it themselves, but if the change to them is worth
| $10,000/month and waiting for somebody else to do it
| causes them to have to wait five years, how does the math
| work out for them on that?
| Proven wrote:
| > I strongly believe platforms should be forced to allow
| interoperability
|
| That is ludicrous. What gives you the right to decide how
| people run their business and what services should or shouldn't
| be available to their consenting customers?
|
| > The idea that someone hosting a productt on the internet
| should be able to control how I access my data or services is
| utter nonsense and it's amazing that we've allowed it to become
| the norm.
|
| Your data is yours before you share it. If you don't want to
| share it, don't use such services, or use services which
| provide contractual guarantees that address your concerns.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Wouldn't this be a direct antithesis to any expectation of
| privacy or data security people have of their social media
| hosts? If I run an instance called mycoolfacebook.example and
| get thousands of people to sign up, what's stopping me from
| just passively saving all 'friends only' posts that pour in
| from people with friends @facebook.com? Do we need e2ee
| mastodon now, or do we just hope laws take into account
| malicious observations?
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I think that expectation of privacy is mostly misplaced and
| the hosting providers are the least part of the concern:
| anyone who's "friends" with more than a handful of people on
| social media should be treating all the posts on that
| platform as potentially public: there's no way to prevent one
| of your connections from screenshotting and/or otherwise
| broadcasting your "private" posts.
|
| In this way, the older unauthenticated model of the internet
| was better: by not creating an illusion of privacy around
| your website (think c2.com or Wikipedia), it does not
| encourage you to rely on that illusion for safety.
| Kinrany wrote:
| This doesn't seem like a new problem. If
| mycoolfacebook.example is a new frontend for Facebook, it
| must only talk to Facebook's backend, this is reasonably easy
| to verify. If it has its own backend, we'll have the same
| concerns we already have about Facebook.
| williamtrask wrote:
| Great point. It's a solvable problem, at least using code
| audits (since it's client side)
| zepto wrote:
| > The idea that someone hosting a product on the internet
| should be able to control how I access my data or services is
| utter nonsense and it's amazing that we've allowed it to become
| the norm.
|
| Nobody can control your data unless you give it to them. What
| do you want to do that doesn't have an open alternative?
| [deleted]
| dageshi wrote:
| The lesson of the internet is that lower friction always wins.
| If people had charged for everything on the internet from its
| inception, it would have died.
|
| I'd rather have good than perfect, I think the internet is
| pretty good at the moment.
| pharke wrote:
| I see it more as capture of unwitting content producers. It's
| the same faustian deal made by medieval landlords to their
| serfs. The social media companies own the real estate and
| tools for improving it and allow their users to live and work
| there for free so long as they sign over everything they
| produce to their lords.
| dageshi wrote:
| That's not even remotely true. If you're sufficiently big
| enough on social media you can get your own advertising
| deals directly with advertisers and cut out the platform
| itself. If you're small enough that you can't do that then
| your content isn't worth much anyway on an individual
| basis.
| hobs wrote:
| So... exactly what they said in the parent post? You have
| no choice and no value unless the landlords bestow it
| upon you.
| dageshi wrote:
| Will anyone pay me for this comment? I'm guessing not.
| Will anyone pay for yours? Also probably not. Because in
| both cases they take minutes or less to write. 99.999% of
| most content on most social media is equivalent to this,
| what is it worth?
|
| The internets "landlords" didn't decide these comments
| have no monetary value, we did.
| Taek wrote:
| With the right micropayments architecture an upvote could
| easily be 0.1 or 0.01 cents. Or even $1. None of it has
| to be visible to the user either, just like mobile data
| bills aren't visible to the user
| hobs wrote:
| It's worth everything - without these small dribs and
| drabs there's no social media at all.
| dageshi wrote:
| No, viewing the posts of the person with 50k+ followers
| is worth something, the dribs and drabs are just the cost
| of business.
| concordDance wrote:
| If you don't assign value to posts written by those
| without 50k followers, why are you reading these
| comments?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| If you took a social network and split it into one
| network with everyone who has more than 50k followers and
| one network with everyone who has less than that,
| everyone would use the second one, because it would be
| the one with all their friends and family on it.
|
| And then all the pop stars would move to that one because
| they're inherently the ones chasing the users, whereas
| dad doesn't want to install another app on his phone
| which means mom can't stop using that one and neither can
| you.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >The internets "landlords" didn't decide these comments
| have no monetary value, we did.
|
| I disagree. The value of my "creative" (I'm using that in
| a very broad sense) output is real and belongs to _me_.
|
| While that may not be translatable to a pay day, not
| everything is a commodity to be bought and sold.
|
| There are a variety of issues which created the current
| (dysfunctional, IMHO) landscape, none of which have
| anything to do with monetization.
|
| Firstly, there's the huge barrier to entry that comes
| with the prevalence of asymmetric internet links. If I
| have (multi)GB _symmetric_ network links, I can host as
| well as consume.
|
| Secondly, there's no broad-based mechanism for
| _individual_ control of creative output. PGP or a similar
| mechanism would be great for that. But instead, we have
| centralized platforms (see my first point) that dictate
| how and to whom data is shared.
|
| With symmetric network links and strong cryptographic
| access controls, barriers to an individual having control
| of their creative output are significantly reduced.
|
| Some folks will want to monetize that, others will not,
| with a mix of both being the norm.
|
| But claiming that there's no "value" in something because
| you can't assign it a monetary equivalent seems a pretty
| narrow view of value, especially WRT to social
| interactions with friends and family.
| foxfluff wrote:
| The internet wouldn't have died, because there always were
| and always will be actors without a profit motive.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I think the internet is pretty good at the moment
|
| Yeah, with uBlock Origin installed it's actually bearable.
| qsort wrote:
| Yeah, _some corners_ of the Web are bearable, assuming
| uBlock origin or equivalent is installed. Most mainstream
| stuff is frankly braindead, uBO or not.
|
| Still much better than, as Pink Floyd would put it,
| "thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from".
| dmos62 wrote:
| Thanks for saying that. I strongly agree.
| [deleted]
| alexashka wrote:
| 100% on interoperability.
|
| It's not amazing that it's become the norm because, it's
| _always_ been the norm that people control other people in ways
| that seem barbaric and counter-productive in hindsight.
|
| There are a few creative spirits who _think through_ what would
| be best for as many, as long as possible. Then there 's
| everyone else that wants to play whatever the game already is
| and win.
|
| You just can't explain to people who care only care about
| winning that logic, decency, solidarity, are fundamental
| pillars everything else they enjoy relies upon. They want what
| they want, their world is simple and cruel, like the animal
| kingdom.
| rektide wrote:
| i dont look at the boon of interoperability as being that of
| the creative few. i view interoperability as leaving the on
| ramp open to anyone, of permissionlessness that lets everyone
| have a chance to respin, remake, reconsider, ongoingly. we
| dont just think through really good solutions... we adapt &
| coadapt & readapt. discovery is continual & progressive &
| inclusive & shifting.
|
| the social arguments dont seem necessary.
| rwbhn wrote:
| > need to start charging for the core product
|
| I think you've misunderstood what their core product is. They
| charge good money to their customers - companies placing ads.
| imglorp wrote:
| Seems like there's roughly four revenue streams. Some
| companies dip into all of them!
|
| * Sell you a physical product
|
| * Sell you a service
|
| * Sell information about you: your conversations, your
| clicks, your friends, etc
|
| * Sell you ads
|
| Smart TV's are an example of all four at once.
| Torwald wrote:
| What about digital products? I guess you left that out for
| a reason, what would that be?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| A variant of #1 or, usually, #2: most of the time when
| you "buy" a digital good, you're really renting it out
| under extremely limiting terms.
| Torwald wrote:
| I got your point, it's valid, specially membership sites.
| But some stuff is different. Ebooks, audio files.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Which ebooks and audio files? Two mainstream providers -
| Amazon (Kindle) and Spotify - both rent out access, not
| sell actual ebooks.
| spijdar wrote:
| It's still correct regarding ebooks and audio files,
| you're not paying for the files but the rights to keep a
| copy of the file and use it personally.
|
| If the files are not protected by DRM, then there's no
| technical limitation on copying or redistributing the
| file, but according to your license agreement you're not
| permitted to do so.
|
| In practice, no one is probably going to come after you
| for copying your music files or ebooks across your
| devices or sharing it with friends, but you don't _own_
| the file. Try mass distributing it or reselling it long
| enough and you 'll attract someone's attention.
| zepto wrote:
| > I strongly believe platforms should be forced to allow
| interoperability
|
| At what level of API with what level of SLA?
|
| > and it should be illegal to prevent or frustrate access from
| other clients or services.
|
| Many existing APIs that are _intended_ to allow access are
| extremely frustrating and poorly designed and implemented.
| Obviously this is true for products and services as well.
|
| It seems very hard to imagine how you could mandate good
| quality design and implementation of APIs.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You're making this too complicated.
|
| All that's required is that breaking changes to the API the
| vendor's first party client uses to access the service be
| documented and announced e.g. two years in advance.
|
| It doesn't matter how poor the vendor's documentation is. It
| doesn't even need to exist. As long as the first party client
| can be reverse engineered and the fruits of that work don't
| get wiped out every month by purposeful undocumented
| adversarial modifications.
|
| And then a vendor has a simple way to avoid running afoul of
| the rule -- keep a stable API. You can still change it, if
| you have to, but then the documentation of the change has to
| satisfy the lawyers, and more importantly you only get to do
| it once every two years, because you have to provide that
| much advance notice.
|
| And it doesn't apply to adding new features, only breaking
| existing ones.
| zepto wrote:
| > You're making this too complicated.
|
| You're pretending this is simpler than it is.
|
| > you only get to do it once every two years, because you
| have to provide that much advance notice. > And it doesn't
| apply to adding new features, only breaking existing ones.
|
| What about changing existing features, or removing them?
|
| Can that only be done every two years?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| How is it complicated?
|
| If an API existed yesterday, and it does the same thing
| it did yesterday, you're fine. If you don't like how it
| works, add a new one and use that. You just can't take
| the old one out, or change how it works, without
| providing significant advance notice.
| zepto wrote:
| > _significant_ advance notice
|
| Are you changing your mind about it being 2 years?
|
| What if you want to make a change to the system that
| isn't compatible with maintaining the old api?
|
| How about if the old api can't scale as the user base
| grows?
|
| This is a clearly unworkable proposal.
| amelius wrote:
| > At what level of API with what level of SLA?
|
| Could be dependent on the size of the company/userbase. E.g.
| Facebook (>100M users) should implement full API, while a
| small company inventing new social software (<100k users)
| should only implement minimum API.
| raghavtoshniwal wrote:
| Browsers are cited as an example of interoperable tech in the
| article. While it maybe true that *anyone* can write their
| browser, we see that Chrome does have inordinate amount of power.
| Even though it's literally based on an open-source engine that
| people can (and have) fork to build competing browsers, there
| isn't a wildly competing browser market.
|
| Maybe just enforcing interoperability won't cut it.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| Its a valid concern. There are so many issues with the current
| architecture there is likely no silver bullet.
|
| The ultimate objective is to align the interests of users with
| the interest of service providers (abolish the user-as-a-
| product business model). Interoperability may be used as a
| fulcrum to force some price discovery about services, or allow
| building new business models that add value to the users, who
| knows... Anything but the current dystopia
| rektide wrote:
| i'm 1% concerned 99% still thrilled & delighted. the
| interoperetability here is amazing. and there's still a lot of
| room for growth. especially if we start focusing on websites
| that support interoperation, encourage it.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| Browser competition doesn't matter much for interoperability,
| because they don't restrict what sites you can use. It's only a
| risk if browsers start banning sites like the app stores do.
|
| And open source Chromium and Firefox are bulwark against that,
| with active fork ecosystems.
| cma wrote:
| It goes the other way now, Google blocks non-Chrome and
| select others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25155451
| slx26 wrote:
| When he says "Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants", in my
| mind I translate that to: "capitalism doesn't care directly about
| human well being. Well, that's not cool, but I believe it's
| better to try to provide an alternative flow / dynamic / space
| for competition than trying to stop the immoral practices of
| these powerful beasts directly. Don't fight the problem face-to-
| face, try to make it obsolete".
|
| Well. One should be shocked: government and laws are exactly what
| should protect human well-being _directly and decisively_ when
| other things fail (or in prevention), but now it turns out
| capitalism is too powerful so we can 't do that? We have to
| ignore morality for a while, and start to leverage government and
| laws just to create a side pathway that might eventually lead to
| the possibility to compete against the big beasts of capitalism
| in their own (or slightly shifted) terrain? Hope we adapt better
| than they do?
|
| I'm not even saying this is stupid. It might actually be the most
| pragmatic way forward. I tend to take a similar view when looking
| for solutions... but when we reached this point, we should
| realize that the problem is not the tech giants,
| interoperability, Java's error model, APIs, EFFs, js typecasting
| nor the internet. If having to resort to this kind of strategies
| doesn't make it clear to us that we are playing the wrong game,
| we are doomed at a more fundamental level: money sits at the top
| of the power pyramid, and we have _no effective mechanism_ to
| balance human well-being against it (which doesn 't make patches
| useless, but maybe we should start prefacing appropriately or
| writing angry o.o comments about it at some point).
| jdavis703 wrote:
| How does this solve the content moderation problem? We're allowed
| to upload 18+ content on Twitter. But a nursing parent posting a
| nipple on Facebook is grounds for account deletion. Or in another
| case, what if I block a user on Facebook, but they come through
| on Twitter? Does interop need to be include verified user
| identity to prevent abuse?
| k__ wrote:
| You can say about Ethererum what you want, but the payable
| keyword in Solidity blew my mind.
|
| Having a globally available standardized decentralized and
| transparent way to pay for all APIs calls baked into a
| programming language is a pretty awesome feature.
| [deleted]
| chubot wrote:
| It's a nice idea, but what can I pay for now? Does it rely on a
| centralized notion of identity?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Right now Ethereum smart contracts don't have access to real
| world data from outside the Ethereum virtual machine. This is
| why most contracts are financial in nature.
|
| There are projects attempting to fix that but so far nothing
| has materialized yet.
| bitwize wrote:
| It's funny how interoperability has to be reintroduced as a new
| concept now, when back in the day it was part of the philosophy
| of the internet itself. I heard stories about a CS professor who
| had to teach incoming students what files and folders were. The
| interoperability thing is like that. 30 years into the Eternal
| September, we're learning that nothing we were enculturated in
| computing-wise can be taken for granted and we must re-teach it
| all to our successors.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Interoperability is kryptonite to business. It kills whatever
| one's moat is, the way a microneedle will kill a cell by
| puncturing its membrane. Most companies avoid it at all costs,
| except for using it as a weapon to hurt competition. Of note is
| how upstarts embrace interoperability while it gives them an
| edge over incumbents - and then abandon it as soon as they
| establish themselves as a major player (see e.g. Slack, which
| built their userbase on this trick).
|
| Early Internet was interoperable because of low commercial
| interest. Now it's centralized because it's a big market.
| Interoperability got replaced by contracts.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Too bad the US government is worthless. Say what you will about
| other countries and the EU, but at least they assert themselves
| sometimes.
| ghuin wrote:
| Maybe if they asserted themselves as much as the EU does the
| tech situation of the US would be the same as the one in the
| EU.
| largbae wrote:
| Would the EU assert itself so firmly against a European
| Facebook? Maybe multiple governments fighting for their slice
| of the internet tax pie is just slowing big tech's regulatory
| capture.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. Is the EU's situation a result of their
| regulation?
| zepto wrote:
| Probably.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Based on what? Any evidence?
| zepto wrote:
| Yes, I assume that European are as smart an
| entrepreneurial as Americans, therefore the kinds of
| companies they build are likely a result of the
| regulatory environment.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| Reductionist to the point of nonsense of course. It could
| be any of many factors.
| zepto wrote:
| Such as?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I disagree that forced interoperability will somehow make they
| emergence of "winner-take-all"-style tech giants less likely, and
| I think the last ~25 year history of the Internet proves that.
|
| I mean, in the late 90s everyone was talking about how the
| Internet would "democratize information", because anyone could
| become a content publisher from their garage. The story then was
| about how "the power" was concentrated in huge media companies,
| and the Internet would change that.
|
| But when the barrier to entry is tiny, and indeed the barrier to
| switching is so low, it means that any competitor that is even
| just a tad better than the other guys will vacuum up all the
| business. It's indeed actually this _more_ open framework that
| leads to _higher_ concentrations of wealth and power, not the
| other way around.
| fsckboy wrote:
| it is difficult to stop the "winner-takes-all" economic
| dynamics from playing out, but interoperability does allow for
| small competitors to emerge in niche markets and through
| technological innovation bite off substantial markets. (AMD
| uses interoperability to compete with Intel.)
|
| and ?por que no los dos, interoperabilidad y antimonopolio?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Completely agree. I'm in favor of interoperability for its
| own benefits (it's not without issues but thank God I can
| mostly depend on USB-C on all my devices these days), but
| just pointing out that interoperability as a counter to
| wealth/power concentration is insufficient.
| hanniabu wrote:
| It's less about wealth/power concentration and more about
| the ability to upset that wealth/power concentration.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Yes, for example if Myspace, Facebook, Google+, and all
| the open alternatives had all been interoperable, it
| would have been less likely for one of them to become a
| monopoly on the friends/wall/timeline segment.
| ouid wrote:
| What is your claim? I don't think that the dynamics of tech
| giants are being properly accounted for in your example. Walled
| gardens are properly anticompetitive. You can't just go and
| iterate on facebook and expect to "suck up all of the
| business".
| gizmo686 wrote:
| "Better" is a multi-dimensional measure and people have very
| different preferences for what constitutes "better". The source
| of the winner take all dynamic is network effects. Because of
| those, everyone agrees that the "better" platform is the one
| that everyone is on, which inevitably causes everyone to use
| that same platform, even if they would have different
| preferences but for the number of people on it.
| cwp wrote:
| Not quite. Yes, network effects are important, but if that
| were the only important thing, then Facebook would be the
| only social media site. The opposing dynamic is that it's not
| hard to be on multiple sites at the same time. So if there's
| a site that meets my definition of "better" and has critical
| mass among the people I'd like to connect with it, it can
| compete. Each new generation gets its own social network
| because it has no interest in connecting with the squares on
| Facebook.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > and indeed the barrier to switching is so low
|
| the cost of switching is not low though, exactly for lack of
| interoperability
|
| if a user moves from a platform to another one, the user has to
| start from scratch because all of the contacts, social
| interactions and content are locked behind walled gardens
| slightwinder wrote:
| > I mean, in the late 90s everyone was talking about how the
| Internet would "democratize information", because anyone could
| become a content publisher from their garage.
|
| Well, to be fair, this did happen. People today are better
| informed than ever. It worked so well, that classical media was
| (is?) dying. But what people forgot to mention was that money
| will still drive society, that people still cannot know
| everything and make failures, as people also will still
| manipulate others for whatever reason.
|
| The world has become better, but it still remains flawed. After
| all, nothing will ever be perfect.
| jahewson wrote:
| > I mean, in the late 90s everyone was talking about how the
| Internet would "democratize information", because anyone could
| become a content publisher from their garage
|
| Well, it did democratize _dis_ information.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'd say that it didn't really happen that way. What happened
| was that they would be interoperable initially, the other
| clients would get neglected as the dominant client vacuumed up
| _half_ of the business, then when the dominant client reached a
| certain size, it would close. The neglected clients wouldn 't
| be able to pick up the people resentful that the dominant
| client closed because of their fewer features, more difficult
| (and less opinionated) UI, and the loss of half of the user
| network. Attrition happens among the holdouts, they switch to
| the dominant client, and development that was once slow on the
| other clients stops dead. Then the dominant client starts
| asking for your firstborn and gets contracts with the CIA.
|
| I'd submit that it's the closing that's the problem, not the
| openness. Openness tends to support a power law distribution of
| clients. One or two will dominate, but there will be a dozen
| that are significant.
| infogulch wrote:
| The problem is that the open _protocols_ which were initially
| used by the dominant client to achieve its dominance later
| became closed when they "seamlessly" forced their users onto
| a closed protocol. OSS licenses solve the open code issue to
| varying degrees but has largely fell flat on the issue of
| open protocols. So if coopting IP-law (aka OSS licenses) is
| the wrong approach, what is the correct tool to address this
| problem? Would other legal concepts like like contracts help?
| Something else?
| Kinrany wrote:
| "Winner-take-all" giants are not the problem. The problem is
| when something is strictly better (price, features, UX,
| performance or security) but can't win due to properties that
| are not inherent to the solution like network effects.
| asiachick wrote:
| Interoperability is arguably a hit to innovation. You start with
| just text messages, one company wants to add images, either (A)
| they have to push for a standard which takes years or (B) they
| add a non-standard extension. Then someone wants to add video
| clips, audio clips. Okay you say, older clients will skip those.
| But then someone wants to add threading, suddenly the entire
| format needs to change (see A and B above).
|
| Or, you just let each developer go as fast as they want to adding
| new features and/or selecting the ones they want (Apple putting
| adding in memoji that works by sending only the parameters, to
| very specific and copyright protected assets)
| orbifold wrote:
| I had this thought that it might be possible to define some of
| the social media interfaces in terms of CapnProto services. Then
| it wouldn't matter where the service was hosted. Especially for
| things like LinkedIn the major draw is that CV data is made
| available in a convenient and canonical form.
| amelius wrote:
| Big tech should be making just that: big tech. They should not be
| touching our data. Let them produce hardware and software
| independently, like in the old days of the internet. That way,
| they empower companies by providing the modules they need rather
| than the monolithic products that work against the interest of
| both consumers and smaller companies.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I know I'm alone in this, but i trust Google with my data more
| than the government, more than my family and more than myself.
| If they don't handle it well, they lose billions of dollars of
| value.
|
| On the other hand, I don't trust Facebook worth sh##. I would
| love to have an decentralized alternative (blog culture & the
| FOAF dream was nice while it lasted)
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Not handling your data well will not cost google billions of
| dollars in value.
|
| Dealing with mega-corps that treat you poorly always remind
| me of this exchange from hhgttg:
|
| Builder: Do you have any idea how much damage this bulldozer
| would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?
|
| Arthur: No. How much?
|
| Builder: None at all.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| You don't think that if Google has a data accident (e.g.,
| my Gmail data gone or leaked) that their stock price would
| fall? Of course it would.
| danielheath wrote:
| If they lost everyones? Of course.
|
| Yours? No. You can join the choir of people complaining
| that google has locked them out of their accounts.
| afarviral wrote:
| if your individual data was leaked? Um, you'd open a
| support case and likely get some bottled response...
| before then needing to go a media outlet or trying to
| gain some traction on social media... even then the
| impact would be minimal. Maybe if you are a famous person
| or the data leak occurred en-mass itd be a different
| story? Id be curious if this sort of thing has happened.
| jefftk wrote:
| I think this would be a major news story: I'm pretty sure
| it has never happened.
|
| (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
| amelius wrote:
| Just like Facebook brand value plummeted after Cambridge
| Analytica. I.e., not at all.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. If that happened to Google, they would
| lose value in a way that Facebook wouldn't. That's why I
| trust Google.
|
| I'm sure millions of others at least implicitly share my
| opinion. And, I'd argue, the more explicit this opinion
| becomes, the more real the value and the greater the risk
| to Google for being a poor data steward.
| olah_1 wrote:
| There is nothing Alphabet could do to lose money.
| Nothing.
|
| They have already completely screwed people many times
| over. Deleting all of their drive data and locking them
| out of 10 year old accounts for false alarms on some "bad
| content" or something.
|
| One does not simply sue a company like this. It is larger
| and more wealthy than a nation state and unaccountable to
| all.
|
| The Butlerian Jihad seems more plausible every year.
| infinitezest wrote:
| > Yeah, exactly. If that happened to Google, they would
| lose value in a way that Facebook wouldn't.
|
| Why do you think that it would be different for Google?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Because they offer a very different service than
| Facebook.
| jefftk wrote:
| Aside: Cambridge Analytica was a scandal of
| interoperability. People gave CA access which it then
| abused to collect data about others. In the kind of
| highly interoperable world that is being proposed here,
| this is not something that you could prevent.
| Lambdanaut wrote:
| It doesn't really matter whether you trust Google or the
| government more with your data, because either way the
| government gets it.
|
| *
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
| hengri wrote:
| PRISM is old news, google encrypts data between datacenters
| now
| jefftk wrote:
| The government can still get it with a valid warrant,
| though.
|
| (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
| andrey_utkin wrote:
| Hardware and software is not the game at big tech. The game is
| profiting off data and comm channels ownership.
|
| Hardware and software is the game for "hobbyists" like Purism
| and Pine64 now.
| shadilay wrote:
| Google made a custom video encoder for youtube which further
| entrenches their monopoly.
| https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-
| alphabet/google-s...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| The internet is already widely interoperable. But some efforts of
| late make it less interoperable, and less able to route around
| problems in the network.
|
| The obsession with HTTPS has to end. Not because of privacy, but
| because of interoperability.
|
| DNS over HTTPS is not interoperable with the whole universe of
| existing DNS products. But what's worse, it's locking people into
| centralized platforms. With traditional DNS, you can move to any
| network at all, and automatically pick up a new local, fast,
| customized DNS catching resolver designed for the network you're
| on. If you're on DNS over HTTPS, you've always got the same
| provider, which does not scale to every network. The solution,
| people will tell you, is just to disable DoH. Until we no longer
| can, because everything expects to use it.
|
| The obsession with HTTPS has also led to the apologists decrying
| any technical solution that _doesn 't_ use TLS 1.3 and HTTPS,
| _because middleboxes!!!!_ And because literally everyone is
| reluctant to design new protocols that can be extended as
| successfully as HTTPS. If it doesn 't work over HTTPS, it's not
| part of the modern internet. This not only severely restricts how
| you can design technical solutions today, it's stupid: we have
| this transport protocol with 65,000 port numbers, but we'll only
| ever use one of them (443), because a redesigned stack is just
| _unfathomable_.
|
| Every modern network service today needs many things. Routing
| metadata, dynamic host/service lookup, federated
| authentication+authorization, encryption, geo-localized load
| balancing, error correction, session management, etc. If we build
| things like these into lower levels of the stack, and build
| primitives for them into the operating system, then all
| applications can gain their benefits, and we won't need to rely
| on convoluted hacks to provide it all.
|
| We can't keep on for the next 100 years with the shitty protocols
| and shitty solutions we have today. We _have_ to start thinking
| about brand new designs, and how we will upgrade systems to use
| them. Otherwise, every solution we come up with will just become
| more and more convoluted and ridiculous, as we build more and
| more on top of antiquated systems designs from 40 years ago.
|
| Phone lines were pretty cool. We were able to extend them to
| transfer data, from 1400 baud to 1.5 megabits. We could
| technically do up to 50+ megabits, but it wouldn't scale. So we
| built new solutions. They were expensive, but we needed them in
| order to grow. Well, I think it's time for tcp/ip and its related
| protocols to be replaced as well. Not _immediately_ , but it's
| time for us to start building the replacement.
|
| That new replacement can take everything into account in a
| variety of new stacks. Federation of data, access, services; new
| kinds of encryption and privacy mechanisms, new trust models. New
| routing and service models to make the "last mile" less
| complicated and more flexible. And more responsive to network
| partition, including the ability to detect them early, to make
| applications more responsive.
|
| We can do literally anything we want, people! We can start
| building the future today! But we have to choose to do it!
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Tangential: What a beautiful website!
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I agree with Doctorow's goals here, but framing it as he does at
| the start of the piece doesn't make any sense. He claims we need
| to fix big tech abuses, then gives as examples of issues to fix
| disinformation and copyright infringement.
|
| Those aren't big tech abuses; they are two systemic side effects
| of the internet itself... Of a technology that disintermediates
| gatekeepers from peer to peer communication. If anything, big
| tech serves as a gatekeeper that _has any chance at all_ of
| addressing those issues. Empowering communities and individuals
| to escape monopoly platforms decentralizes disinformation and
| copyright infringement and increases the severity of those
| problems.
|
| I think there are good reasons to decentralize the current mega
| platforms we have, but addressing disinformation or copyright
| management aren't them.
| chaosite wrote:
| The longer piece on CACM touches on this:
| https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/10/255710-competitive-co...
| kisil_reboot wrote:
| I came here to say just this. The pivot at "rather than fixing
| tech companies, we can fix the internet" makes absolutely no
| sense.
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