Does the Internet Need a New Architecture that Puts Users First? (wired.com) 116
Two VoIP pioneers argue in a Wired opinion piece that "Treating the internet like a public utility only bolsters the platform giants," adding "A more secure model starts with control by the people."
As we rely on the internet more and more for work, social connections, and basic needs, it is time to talk about the future of meaningful online experiences, and the need for a new internet architecture. We need a user-focused, localized internet. This competitive architecture would deliver an experience that values real-time connectivity over one-way advertising and puts control with the user, not with big tech platforms.
This paradigm would flip the model on its head, letting people start with complete privacy and security, and from there allow them to open their channels depending on trust level. It inverts the terms of service, where instead of any platform imposing them on users, users impose theirs terms on the platform.
A new architecture that competes with the "public" internet is completely possible, and it begins with a policy approach that fosters the necessary innovation and investment, while allowing for flexibility and experimentation. Fixing the internet is not rooted in treating it like a public utility; it is not to be found in micromanagement by government. In fact, those very backward-looking policies only fuel more harm by protecting the status quo, which is likely why big tech platforms have been so fervently pushing for them... As we argued in challenges to the 2015 Federal Communications Commission's public-utility-based Net Neutrality rules, this also kills investment, startups, and new innovation...
[T]he public internet we experience today created the trillion-dollar tech platforms, but it allows for a few entities in Silicon Valley to colonize the entire planet and kill consumer choice. Six companies control 43 percent of all internet traffic. Of those six, three — Google, Facebook, and Amazon — receive 70 percent of all digital ad revenue in the U.S... Exposing everyone to the equivalent of homelessness online for the purposes of selling advertising already exceeds the tolerance of most of us.
There exist more valuable uses of connectivity in support of human productivity than conjuring ever expanding modes of performance and creepy surveillance to drive advertising revenues.
This paradigm would flip the model on its head, letting people start with complete privacy and security, and from there allow them to open their channels depending on trust level. It inverts the terms of service, where instead of any platform imposing them on users, users impose theirs terms on the platform.
A new architecture that competes with the "public" internet is completely possible, and it begins with a policy approach that fosters the necessary innovation and investment, while allowing for flexibility and experimentation. Fixing the internet is not rooted in treating it like a public utility; it is not to be found in micromanagement by government. In fact, those very backward-looking policies only fuel more harm by protecting the status quo, which is likely why big tech platforms have been so fervently pushing for them... As we argued in challenges to the 2015 Federal Communications Commission's public-utility-based Net Neutrality rules, this also kills investment, startups, and new innovation...
[T]he public internet we experience today created the trillion-dollar tech platforms, but it allows for a few entities in Silicon Valley to colonize the entire planet and kill consumer choice. Six companies control 43 percent of all internet traffic. Of those six, three — Google, Facebook, and Amazon — receive 70 percent of all digital ad revenue in the U.S... Exposing everyone to the equivalent of homelessness online for the purposes of selling advertising already exceeds the tolerance of most of us.
There exist more valuable uses of connectivity in support of human productivity than conjuring ever expanding modes of performance and creepy surveillance to drive advertising revenues.
No. (Score:5, Interesting)
No.
The Internet does not care what is at each end and that is as it should be.
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Internet does not care what is at each end and that is as it should be.
Indeed. The people making this proposal have been hitting the bong too much. Nothing they are saying has anything to do with the "architecture of the Internet".
If they don't want people using Google, then they should offer some compelling alternative content. Since there will be no targeted ads in their utopian paradise, maybe they can pay for the necessary datacenters with pixie dust. Whatever.
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How about, is more than one internet needed, one size fits all, doesn't really seem to work. How about an internet for minors, via network infrastructure and encryption, completely separate from the Adults internet. It could be down by interconnecting all schools and providing properly vetted content specifically for children, quality content to help properly develop young minds, rather than the twisted world of adults.
Then there is consideration as to whether the social internet and the business internet
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is fine, it's laws that need to be change. First and foremost, it should be illegal for any ISP to prevent users from running their own servers on residential connections. My old ISP explicitly allowed servers but my current one doesn't, which is absolutely ridiculous. It should also be illegal for ISPs to censor legal content, including views and opinions that they may not agree with.
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First and foremost, it should be illegal for any ISP to prevent users from running their own servers on residential connections.
While there shouldn't be laws preventing running servers on residential connections, I've found that it's not such a big deal after all. I rent a dedicated server from Kimsufi for $12/month. More important than the bandwidth (which is pretty minimal for my server, but which isn't actually limited by Kimsufi) is that I can't get a static IP address from my Internet provider. There are ways around it, but it's just not worth the hassle.
I was stuck with AT&T for years (they offered me a static IP address I
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More important than the bandwidth (which is pretty minimal for my server, but which isn't actually limited by Kimsufi) is that I can't get a static IP address from my Internet provider. There are ways around it, but it's just not worth the hassle.
IPv6 should eventually make that problem go away, but I think we're still a decade away. The transition has moved very slowly.
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It should also be illegal for ISPs to censor legal content
It should be illegal for the ISP to censor anything. They are there to provide the hook up.
Unfortunately the authorities want to censor content providers that provide user input.
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It should be illegal for the ISP to censor anything. They are there to provide the hook up.
We might as well take the plunge and go to utility regulation of ISPs, just as with power and water companies.
ISPs don't prohibit that (Score:2)
People who run servers tend to break this assumption, and use more than their fair share of bandwidth. That's why ISPs ban servers on residential service plans
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The problem is a "local-ized" internet is not the internet, it's a walled garden.
It also comes with a lot of other problems. One of them being that every user of said network needs to have a store-and-forward node (eg a file server) to cache data, and share with others within their local network so that the inside network curation tools work, and outside forces can't manipulate that which is on the inside.
The problem, which should be obvious is that a "local-ized" internet is heavily censored by design. So
Re:Yes. What we need is mesh routing. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all a matter of scale, and size of audience. Most people I know have some own servers somewhere, either at home or at a hosting provider, I host my own Blog and a Mediawiki for my role-playing group, mail server, and other small things, for an audience of maybe a few dozen people. Cost me about five bucks a month for the VPS, That's what I would consider "The Real Internet", which is quite similar to the Internet I experienced before Goggle and Amazon and co in the early 90s.
I believe that "Real Internet" is still there for those that want it, it just gets eclipsed by "TV over Internet" and "Sears Roebuck Catalogue over Internet", which also use the Internet as a platform, and which seems to be what most people want to consume these days.
Re:Yes. What we need is mesh routing. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you entirely, and I think this every time I see an article about "democratizing the Internet" or whatever the author calls it at the time. The old Internet still exists; I can still make a web page and say whatever I want on it. It probably won't be very popular, partly because it won't be as easy to find and consume as Facebook. It won't make me money, but the web pages of old didn't make money, either.
It's absurd to demand that huge web sites like Facebook and YouTube and whoever should behave like the old days. If people really want to go back to how the Internet was, all they have to do is do it. Hosting providers exist, web servers exist, content management systems exist to make content easier to publish, RSS exists to make content easier to consume. There is literally nothing standing in the way, except that most Internet users today prefer to consume content on mega-sites. But those people aren't the people who were consuming content on the Internet way back when.
Most casual Internet users today want to Facebook stalk their high school classmates, get in to combative political arguments with distant relatives in a perpetual uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner, and share pictures of their kids with the grandparents. Those people were not the original audience of the Internet, and they're never going to be interested in your web page. But who cares? You can still make it, and the people it's really for may find it and follow it. Just like it was at the outset.
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This idea is only vaguely interesting if there is some sort of way of discovering these mini-sites.
I think they had a name for a site that used to run a service like this... It was called Yahoo.
Then along came their competitors and the advertisers in hordes. And that whole concept became a stinking pile of shit.
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Mega-sites like youtube and twitter that can categorize and recommend content all via a uniform interface is exactly how I want the UX.
Protocols like RSS could potentially democratize this somewhat, but you'd still need to rely on someone to figure out what to add to your feed. People have long theorized an agent-based approach, where you own the bit of code that knows you and what you like and spiders the web to find and deliver it to you. The centralized approach is much easier to build and maintain, though.
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We had ways, back then. Indexes, like KingRatMass mentions, Yahoo and such. But also webrings and other kinds of "affiliate" structures. And aggregator sites. And I grant you, the signal:noise ratio is bad. And approximately none of the people making these web sites had any sense of visual design.
But, like you, I prefer to consume my content in one place without worrying about a bunch of different layouts, which is why I like RSS readers. I totally understand why people like the uniformity of just doing Fac
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It's all a matter of scale, and size of audience. Most people I know have some own servers somewhere, either at home or at a hosting provide
Most of the people you know run servers? You need to get out more :)
I kid, I kid. Run a little nettop for streaming music, scraping comics, hosting Minecraft and whatever else is needed in a pinch.
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Re: Yes. What we need is mesh routing. (Score:2)
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I live in a subdivision where any one house can wirelessly connect to 3-6 houses next to them. If each house was running some sort of wireless mesh network system, we could all communicate electronically without even paying a dime to the local cable ISP monopoly.
Meshing might work in urban areas if it is kept hyperlocal, allowing all the houses in a neighborhood to negotiate as a bloc with competing ISPs rather than each house being limited to the choice, if any, of services that happen to run right to it. Meshing starts to become inefficient as the number of nodes in the mesh becomes large enough so that the torrent of traffic passing through each node approaches its capacity.
In rural areas, meshing wouldn't work at all. They will have to wait for Starlink.
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Overhead, for one. Anonymous communications online means relaying through intermediate nodes, which multiplies bandwidth use and latency.
in other words... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or in other words: Once people are users again, instead of a sellable target audience package, things might turn out to be less shitty.
Who'd have thought?
Advertisement is a cancer. A small amount you can live with, if it's under control. When it gets out of control, it'll kill its host body.
The evil of ads isn't even in making your experience terrible. Well, that's one evil, just not the main. Yes, without ad blockers, most of the Internet is completely unusable already. But the main evil is that websites, games, newspapers - everything that is financed by advertisement is now playing a different game. Instead of providing you with a service that caters to your needs, it reshapes its service to maximize ad revenue.
Mobile games are a prime example of what changes it the underlying business model is exchanged. When you buy a game and that's it, the game designers will try to give you a great game that you enjoy, because that improves their chances of you being a customer for their next game. But when the game is financed by micro-transactions or advertisement, the goal is to hook you into an addiction cycle where you spend as much time as possible on as pointless and frustrating activities as possible, so that they can show you ads or sell you gems or whatever that relieves the frustration.
Advertisement needs to die.
There is no need at all for it in a world where all information is available. If Google were not an advertisement company, then small companies wouldn't need advertisement at all - running a well-maintained, informative website would guarantee that people interested in what you sell can find you. Large companies wouldn't need ad campaigns to showcase their newest products - putting it online would be all that's needed, and people interested in your product would find it, either by searching or through the crawlers they run to gather stuff that's interesting, or websites offering such a service.
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Or the exact same thing is going to happen all over again because people like an easy way of reaching their entire social circle, whether they're in the same town, state, country, or continent.
I live in Europe and have friends in America and Australia I talk to on a daily basis. With this kind of 'localized internet' I can't help but suspect it would get a lot harder to do that.
In the early days of the internet people posted whatever they wanted on their websites, talking about their hobbies etc. One half o
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All of that can be done without every single you do online being tied to a network that's trying to figure out every last scrap of information about you (for profit, and damn the consequences!).
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I live in Europe and have friends in America and Australia I talk to on a daily basis. With this kind of 'localized internet' I can't help but suspect it would get a lot harder to do that.
I don't think "localized" in this context means geographic location.
I had daily contact with people on multiple continents long before Facebook existed. Forums, E-Mail, Usenet, etc.
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If you want advertisment to die, you need to solve a few other issues first. Starting with a way to reduce hosting costs. If we're talking new architecture, I'd suggest some sort of distributed shared cache - let the ISPs run their own nodes. The cost of a few high-end servers and a shelves full of hard drives would be offset by the bandwidth savings.
Re:in other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
The distributed caching idea worked well for static HTTP content, but doesn't work so well when using HTTPS or dynamically generated content.
What we need is a return to the original model of the internet - as a collection of equal peers. If you want to host your own content, buy a raspberry pi and put it online at home with your content on it. It won't cost you much, and you fully control it.
The problem is when ISPs want to make you an external observer rather than a full peer in the network.
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Your server at home isn't going to cope when your content gets popular, unless you are doing nothing but plain text. How about not treating static and dynamic content in the same way? Maintain dynamic content as a server-based system, but static can go into something more suited for distributed caching - I'd base it on the same DAG that IPFS uses, but with more provision for decentralised but not fully distributed architecture. That way you need only pay for hosting the dynamic parts, while the big video fi
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Your server at home isn't going to cope when your content gets popular
Your ISP has an incentive to not transmit data unnecessarily, in order to get by with less bandwith (it's all oversold anyways). He would probably cache outgoing the way he caches incoming now.
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That would be the case, yes, but only if we used protocols that support caching. Currently, we don't.
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HTTP does, and TLS is just a layer on top of that.
The need to have everything dynamic "just in case" is a worse problem for caching.
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HTTP supports caching, rather poorly. TLS doesn't, outside of the local browser cache, unless you set up a trusted proxy.
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That's exactly what I was saying.
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You can't trust a proxy. That's why I suggested the IPFS merkledag as a foundation - not necessarily IPFS itsself, because it's a rather overhead-heavy protocol, but the data structure beneath it. Everything is self-validating through hash trees, so you don't have to trust anything beyond the initial hash you are fetching.
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YouTube does offer a premium service and will still host demonetized videos for free. There are open source video hosting platforms you can run on a VPS. Anyone can buy ads to promote their videos.
The simple fact is people are not willing to pay what it costs.
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well, advertizing won't die because it works? someone is clicking on all this stuff that generates real income for those who pay for it after all. until our (as in "collective internet usage") habits change, advertizing as we know it is going to be around.
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well, advertizing won't die because it works?
The thing is, it mostly doesn't work [thecorrespondent.com].
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Thanks for that link, it's a brilliant article.
And it made me realize one thing: The genius of Google, etc. - they understood that in a gold rush, you want to sell pick axes and shovels to idiots who think they'll be rich. They sell ads to people who think they need them. They don't care if the ads work or not - only if there are enough businesses who think they do.
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Problem is no one wants to pay for this. Hosting isn't free, reliable services are not free.
Slashdot is only viable because of ads, as are many web sites that are primarily user generated content. YouTube is only viable because of ads, good luck finding a free or even low cost host for your 4k video content.
A lot of the early internet is effectively lost now, or at best hidden away on archive.org because the person who made it switched ISP and their personal home page was deleted.
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Problem is no one wants to pay for this. Hosting isn't free, reliable services are not free.
Agreed. But thinking that advertisement solves that problem is stupid. It's like thinking your mortgage payments are too high, let's gift the house to that guy who offered to rent it back to you for a lower amount. You just completely disenfrenchiesed yourself.
I agree it's a cultural thing. We (as a culture) have fallen too much for that "free" lie and are now caught in it and it'll need a cultural shift to get out of that dead end.
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There is no need at all for it in a world where all information is available.
The consequences of this are very real. eg. being outed as gay by Facebook's algorithms can cost you your job/reputation in "civilized" countries, it can cost you your freedom in countries where being gay is illegal, and even your life in places where mobs rule or where homosexuality is punisable by death.
https://www.wired.com/2010/10/... [wired.com]
https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]
Or how about this?
https://gizmodo.com/how-facebo... [gizmodo.com]
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Advertisement needs to die.
Please pay $0.25 to read the rest of this message.
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That's deeply insulting. I've been putting things on the Internet for free for more than 20 years.
I've also published several books and in other ways profited from copyright. It's all a question of balance.
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Yeah, but Google needed their cut for letting people find your site.
Agree that there is space for commercial activities on the Internet, and payment gets tricky when both sides of an unconnected transaction profit from it.
But as a species, we've had the brains to put a man on the moon. You're trying to tell me we can't figure out a better way to do this?
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Decentralization (Score:3, Interesting)
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If you like the idea of decentralizing the net please like, share, and subscribe
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The Internet is decentralized. It was designed to be peer to peer, and it is.
It turns out the vast majority of people don't like that, so they almost exclusively use centralized services built on top. And it turns out they don't like paying for things either, so those services are ad supported. It also turns out that people completely undervalue their information, so those ad supported services are ridiculously profitable.
Abolish "Imaginary Property" (Score:3, Interesting)
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Until the 80s patents on pharmaceuticals were explicitly forbidden in many parts of Europe including Venice (I don't know about Greece). Starting with the 90s, it was the USA who imposed their "IP protection" model to the whole world through the WTO. With regard to software, until the 80s not even copyright was enforced on software, let alone patents.
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Never happen. (Score:1)
Or if they do put it on the new internet they will require you to sign away your rights to access it. That is what they already do on the normal internet. How would companies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, which are admittedly awful in their own ways, continue to exist without ads?
Meaningful experiences, privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Putting control with the user and starting with complete privacy sounds like a good idea. But how long until Facebook and Google sites will show a banner: Please disable the following privacy settings on this site, so that we can """improve your experience""". How long before that banner becomes a popup, or access to the site is blocked until you disable the privacy settings? The only thing you'll achieve is educate the public about what manner of data is harvested for advertising, and it's already crystal clear that most people don't give a damn if they get some free stuff or services out of it. That's not unreasonable either... many of those services are incredibly useful, and wouldn't be free (or even exist) if it weren't for ads. And don't forget that running effective online ads, even global campaigns, is now within reach of small outfits, thanks to better demographic targeting. I know from experience that such ad campaigns are an effective way to boost sales.
The problem is that the data gathering and re-selling is going too far rather a lot, partly because of the insane hunger for data by advertisers, driven by the current overinflated perception of the benefits of data analysis. A free internet operated as a public utility, with a number of rules around privacy (and a few other things), will work just as well or perhaps better than the proposed model.
If you want more diversity (in terms of startups vs incumbents) on the internet, drop some of the other rules, laws like the DMCA or laws mandating moderation on illegal or copyrighted content. A number of countries already do that; a lot of the proposed legislation in EU countries on moderating hate speech and fake news only target the large incumbents; small operators are exempt. And if you want to safeguard everyone's privacy, ban ads. Period. Just remember that those ads pay for lot of the services we take for granted.
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What do you expect businesses to do if you remove their source of revenue? Do you think they will keep providing free services our of shear generosity?
No, most of them will go bust or give up, leaving a few big players who can survive on converting free accounts to paid ones with premium features. Paywalls will go up, a lot of creators won't even get started because of the costs involved.
It will be even worse than it is now.
Re: Meaningful experiences, privacy (Score:1)
many of those services are incredibly useful, and wouldn't be free (or even exist) if it weren't for ads
Except there's no such thing as free lunch, or free service. You don't pay directly, but the price of advertising is calculated into price of everything. As everything needs to be advertised, everything is more expensive because of price of ads.
For example, in some EU countries you pay highway toll but have cheaper gas, while in others you don't pay highway toll but gas is more expensive. This does not mean highway is "free" in no-toll countries, just that it's compensated through other means.
reinventing the wheel. (Score:2)
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Many people make content with no intention of monetizing it, you need a LOT of views before you make any worthwhile amount from advertising.
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Do these "many people" expect to have, say, 10,000,000 people looking at their content regularly? If so, how much are they willing to pay for the bandwidth to allow same?
No (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean a return to the old architecture? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the old days of the internet every computer had a worldwide accessible IP address. Today this is not the case. Most homes will have NAT to share the old IPv4 address space, which has run out of space to allow direct access to every device accessing the internet today. On top of this is dynamic issuance of IP addresses, so people cannot know what their IP address would be from day to day. That is assuming they care what their IP address is from day to day, which they should not. There are services that turn these addresses into forms more readily usable by humans but these systems need to know what the IP address is from day to day. But without enough addresses to go around this is meaningless, there must be an address for a URI to point to.
Another thing I can recall from the old days of the internet was that web pages were far less dynamic. This has it's ups and downs because there are a lot of good reasons for dynamic web pages. What I don't want is the loss of control over how my web browser acts with many of these dynamic web pages. I can load a news article on my computer then have to leave for something. When I come back I'm hearing the cooling fans running like mad, the computer unresponsive, and the case noticeably warm. All from loading a news article.
Before you accuse me of just having a POS computer I've seen this happen on servers converted to desktop use. There's multiple cores and many gigabytes of memory. The advertising and such on the web page just keeps taking CPU power as time moves on to the point it simply takes over the machine. Some people would blame this on the advertisers. I do not. I blame this on the web browsers. The default behavior should not allow the computer to become unresponsive from loading any web page.
I've had people recommend ways to address this, many of which I already do. But, again, a web browser should not allow a badly coded advertisement on a news website to cause my computer to run so hot. I expect my web browser to behave. I expect my web browser to allow me to turn off any ability for a web page to auto-play any audio or video. I expect my web browser to do this without having to add extension to remove "features" I do not want.
The people writing these highly animated advertisements share some of the blame. The people hosting these advertisements share some of the blame. Where I place the bulk of the blame is on the web browsers. It seems that no web browser is free from this behavior, likely because there is an expectation of these dynamic web pages to work in a certain way. That's fine to allow for auto this and dynamic that. What should not happen is a web page so locked up from trying to load these dynamic web pages that the only way to rid myself of it is to quit the application.
So, sure, we need to put the user in more control of the internet. One step is having web browsers that can behave themselves. Another would be a move to IPv6 so that there are enough IP addresses to allow for more peer to peer services to work. Such peer to peer access does have it's hazards, but there's ways to address this. One way to address the hazards of a return to globally accessible IP addresses is with use of home internet WiFi access points having a fire wall similar to the inherent firewall that NAT provides now. People can still put servers behind NAT, they just need to create the right "rule" or "pipe" for it to work.
IPv6 and some better web browsers would go a long way to make the internet more user centered.
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Yes, restore global device addressability by going to IPv6, but what we need is a set of standards for level of well-behaved advertising in combination with ad level selection built into browsers. One user user could choose to block all ads and pay for content by the page, another might accept "level 1" banner ads only for free access to more content, and another could opt for a level that includes videos and popups.
Each of the standard levels would require that an ad server disgorge its content within a st
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One user user could choose to block all ads and pay for content by the page, another might accept "level 1" banner ads only for free access to more content, and another could opt for a level that includes videos and popups.
That will not work. That's because the web browser still interprets scripts, images, and HTML as it pleases. Over time it appears that web browsers have made it more difficult to configure how the HTML is interpreted but it's still there. As an example there's those pop-ups to ask people if it's okay to store cookies. I don't click "OK" like I'm sure many people do. I've done this so often that it's routine. I right click in the pop-up to bring up a menu, select "inspect element", right click again, s
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The anti-anti-advertising measures also really screw up screen-readers. They are intended to make it impossible to just break the page elements down to reach the story, which is what screen-reading software has to do in order to read it.
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Browsers as they stand now are too free to interpret HTML as they please. This was designed for flexibility in rendering pages on different displays in an area when display technology was chaos. Now that display tech has settled down into broadly definable classes of device ("phones," "tablets," "desktops," etc.) that operate in similar ways within each class, that very flexibility has become an annoyance of its own. Why should every page be accompanied by its own "Accept notifications from this site?" quer
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What about nuclear power? Wouldn't that save the Internet?
Go away troll. Also, learn some thermodynamics if you are going to post about power production.
New internet? (Score:2)
Do you mean ipv6 or ipv7?
Or maybe you mean a different way of authenticating users?
Naive (Score:4, Insightful)
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...the summary paints a picture of an internet I'd very much like to be a part of.
The article apparently can't differentiate between the Internet and the Web. The Internet's problems are regulatory (promoting local monopolies), while the Web's supposed problems are human nature. These Web giants exist not because of faults in the Web technology used to build their empires, but because they provide a service that people want at a price people are willing to pay.
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"It can never work"... except that it worked exactly that way for the better part of two decades. Your user ID is probably too high to remember when Usenet revolved around open infrastructure and distributed resources for public communication, and it doesn't need to be any other way - except for the four-five incumbents who grabbed the public using the infrastructure and are keeping it hostage.
Even though they succumbed to spam and more user-friendly websites, we've learned a lot since then on how to defend
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> Corporate interests have tasted the honey now
Very true, but now we have very powerful devices in the hands of a large majority of the world's population, which we didn't have in the 2000's.
There are enough people who are very conscious of secuprivacy concerns, and it's not inconceivable that we'll be able to keep going a new alternate Internet service, just like we have going Linux as a viable alternate OS or the fediverse as an alternate non-corporate social network.
We don't need to have 100% of the p
Globalisation also suffers the same affliction (Score:2)
It is the nature of free-market plus global reach. So not really a problem within Internet per se.
All In The Architecture (Score:3)
So either they're writing under pseudonyms or, perhaps, they don't have that much experience of article research yet.
Unfortunately, they fail to mention perhaps the most significant obstacle to the networking nirvana they seek, which is, simply, the process that the world has today for developing the interoperable technology that the internet requires in order to function. Like it or not, the internet is standards-based. The problem this poses to the authors is that the "Technical Committees" that develop the Standards on which the internet is based are stuffed full of representatives from the companies that have resulted in the current internet manifesting the issues the article proposes to remove.
How do you suppose current telcos have the technical capability to throttle your network traffic - to degrade your access to competing content providers - if not for technical features? How do you suppose those technical features found their way into internet protocols in the first place? IPv6 added "Quality of Service" over IPv4 with the proposal that this would allow providers to boost bandwidth for real time services such as video chat whilst holding back asynchronous traffic such as email. Put like that it seems reasonable, even sensible, right? Problem is, that technology can be abused.
But what if a user-focused, localized model were possible. Let's assume it is. How are we going to get a localized network from the East Coast of the US to mainland Europe? Or from the West Coast to Hawaii? I'm not trying to be argumentative here... Clearly the model breaks down with edge cases, but in this instance they're important, because it seems unreasonable to expect lots of new carriers wanting to enter the marketplace to allow extensive diversity of connection choices for, say, Hawaii. So now the localized model breaks down, because the owners of those relatively few pipes gets to set the rules for everyone in Hawaii.
Not entirely architecture related, but... it's worth pointing out that "big business" continues to champion the idea of "market forces" and decry "big government" and "regulation" as being, somehow, anti-democratic. This is particularly popular, as arguments go, with big tech. But what about your local interstate and car companies? I could go out tomorrow and buy a Dodge Hellcat that has a top speed of 199mph. Can I drive that fast? No. Why not? Mainly because driving at that speed would put other people at risk. As a result of that risk, all road users - all vehicles - are limited to the same top speed on any given piece of road. (OK, in some places commercial vehicles have a different speed limit from passenger vehicles). But the point here is that we accept the laws regarding road use as being necessary.
In order to have a safer, fairer internet, the only way to get there will be through safer, fairer legislation. No other option will work. The reason is because those who are in a position to provide national/international connectivity have a polar opposite set of motives and objectives from those who want to use that connectivity. That's a scenario rife for market abuse. When that situation occurs, the ONLY mechanism to protect the end user is legislation and/or regulation.
I accept that this will be an unpopular concept to many. It doesn't automatically make it wrong though.
Re: (Score:2)
I largely agree with you, but I will say this: this can work if you get other behemoth companies to line up behind it, to wit, Apple and Microsoft. Because they make their money selling to end users and not through ads, if you could convince them to lean heavily into this model you MIGHT be able to get this off the ground.
The problem with legislation is that it takes a long time, is subject to lobbying, and always leaves in some loophole that undermines everything. Even airtight legislation has unintended c
Re: (Score:2)
What's worse, when we do see the megacorps take an interest in international standards, it's just as likely to be for questionable reasons as noble ones. For example, consider Microsoft's foray in to corrupting ISO Committees with regard to their "Office OpenXML" 'standard' when it looked as though governments around the world were going to insist that all documents created and maintained by public bodies must use an open standard file format... Did Microsoft adopt ODF? No. Instea
And you will be charged $300 per month (Score:3)
because what do you think all that advertising pays for?
Re: (Score:2)
The Internet is all paid for already with connection and traffic fees. Your ISP forwards on your share.
Advertising pays for some hosting and some games and some news and some other content. They may constitute traffic over the Internet to you - traffic that you fully pay for.
Handwaving but no substance ... (Score:2)
What a load of bollocks.
Lots of words but absolutely no substance as to what is proposed. The Chinese have a "new internet" proposal that is supposed to make everything whiz bang so why don't we just welcome that? At least they have slide decks and some concrete proposals to go along with their thinly veiled top down assertion of control.
I read nothing in this that rises above claimed indignation. Yawn. Internet fixes come and go; most of them would have grounded the net before it had a chance to
A lotta work to do (Score:2)
What difference does perfect encryption make if every web site you go to dumps everything you do there (apparently now including "fingerprinting" of your mouse or thumb drag movements) into the AI maw grinder of giant ad server corporations.
Do you think web sites have less incentive to do this? The increased delta of profits makes them leap out of bed in the morning to join up.
Wait until you see custom targeted ads on cable TV based on the porn sites you visit, when gramma is over for Thanksgiving. It wil
Protect us from government intrusion (Score:1)
back to the good-old-days (Score:1)
maybe there are better models, sure (Score:2)
...but we can't have them.
See, it's like re writing the US constitution: while we may all agree that there are bits that could have been better handled, first we're rarely going to find sizable consensus on any PARTICULAR thing.
Second, and more realistically: if we open it up to redesign, you don't actually think normal people are going to get to write out, do you? I'm not much of a tinfoil-hatter normally, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that there a vast powers - governments, corporat
Another meaningless obstacle (Score:3)
letting people start with complete privacy and security, and from there allow them to open their channels depending on trust level.
In the EU we already have something like that. It is incumbent on websites that wish to store cookies to ask the website-visitor's permission. The same observation applies to downloaded apps: they can ask for a load of permissions, but nobody, except geeks, inspects them and asks "is this reasonable" or possibly even understands what they imply.
In reality this privacy and security layer would be just another annoying popup that nobody reads and everyone clicks, just to get it out of the way. Having something almost the same that asks if users give their permission for pretty much anything, will end up like that or like licence agreements that we are all supposed to pore over and give serious consideration to, before clicking I agree.
Nice idea BUT (Score:1)
Jeff Pulver of "Free World Dialup"/FWD fame? (Score:3)
You people are seriously discussing this? (Score:1)
It's not like Wired ever has articles worth discussing. It's a thinly-veiled opinion rag for liberal arts students who know sweet fuck all about technology.
This piece is stupid. Like pretty much every other article at Wired, it's stupid. Not just slightly stupid. Monumentally stupid.
"User-first technology." - Give me strength, the idiocy of this phrase just boggles the mind.
Another weekend on /. (Score:1)
Why is it every weekend "EditorXXXX" puts out insipid things? Is it a lack of content on weekends?
Betteridge's law of headlines covers this nicely.
NO.
Next stupid question?
What we really need: no more price gouging (Score:2)
Problem with articles: The internet is not content (Score:2)
Conflating two ideas (Score:2)
I see TFA is conflating two ideas. The Internet if a pipe, a connection to being online. It should be free from any blocking, changes or manipulation of traffic. Content - which is what this article is talking about, can be done by anyone at any time. Should these people commenting get the funding, they can create their own utopia websites for local content.
Re: (Score:2)
Then Russia got involved, and altered the outcome of a presidential election.
Don't let Trump steal the election again, demand voter ID laws!