NPR is reporting the results of a Pew study of more than 1,400 tech industry leaders and academics indicate their belief that the Internet of the near future will be neither as free nor as open as it is now.
The factors cited by those surveyed include:
- Actions by nation-states to maintain security and political control will lead to more blocking, filtering, segmentation, and balkanization of the Internet.
- Trust will evaporate in the wake of revelations about government and corporate surveillance and likely greater surveillance in the future.
- Commercial pressures affecting everything from Internet architecture to the flow of information will endanger the open structure of online life.
- Efforts to fix the TMI (too much information) problem might over-compensate and actually thwart content sharing.
This is also an opportunity for an "Ask Soylent" question so here goes: What do you think the future Internet, say 10 years from now, holds?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Future Internet Is Not So Free Or Open
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 27 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday July 04 2014, @01:48PM
I don't think anyone ever foresaw tech companies exploiting open-source operating systems and tools to build walled gardens that are the opposite of the open, free Internet. From ChromeOS that destroys the very nature of Linux to give everyone a free, open computing environment by crippling the ability to run your own software, to Apple and Amazon's end-to-end DRM ecosystems, the future looks bleak for computing. (Also throw in Microsoft's boot loader encryption that inhibits free, open computing.)
So now we have a free UNIX with a free toolchain, but Apple forces developers to pay to deploy software on their devices. We have an open Internet to exchange information freely along with open protocols, but corporations are building end-to-end DRM on top of it. We have an open Internet, but more and more information is going behind paywalls.
Corporations see openness and freedom as damage to the economic system, and route around it to maximize profit.
I've been around since the early days of the Internet, and I really don't like what I see now. The very same open tools, systems, protocols, and access that built the Internet are like a "level 1313" (hey, I had to get in a gratuitous Star Wars reference!) below a teeming, bright city above with no freedom.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 1) by radu on Friday July 04 2014, @02:22PM
Most of what you wrote is your dislike that for-profit entities use free tools to do whatever they like. This doesn't conflict with anything I can think of.
Paywalls, DRM, walls, "crippling the ability to run your own software" - what do I care? Just don't buy Apple.
> Corporations see openness and freedom as damage to the economic system, and route around it to maximize profit.
What do you mean by that? There are free programs that do something and not-free ones that do the same. So what? Some take free code, "improve" it and sell it afterwards. So what?
For me at least everything has changed for the good during the last ~15 years. Most free programs were so crappy I used to pirate almost every single tool for everyday activities (AcdSee, The Bat!, UltraEdit, ...). Now almost all free tools (for these simple tasks) are better than their for-money counterparts.
Having a "normal" PC and a decent Internet connection I really don't see any lack of freedom. NSA listening? Don't blame them, blame everybody not using GPG.
Or you just don't like the idea of assholes using "the same Internet" as you do? It's the same with "ugly" people walking on "the same paved road" you walk - it's free for everybody, ugly or handsome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @02:45PM
Enjoy THAT while it lasts, kid.
PC's are for old people.
(Score: 1) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday July 04 2014, @02:57PM
Free software is being used to undermine freedom, when corporations build walled gardens on top of it. That's my objection. Not only are corporations like Google and Apple making billions off the back of unpaid labor (and why would anyone work on an open source project for free just to make Apple their next billion?), they're using free software to build things that destroy freedom. That's an existential threat to freedom, and the very tools that were created for the purpose of freedom are being exploited to destroy the same freedom. To me, that sounds like a bad situation. Soon it's not going to be possible to choose to not use non-free things, which is why I mentioned MS's boot loader.
I'm in a minority of one, so I doubt that anything I say or do will matter. I'm happy not to consume the copyright industry's content, and take other steps, but the industries exploiting open source aren't going to notice the tiny number of people who take a principled stand.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @03:06PM
Industries see GPL as a threat and are routing around it.
That is why Apple moved from gcc to llvm and will move from Linux to non-GPL operating
systems in the future.
Watch what happens in the BSD space as time goes on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @03:14PM
and OTHER CORPORATIONS will move from Linux to non-GPL operating
systems in the future.
(Score: 1) by jorl17 on Saturday July 05 2014, @03:34AM
You're not alone. I feel you, and I am like you. Well, sort of, in a way. I own a Mac now, though I ran Linux for 8 years. I'm still (ironically) an open-source and free software advocate, and it really pains me to see the exact future you describe. But it won't really matter, won't it? It will find its way, like it always does. A new "revolution" will eventually happen, add more freedom to the system, block whatever is to be blocked, and fade, leading to another one...At least I like to believe that.
I mean, would it be that hard to build a GPLv4 which prevented this kind of thing? And if it didn't get adoption, then it's because it wasn't that needed after all.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by CRCulver on Friday July 04 2014, @03:22PM
It conflicts with the philosophy behind a major part of the Free Software movement, and I think that is obvious to anyone nerdy enough to read SN. It's well known that the Free Software Foundation had to come up with a GPL version 3 when the totally unintended development of tivoization arose. Long ago, Richard M. Stallman launched GNU and the GPL in order to ensure openness of the platform, allowing the user to have complete control over the software running on his computer. The GPL was never intended to allow a company to use Free Software to build a walled garden, where consumers has no ability to run their own code or alter the software already installed on the device.
I wonder if this can be chalked down to cultural differences (I am assuming from your username that you are from Romania, and you mention pirating TheBat). When I moved Eastern Europe many years ago, I was struck by how Ukrainian and Romanian nerds were quite at ease with pirating commercial software, whereas the nerd scene I had left behind in the West felt that it is better to stick with Free Software, even if still substandard, for the sake of openness.
(Score: 1) by radu on Tuesday July 08 2014, @04:10PM
Since you are here, I assume you are nerdy enough to know that the Linux kernel is still GPLv2. Not everybody agrees with RMS on this one.
About the philosophy... I believe it is exactly the other way around. If you make a tool (== some piece of free software) and restrict how people can use it (== "you're not allowed to use GNU/Linux to make a walled garden!") , you play exactly like the bad guys you are talking about. It's about intention and action that are condemnable, not about the tool used (like if someone smashed the head of someone else, I don't give a fuck if he used a bible or a stone to do it).
(Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Friday July 04 2014, @05:30PM
It doesn't bother me that much that there *are* walled gardens. It's that it's getting harder and harder to avoid them, what with hardware being sold with locked bootloaders and the like.
I go into my local computer store, and it's getting hard to find a machine that isn't already precompromised. That used to be easy. Forget about getting a tablet that I can just install Debian on. I'm still fond of my Nokia N800, which does at least provide root access.
Anyone know where I can get an unlocked ARM laptop, for example?
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday July 06 2014, @07:45PM
+1 for old nokias. I have a pile of n900's so high I think I'll be still using them until well after GSM is obsolete. (I use it more as a computer than as a phone.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @03:12PM
"I don't think anyone ever foresaw tech companies exploiting open-source operating systems and tools to build walled gardens that are the opposite of the open, free Internet."
I don't think anyone anticipated spam either, or any of the other sociopathic actions that have appeared,
or that a technical solution to them couldn't have been developed beyond creating corporate guardians of morality.
(Score: 2) by Teckla on Saturday July 05 2014, @03:35PM
Consider looking at things from a different perspective: Google and Apple are giving people what they want.
In a computing world where viruses and Trojans run rampant and the care and feeding of Windows, OS X, and Linux, as well as your applications, is a horrendous and confusing chore for your average non-technical person, people want safe and easy computing. Your average non-technical person is willing to trade some freedom for safety and ease of use.
Complaining about Apple and Google supplying people with exactly what people want is pointless and misguided. If free software used directly by end users wants to survive and flourish, then the free software community must give the people what they want. No, you must give them what they need. Easy, safe, near effortless computing. Bizarrely named command line programs and even more bizarre command line arguments won't cut it. Lots of care, feeding, and maintenance of your OS and applications won't cut it.
The free software community needs to stop complaining about companies giving people what they demand, and instead need to start focusing on fulfilling that demand. That's the only way forward. Anything else is just pointless whining.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @09:45PM
What's wrong with your face?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Jaruzel on Friday July 04 2014, @02:48PM
I've watched the Internet evolve from a bunch of FTP and Gopher sites through the first days of the Web, and now deep into the Web 2.x application ecosphere. In one way the fact it keeps evolving is part of its power, but as we are seeing, if corporations want to control something they will.
The biggest problem is money. The internet costs a LOT to run, so someone has to make that money somehow just to keep all those memes of kittens flowing. Unfortunately, where there is a need for a business model, there's a desire for profit, and that is the crux. Without wishing to sound like a tree-hugging hippy, until the need for money is eradicated, there will always be greedy corporate bastards eager to gobble it all up.
We see the Internet as a information and sharing platform but Mr CEO of BigFatBandwith Inc. just sees a cash-cow - his firm could be selling air for he cares, as long as he can charge a fee per metric.
So what are we left with? Well 95% of global internet users don't care; these are the people who watch reality TV for 18 hours a day and eat what ever the commercials tell them to. As long as they can do their online shopping, and share the aforementioned kitten memes, they are happy consumers. So what if using the service exposes all your deepest personal secrets, as long as they still have access to all these 'free' services it's all good, right? These people don't block web ads, in fact they ACTIVELY click on them; To them the constant barrage of marketing is a bonus - it saves them having to think about what to eat, wear, visit and watch.
These people are The New AOL, they'll live in this new Web 3.x Walled Garden and not care one iota about how restrictive it really is.
For us... Well we'll carry on doing what we've always done - bitch about the 'Corporate Overlord' and continually think of ways to use the backbone in a way that is beneficial to us, but without any of personal data leakage - I see an emergence of a GreyWeb - not the DarkNet full of drug dealers and paedophiles, but a middle ground of tech savvy people with fully encrypted clients, servers, and protocols. We'll pay for the access provided by Mr CEO, but we wont use any of his services.
If eventually the access goes too, then I'm sure multiple private meshes will spring up and over time, a non sanctioned independent network (IndieNet?) will exist and we'll all go live on there and bitch about how slow it is. ;)
-Jar
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Geezer on Friday July 04 2014, @03:07PM
The Force is strong in this one. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @03:38PM
Is that the polite way of saying: "Welcome to the new AOHELL?"
Something like that could make you look back fondly on your days on EFnet. It is not the Wild Wild West any more...
(Score: 1) by voyager529 on Friday July 04 2014, @04:16PM
I too have wondered if there would be a divergence in the internet like this. Personally, I've discovered Usenet, and while many discussion groups are flooded with spam now (exactly who do the spammers think are going to read their crap, given that you have to be technologically savvy [relative to the aggregate Facebook crowd] to use Usenet these days), there's still a few holdouts in some Linux groups, HAM radio groups, etc. I wonder if it will find its renaissance as a discussion forum in an era of walled gardens. Alternatively, I wonder if there's still 'room' for another communication protocol on the internet. Can there be room for something that resembles vBulletin or phpBB, but with a higher amount of anonymity and less dependence on centralized protocols? Will something like Retroshare start to take off? Will we end up with an 'Eternal September' problem where 'the masses' end up in the GreyWeb and require the creation of another GreyWeb?
The internet: Like the rest of human civilization, it's cyclical.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @04:36PM
Hijacked threads are a worse problem than spam.
The problem with it are the same trolls, and the same dozen people saying the same
things over, and over and over no matter how the thread starts.
So you go to moderation, or popularity voting like /. or SN or ...
where contrarian opinions disappear in the herd.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Friday July 04 2014, @04:35PM
This grey web you speak of is already emerging. The main technical reason preventing most people hosting their own services has been asymmetric Internet connections with rubbish upload bandwidth. I now have 18mb/s of upload bandwidth and I'm planning on spending a good chunk of my pay checks down the line building a lil server with tonnes of resilient storage to run a private shared cloud backup facility and Netflix clone on for my friends. We all use HTTPS Everywhere, Noscript, Ghostify, Adblock, GPG email and IM, Tor...
(Score: 2) by Jaruzel on Friday July 04 2014, @05:36PM
Ok so, this term 'GreyWeb' sounds good (at least to me), so I've just run off and registered greyweb.org (almost went with greyweb.me, then spotted that one of the 'holy-three' tlds was still available) - not sure what I'll do with it, other than maybe run a small blog talking about 'underground' net-systems or whatever.
My second idea was a no-ip.com type thing (hostname.greyweb.org) but with a built-in index on www.greyweb.org so people could find (if you wanted them to) the stuff you were hosting. I'm not a tor fan, and for some running tor is too close to the real Darknet that they don't want to - sometimes just not hosting out on the public cloud is enough.
Anyone got any other thoughts of stuff I could put on it?
(Of course the first thing to do is a robots.txt with full disallow).
-Jar
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Saturday July 05 2014, @02:20AM
Service reliability, uptime and status monitoring would be good things to track in the index. A feature to simplify routing to .onion sites would be nice, a DDNS isn't essential but more providers is better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 05 2014, @04:24AM
Pretty much spot on, there is already "private meshes" as you put it mostly in the form of wireless networking.
I myself being part of Air-Stream (www.air-stream.org) but access is in fact generally a lot faster than most peoples DSL connections.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @04:39PM
maybe there will be two internets?
not two seperate physical networks, but
two ways of accessing it:
1) the people with their iShiny, tablets, e-reader, tv-streaming devices AND PHONES
that need to register with some central location first before anything goes.
you will get gazillion storage space in the ..err... galactic nebula.
peopel will go out of their way to be polite (you know .. or else!!)
it might even be partioned into "classes":
polite.
really polite
and "my head is covered in sh1t"-from-all-the-ass-kissing polite.
it will be cheap and fast and you will have no privacy at all.
everything will be linked to everything for like forever.
it will become a sport to be a "good internet citizen" (yearly awards?)
it will be the good "rainbow-and-unicorns-farting-ponies" net.
2) and the people that just want the raw cable internet only to connect to TOR (or TORv2.0)
and VPNs and everything that is defined by "experimental".
traffic will be in tunnels and tunnels in tunnels and tunnels made from more tunnels ... and sh1t.
it will cost a arm and a leg. the speed will be so-so.
you will get hassled alot. if your identity is found out it will be considered "a l33t hack"!
it will be a "dark" net.
.. maybe : )
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @05:00PM
I don't think you understand what that can actually mean.
"Hassled" as in not being able to maintain an income, or the
ability to avoid the attention of local police.
"if your identity is found out it will be considered "a l33t hack"!"
No, you will be considered a 'potential terrorist'.
Enjoy your ability to fly on commercial air carriers, while you can.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @05:15PM
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/07/01/historian-of-technology-cruelly-crushes-internet-myths/ [scientificamerican.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 05 2014, @02:52AM
I'm quite sure the Web will evolve to a television like medium (and replace it). There's a good chance that the internet will become like cable tv where you subscribe to certain services / packages too.
In this case we have separate networks and then the question arises if and how a subscriber can access content from another network. Almost certainly, commercial interests will demand this feature. An open network (though not necessarily a free one)
is very good for commerce, so I don't think this will disappear in the future.