Now is the "battle for the soul" of the internet according to Tim Berners-Lee. It's not to late to fix the web.
Founder of the world wide web says commercialisation means the net has been 'optimised for nastiness', but collaboration and compassion can prevail
Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by "charlatans".
"It's only a small part of the whole internet ... but the problem is that people spend a lot of time on [social media websites] because they're addictive," he says.
So money is the root of all the evil then ... Or in their case perhaps it's how they make their money. Or did it just turbo charge Greed?
Compounding the problem is monopolisation. Facebook and Google's dominance is bad for innovation and bad for the web,
I would like to see a Cern for AI, where all the top scientists come together and see whether they can make a super intelligence.
Not sure what it pays to work at CERN but I doubt it's Google and FaceMeta money. So unless all the scientist are supposed to be altruists ...
Not sure I share his optimism. It has become quite soulless, commercial/corporate, bigbrother:y and well somewhat "evil". Perhaps it's just time to slay the beast, stake it once and for all and build something new and better on its festering carcass. Too bad to save. Time to put it out of its misery?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03, @12:12AM (6 children)
You're making this out to be dependence on the commercial entities and the masses.
Protip: You can still make your own website, and host it yourself.
No one has to read it. A very few will find it, and maybe appreciate it. How did you find things in the past, before Googoyle? How did you find any information? What was the format of that information? Why is it different now?
The commercial masses are certainly trying to cable-TV-ize the internet, and making excellent progress - but you don't need to pay it heed. Just do the things you do. When is the last time you looked up a college professor's blog, and read it? Are you familiar with the recent considerations for the C++2Y standard? (Why not?) -- typically, we're getting older, we want things to be easier. It was harder before, so we just ... don't. As trade-off, commercial entities make certain things "easy" and we pay for it with our time (which we were trying to save by going there in the first place). Often, they make what we wanted easier, _and then_ shift into selling our time. Captive audience (they don't realize they're captive.)
So go make a site. Host it yourself. Don't use wordpress.com, where 99.9% of people who want "a site" go. Go back to the "open internet" and host it yourself, or use your friend's server who leaves his computer on 24/7.
Set up Freenet and i2p and tor. Host an onion site, too - for the people who don't want to be tracked by their ISP. You want "small close-knit groups," this is one of the ways to achieve that. The bots aren't roaming these networks? (what's there to roam?) Make it not require Javascript.
Blog about your hobbies. Even if no one reads your blog. This will make you happier in life - even if no one reads your blog.
Stop using commercial sites. Stop browsing Amazon, even if you have to pay a few bucks more (eBay almost always has it - someone buying from AMZ and reselling on ebay for a couple bucks extra, and you don't get tracked). Stop using Googoyle and Bing and use Duckduckgo, even if it's not as good. Stop using Wordpress and blogger, and go to real sites written by real people - you'll avoid the Outrage and the commercialization and the *advertising*.
Go and do it. Be a better, happier you. One less advertised to, one less tracked, and more in control of your own environment. But: you miss out on all that commercialization, that everyone is so addicted to.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by aafcac on Tuesday February 03, @12:45AM (3 children)
To an extent I agree with you. I've been setting up my own private cloud to meet my needs and using tailscale with sshuttle to connect up as needed. And that's fine, I think that it's too hard for most people, but there's no inherent reason why it can't be simplified.
The problem though is that the search engines and the like absolutely bury anything that they don't like or that isn't sufficiently new. I've had the worst time trying to find information from years go, like in the case where some major event changes the way things are done, it's virtually impossible to separate that out due to the search engines burying the older stuff. Now, we've got all this AI slop that's burying the alternate views that real people might have and there are fewer public places in which people can reach an audience if they are interested in the message.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday February 03, @10:51PM (2 children)
The problem though is that the search engines and the like absolutely bury anything that they don't like or that isn't sufficiently new.
Plus, the browsers themselves often won't display your HTTP page to someone who doesn't understand the internet unless it has SSH whether you need it or not. There is no reason whatever for a site like Wikipedia or any other non-commercial site to need HTTPS.
On top of the degradation that has hit Google in the last couple of decades, I miss "-price" and "-Trump"; eg I miss NOT getting garbage in my results. Google has removed a lot of functionality.
I've thought of starting an engine that only searches noncommercial sites and has what Google has removed from their site, but it's been years since I did any real programming. That, and I'm old and lazy, maybe one of the kids will?
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(Score: 2) by aafcac on Tuesday February 03, @11:04PM
This reminds me that I really need to take a look at the various distributed search engines.
But beyond that, I think that web rings could be successful again as you just need static IPs and some method of distributing them, as in you can't be taken offline by just seizing the domain name, they also have to take the IP and the servers. And, with public key cryptography, the IP might not even be mandatory.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday February 04, @12:21AM
I, too, wondered why there was a great shift from HTTP to HTTPS. What I heard is that ISPs and other middlemen can inject ads into HTTP. If they can inject ads, they can inject other things such as malware. The move to HTTPS was to stop those injections.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Bentonite on Tuesday February 03, @01:11AM (1 child)
For clearnet hosting, you still need to go to the DNS cartel to get a domain and CGNAT+no IPv6 is a common ISP technique to make hosting without a tunnel to a real connection impossible.
Services that offer gratis subdomains do exist, but those tend to have limitations.
While HE provides gratis 6in4 tunnels, those almost never work behind CGNAT.
Behind a CGNAT, or on an IPv4-only connection, the only way to properly clearnet host is to rent access to a VPS and use wireguard to tunnel the connection (quite annoying to setup and many protocols break unless every packet is tunneled over that connection - which is a problem, as VPS providers severely limit data transfer and sometimes don't even honor advertised transfer caps).
As you pointed out, a workaround is to host a .onion, freenet, i2p eepsite or GNUnet website, but the problem with those is that additional software is required to access the website.
Amazon typically costs more - although of course the prices shown are lower with a "prime membership", as the suckers have already pre-paid a partial amount (before they even order anything or not).
ebay spies on you just as hard as amazon and won't hesitate to hand over your purchase history to the government.
It would be good to have a freedom-respecting and privacy-respecting online store (or a free p2p program), but Amazon and ebay just buys out any competition and the government goes and demands that developers of p2p programs shut down.
duckduckgo just serves bing results, although it at least works without JavaScript.
A frontend for google results is startpage.com (google results are now horrible, but sometimes lists a result that bing misses), but startpage at random refuses to work without JavaScript.
The best frontend for several search engines is https://4get.ca/ [4get.ca] but it has a very annoying captacha
If you use ublock origin and don't run proprietary software and SaaSS, you don't seem ads.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Tuesday February 03, @10:56PM
Less than $20 a year for domain name and 10 mb hosting at Register4Less; R4L.com. I've been using them off and on for over two decades. Even their commercial hosting is 1/10 the cost my AT&T internet.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 03, @03:46AM (4 children)
I don't like commercial control of the Internet either. But what are the alternatives?
I'd like the postal service to get with the times. Provide free email services to all citizens. Also provide good, transparent encryption. Provide each person with a personalized domain name. And run a chat service like the old ICQ. Run Lemmy servers. Maybe have Bluesky presence too.
Doing it on a national level may risk putting too much control in one place, so that if an authoritarian movement takes over the government, our services are suddenly at risk of surveillance or cancellation. Local government cooperatives seem a good approach. Really, what is the public library good for these days? Books? Not as important as Internet access! Why not revamp public libraries to provide as many of these services as practical?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03, @12:18PM (2 children)
> Why not revamp public libraries to provide as many of these services as practical?
Interesting. My initial internet access was through a local Freenet that was run on voluntary donations by some folks at the nearby state university...and the local public library system. It was dial-up back then, and you got booted off after an hour--which was a great reminder to get up and stretch--before dialing back in.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday February 03, @10:59PM (1 child)
Yes, but today they would say it was too "woke" because you didn't have to pay for it, like water, matches, gas station air pumps and more used to be free. We geezers didn't know how good we had it!
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @12:43AM
> ... gas station air pumps and more used to be free. We geezers didn't know how good we had it!
Yes we did (well, I did anyway), Bob Dylan wrote a song about it, "... The pump don’t work, ’Cause the vandals took the handles."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03, @04:42PM
Not while the Postmaster General has the mandate to destroy the USPS
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03, @03:49AM
...about the organisation he founded being taken over by idiotic ideologues.
https://www.w3.org/policies/code-of-conduct/ [w3.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Tuesday February 03, @04:03AM
"CERN for AI" was basically OpenAI's salespitch until there was blood in the water and it became "We'll be middlemen of everything forever, kneel peasants"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday February 03, @11:45AM
He can undo the damage he did the other year [defectivebydesign.org] by having the W3C remove Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) from the standards. Those have no value to end users and merely shackle them with undesirable Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technologies.
That alone might or might not save the web. Even if it doesn't on its own, removing the DRM is nonetheless an essential step towards doing so.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Informative) by mcgrew on Tuesday February 03, @10:41PM
TFS actually quotes the Bible here, only leaves half of the statement off. The actual passage says "the LOVE OF money is the root of all evil."
Not unlike the redneck southern judge defending his state's indefensible abortion law with a Bible verse that said "I knew you when you were in the womb" while leaving out the second part of the same verse, "I knew you BEFORE you were in the womb!"
Of course, the misquote about money has become a cliche.
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