I am absolutely not sure what to do about any of this, it is almost as if there is a mutual exclusionary principle between a free and open communications network and the eventual success which will then doom that network to become non-free and non-open. Very frustrating all this.
are going to? It already has. I'm old enough to remember a time when the web wasn't considered a synonym for the Internet, when USENET was actually useful, gopher was a thing, and one could participate in online discourse without constantly walking on eggshells. I want the early 90s Internet back.
Here, here! Save for the whole part where we could only connect via dial-up out in Feckall, Nowhere. Could you imagine trying to download the latest Ubuntu ISO, for example, over dial-up?
And then some things never change, like the group think of the tech community and its hype cycles
Instead what will happen, is haphazard forced customization of the existing Internet. They will beat and punch it into the shape they want it to be domestically. That approach will continue for a minimum of the next 20 to 30 years. Nothing can stop it. The adoption is too high, the investment is too high. Instead of ditching that epic macro investment, nations will bastardize what's already in place and bend it to their own socio-cultural needs or demands. China has already demonstrated how well that can work, how far you can go in molding it to whatever your demands are. If China can do that, others can mostly do what they want with it and will.
The Internet will hyper balkanize, just as most systems from one border to the next tend to (with some exceptions for agreements between large pools like the US & EU). There will never be a replacement system that goes global as the Internet did. It's a one-off - like first discovering a new piece of land nobody had explored before - as nations build frameworks (off their experience with the Internet) to regulate how any digital network can operate, which will make it impossible to smoothly launch a new global network to challenge the Internet. Every aspect of operating socially and commercially on the Internet will get more expensive on average, and especially if your attempt is to operate globally (locally there will be exceptions, countries with low regulatory hurdles and annoyances, but those will be overwhelmingly small nations like an Estonia, New Zealand or Switzerland etc). Internet regulation and control will soar on average, it'll become the compliance nightmare that everything else is that governments get their hands on. That will benefit anybody that gets out of the gate before the barriers get too steep; it will stagnate innovation in most cases and punish anybody that arrives later to the party. Nearly all systems regulated by governments evolve and exist in that mode of suffering, with few exceptions.
https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...
Met Tim Berners-Lee up at MIT two years ago about their solid.mit.edu project and tried to join forces. But ultimately they got funded and are working on their own thing.
I would love to get feedback on the above link.
If this piques your interest, let's chat over email and I can explain exactly what I mean. I think there is much hope for the future of the internet and that we've just hit a nasty pothole.
I put my faith in the young though. Something new will eventually come out. Which hopefully is more fulfilling than current status quo.
Thank you for adopting The Greatest language:JavaScript .I hope to achieve a certain level of fluency in Javascript that it becomes first language of my children.
Thank you for helping us reinvent operating systems and name them web browsers just to be able to render your standards and connect to you with our hearts, over http of course.
Thank you for enabling communications and freedom all around the world .Now I can ease my mind knowing that Google predicts when I die and would show adequate coffin ads to my family weeks before the incident.
Happy birthday.
I remember digging through HomeSite 4.0 help file to learn what HTML tags do.
There is more high quality content online than there ever was—if you know how to look for it. There's also a lot more crap.
I gather the perspective on the internet/web might be very different for people who were introduced post-Google, post-Facebook, etc. For many people those are the introduction, unfortunately. I'm glad Google is featuring some bit of history there, but those large services seem to like to promote that you stay within their walls. In that way I can see the disappointment.
To quote Billy Bragg— "You've got to take the crunchy with the smooth, I suppose"
Blame that US site and its advertisers for trying to harvest your data for advertisers.
My kids have this incredible tool I didn't have and they will have a better education because of it.
So there's something for everyone.
I'm sure Zuckerberg is very proud of that.
>Please note that the Youtube recording has a time-lag on the soundtrack, so use our Facebook Live page instead for immediate access.
What? CERN can't upload a coherent video+audio stream?
I would actually like to see a good explanation of the validity/nonvalidity of this. If too many people watch this video, FB maybe has the best tech to handle the load.
I remember before the Web there was AOL, MSN, Compuserve. The Web brought permissionless ownership and choice, and disrupted those centralized platforms. It unlocked trillions of dollars of value but enabled new platforms to appear, built on top of the Web: Google, Amazon, Facebook, which acquire other companies like YouTube. It is time for another open platform to come along and to do what the Web did to AOL.
But there are also bigger problems to solve. We just made a post about it:
https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...
Would be interested to hear your thoughts.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/whats-difference-internet-web/
I, as a consumer not an academic/student/employee, buy an internet access account from my local monopoly highspeed internet provider. I'm set up with my wifi router/modem and suddenly have a LAN that can connect to a huge variety of sites via the web. Note that the web isn't in any way distinguished from the internet. For most folks, the two have become synonymous.
I have 3 (imaginary) devices to use. A phone, a gaming console, and a PC. 2 of those devices are already using a walled-garden app store, leaving only the PC as something still sort of free. So I think there's a burden on Apple/Google, and Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo to put measures in place to increase freedom and decrease the negatives of the web.
Yet they don't control the main culprits of the problems that the web faces: Twitter, Facebook, and I would add news sites comments, and Reddit, here. Those web sites do have a huge responsibility for the problems that their users have added to the web.
Their hands-off attitude allows bad actors to fester and grow, pulling people in and further spreading their message to new sites. I don't see the problem being tackled anytime soon though.
& to the visionary people from Network Working Group, whose technologies grew the Network beyond the control of the Department of Defence (US); giving rise to the Internet.
Google's coverage of WWW is nice[1], this is the first time I see right click being blocked (for exhibit) on their site. There's no easy way to return from the exhibit without using back as well.
Here's an open letter about Tim's view on the dysfunction that affects the web today.
https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-birthday-30/
The BBC did an interview with him too
> after a good first 15 years, things had turned bad and a "mid-course correction" was needed.
He's optimistic such a correction will occur. I hope I'm that uncynical when I'm his age.
Then there's a 30 minutes interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, where among other things he touches on Solid (https://solid.mit.edu/).
The last hour is a shared panel with the rest of the featured speakers on the impact of the Web on Human Rights, surveillance, privacy, etc.
Thanks Tim! (HTTP 417)
While there are reasons to complain about the current state of the internet, it _is_ an achievement of mankind which has transformed the world in many ways.
