Tim Berners-Lee, Act Three
November 14, 2018 7:15 PM   Subscribe

Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web, has some regrets. He has seen his creation debased by everything from fake news to mass surveillance. But he’s got a plan to fix it. "The power of the Web wasn’t taken or stolen. We, collectively, by the billions, gave it away with every signed user agreement and intimate moment shared with technology. Facebook, Google, and Amazon now monopolize almost everything that happens online, from what we buy to the news we read to who we like. Along with a handful of powerful government agencies, they are able to monitor, manipulate, and spy in once unimaginable ways. Shortly after the 2016 election, Berners-Lee felt something had to change, and began methodically attempting to hack his creation."
Last fall, the World Wide Web Foundation funded research to examine how Facebook’s algorithms control the news and information users receive. 'Looking at the ways algorithms are feeding people news and looking at accountability for the algorithms—all of that is really important for the open Web,' he explained. By understanding these dangers, he hopes, we can collectively stop being deceived by the machine just as half the earth’s population is on board. 'Crossing 50 percent is going to be a moment to pause and think,' says Berners-Lee, referring to the coming milestone. As billions more connect to the Web, he feels an increasing urgency to resolve its problems. For him this is about not just those already online but also the billions still unconnected. How much weaker and more marginalized will they become as the rest of the world leaves them behind?

Berners-Lee, who never directly profited off his invention, has also spent most of his life trying to guard it. While Silicon Valley started ride-share apps and social-media networks without profoundly considering the consequences, Berners-Lee has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. From the beginning, in fact, Berners-Lee understood how the epic power of the Web would radically transform governments, businesses, societies. He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously observed of his own creation. His prophecy came to life, most recently, when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election, or when Facebook admitted it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s campaign. This episode was the latest in an increasingly chilling narrative. In 2012, Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood shifts and emotions in the human voice.

For the man who set all this in motion, the mushroom cloud was unfolding before his very eyes. “I was devastated,” Berners-Lee told me that morning in Washington, blocks from the White House. For a brief moment, as he recalled his reaction to the Web’s recent abuses, Berners-Lee quieted; he was virtually sorrowful. “Actually, physically—my mind and body were in a different state.” Then he went on to recount, at a staccato pace, and in elliptical passages, the pain in watching his creation so distorted.

This agony, however, has had a profound effect on Berners-Lee. He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new platform, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots. On this winter day, he had come to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Wide Web Foundation, which he started in 2009 to protect human rights across the digital landscape. For Berners-Lee, this mission is critical to a fast-approaching future. Sometime this November, he estimates, half the world’s population—close to 4 billion people—will be connected online, sharing everything from résumés to political views to DNA information. As billions more come online, they will feed trillions of additional bits of information into the Web, making it more powerful, more valuable, and potentially more dangerous than ever.
Related Post: Decentralizing the World Wide Web

Via Hapers Magazine: Rebirth of a Nation: Can states’ rights save us from a second civil war?
In 2018, Americans spent more time in front of a screen, subject to hyperreality, than ever before. As the number of cable channels has proliferated and the internet has become a daily part of life, a profound change in our media consumption has occurred. According to a new Nielsen report, adults in the United States devote about nine hours a day to looking at a screen. Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos have gotten bewilderingly rich off this so-called attention economy because they are controlling almost four hours a day of that screen time. As media has become more balkanized, first with the five-hundred-channel universe and then with the information bubbles of the web, the shared set of facts we used to have when Walter Cronkite ended his nightly news broadcast with “that’s the way it is” has been vaporized. Both NBC’s and ABC’s nightly news shows now receive 1.5 million viewers per night in the twenty-five-to-fifty-four demographic. Walter Cronkite had 30 million every night in the 1960s. Today, Facebook has 1.47 billion active users per day, and anyone can pretend to be a journalist on Facebook, as the Trump election proved. The social media tools that are sometimes touted as instruments of freedom against dictatorships turned out to be weapons capable of harming democracy. As Tim Berners-Lee recently told Vanity Fair, the internet “ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”

Berners-Lee’s solution is to “re-decentralize the web,” but for now the centralized internet is as much a problem as centralized political power. The platforms are unregulated and offer (relatively) cheap ways to publish articles, produce videos, and advertise. If Steve Bannon taught Donald Trump anything, it was likely that, gleaned from Bannon’s role as puppet master of the “alt-right” propaganda outlet Breitbart. You could say anything on the internet, and you could say it millions of times to just the people you wanted to reach, for relatively little cost. For all his bluster about tech giants being biased against him, Trump will never regulate them, because they won him the election. Just as Reagan killed the fairness doctrine, Trump’s FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has effectively killed net neutrality, an action that promises to consolidate power on the web in ever fewer hands.
posted by homunculus (42 comments total) 60 users marked this as a favorite
 
Tim Berners-Lee launches campaign to save the web from abuse: A ‘Magna Carta for the web’ will protect people’s rights online from threats such as fake news, prejudice and hate, says founder of the world wide web
Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global campaign to save the web from the destructive effects of abuse and discrimination, political manipulation, and other threats that plague the online world.

In a talk at the opening of the Web Summit in Lisbon on Monday, the inventor of the web called on governments, companies and individuals to back a new “Contract for the Web” that aims to protect people’s rights and freedoms on the internet.

The contract outlines central principles that will be built into a full contract and published in May 2019, when half of the world’s population will be able to get online. More than 50 organisations have already signed the contract, which is published by Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation alongside a report that calls for urgent action.
posted by homunculus at 7:23 PM on November 14, 2018 [4 favorites]


I mean you can try to fix it all you want, bro, but the only way we’re getting out of this mess is if we follow Admiral Adama’s advice.

Never. Network. The computers.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:38 PM on November 14, 2018 [38 favorites]


Having just read the Vanity Fair article, here's something I don't understand:

The web itself was already decentralized at its inception, and because of convenience behemoths like Facebook and Gmail centralized it. If you build a second (vaguely defined, ambiguously useful, unlikely to materialize) technology that is similarly decentralized, how are you not just replicating that self-same problem? I looked at the webpage for Solid (here), and all of the stuff it's purporting to do seems... hard.

Facebook isn't particularlly good or novel networking software. Maybe within a year or two of its inception, but currently it's a crufty, ugly, feature sparse forums package that doesn't let the user actually configure any of the settings. People use Facebook because their existing social network is there, and because it's easy. Let's say that this new set of standards becomes fashionable - what's to stop these very same capital rich interests (or some new player) from taking up the same positions? If I'm misunderstanding what Solid is trying to do, then please correct me.
posted by codacorolla at 9:38 PM on November 14, 2018 [10 favorites]


If anybody wants to go into more technical detail about what exactly Solid is, it appears their spec is available on GitHub.
posted by destrius at 9:45 PM on November 14, 2018 [3 favorites]


The web itself was already decentralized at its inception, and because of convenience behemoths like Facebook and Gmail centralized it. If you build a second (vaguely defined, ambiguously useful, unlikely to materialize) technology that is similarly decentralized, how are you not just replicating that self-same problem?

The issue is simple - you can't engineer your way out of a social problem. People didn't go to the big web giants because of perfidy (well, not entirely), but because they offered answers to the social problems people had. Furthermore, because of techies being distrustful of government, they pushed away the one social force that could counter the tech giants.

This is not a problem that will be solved by tech, and the sooner people like Berners-Lee realize this, the better off we'll be.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:49 PM on November 14, 2018 [49 favorites]


This is not a problem that will be solved by tech, and the sooner people like Berners-Lee realize this, the better off we'll be.

True, for the most part, but there is a technical component as well. I have a hand-wavy idea of what it is, but I imagine so does TBL, and he's way smarter than me.
posted by maxwelton at 11:26 PM on November 14, 2018 [3 favorites]


that article is incredibly vague so i decided to dig a little more.

that platform they're talking about? solid?

solid stands for "social linked data." it's a tool for building decentralized social applications based on linked data principles (e.g. semantic web).

the login process itself is decentralized - authentication, authorization, access control, user profiles, discovery of user preferences and server capabilities are decentralized, so that users don't need an account on a particular server to access data.

user stories include stuff like:
user profile management (profile pic, name, address, phone number)

here's a link to the user profile user story: https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/blob/master/UserStories/UserProfileManagement.md

here's a link to the private sharing user story: https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/blob/master/UserStories/PrivateSharing.md

i do like some aspects of this as I already use facebook as a defacto single sign on for stuff like my blizzard account and linked in - it would be nice to have ONE account that I can use to log into everything, it would be nice if that account weren't facebook, and it'd be nice if I had stuff like a social media friends list etc. existing outside of facebook.

of course what this doesn't really solve is, "who runs the solid server?" sure, anyone can run one, but who does? perhaps the answer is that it's nice that anyone could be facebook.
posted by Veritron at 11:43 PM on November 14, 2018 [5 favorites]


I had the same impression from reading the Solid webpage. It's not a terrible idea, but the framing and rhetoric around it is confusingly misguided. The problem with the original design of the Web wasn't that it wasn't open enough - that's the same brand of naive techno-utopianism that got us into this mess, and that you can find for $1.50 at a used bookstore in any number of braindead Clay Shirkey books. Perhaps I'm letting the hackish writing of the FPP Vanity Fair writing influence me, but any solution to this problem needs to have an ideological component beyond 'complete freedom'.
posted by codacorolla at 11:55 PM on November 14, 2018 [7 favorites]


It's worth pointing out that one of the first signatories to his "digital Magna Carta" is CloudFlare.

You know, the company helmed by a guy who argued that "freedom" made him work with Nazis.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:27 AM on November 15, 2018 [3 favorites]


For that matter, two of the sponsors of Solid are MasterCard and Dubai. I'm very skeptical.
posted by codacorolla at 12:47 AM on November 15, 2018 [3 favorites]


it would be nice to have ONE account that I can use to log into everything, it would be nice if that account weren't facebook

Use KeePass or some other decent password manager with a locally stored database. This will give you sign-on functionality that's negligibly less convenient than any form of single sign-on, without any of the security and privacy losses that become inevitable as soon as you give away the job of managing your online identities to anybody else.
posted by flabdablet at 2:36 AM on November 15, 2018 [8 favorites]


Why does there need to be a server? Everything gets stored on a cloud server, you pick which one. Your stories, your pictures, your whatever. It's all encrypted by you, before it leaves your box. (Imagine this is done in a consumer-friendly way, not some endless command-line bullshit.) There's a standard format which you can participate in, or not, as the case may be.

Services like Facebook, Flickr, Metafilter, whatever exist as a presentation layer and aggregator of like minds, but don't ever get your public key unless it's in their terms of service, and, of course, you encrypt things with different keys (labeled useful things like "public and searchable", "public", "people only" (which somehow recognizes bots, hey, I'm fantasizing here), "friends", "close friends", whatever).

Those services fetch the material from your cloud, always. Yeah, caching...who cares. I'm not going to die if a facebook style wall takes a few more seconds to load. The key is this: the services do not get to see your photos or read your posts, and do not get to ever store or sell any of your data. Your browser, when presented with a box like I'm typing in here, saves your words to your cloud, encrypted, and what the service gets is a pointer to that data, which they stick into some not-yet-existent HTML tag as a src-type attribute.

Likewise, things like "favorites" or "stars" or "thumbs up" are a standard format and, once again, are saved to your cloud. There's some sort of broadcast model for those, the idea being the service itself cannot know who favorited what, but that people who have your "favorites" key for that service can tell you liked something...if you want them to.

The idea here is that it's illegal to claim ownership over someone's content, and that if you don't own content it's illegal to try and decipher it unless you have been specifically granted a key. It's illegal for a service to save any identifiable user data, with very strict definitions of what that entails.

Cloud services themselves are just selling disk space and bandwidth; it's illegal to store un-encrypted data on such a service.

So you'd use Flickr, say, because you pay them not for storage but for the great tools they give you or the community...the community being a group of people who are all granted the key you create for content you want to share publically on the service--again without directly saving or peeking at your data. (Javascript is now a one-way street unless you specifically authorize the sending of data to a service, and even then, they cannot peek at it or save it. Most lifting is done in the browser anyway.)

Browsers themselves have encryption tools but are not allowed to communicate any data to their creators.

If Facebook cannot survive without selling your personal data, well, they can charge a fee, just like any other business.

OK, there's a lot of holes and a lot of hand-waving. Yes, a service like Metafilter needs for their human moderators to view the content, but that can be in their terms of use ("we do not display content which we do not have a key for"), but the key there is humans. But the idea is: your creations, including shitposts like this comment, are yours, period. Web services should be value add only for the people using them, not for third-parties. Data mining will be illegal, period.

"Vote" for maxwelton, semi-benevolent dictator with big plans and no skillz. But we can watch Jack and Mark and those guys sob into their cheerios together (assuming we have the right public key to do so!).
posted by maxwelton at 3:33 AM on November 15, 2018 [12 favorites]


Never trust anyone, BTW, who types "the idea here" repeatedly.
posted by maxwelton at 3:41 AM on November 15, 2018 [3 favorites]


Tim Berners-Lee:
Imagine if all your current apps talked to each other, collaborating and conceiving ways to enrich and streamline your personal life and business objectives? That’s the kind of innovation, intelligence and creativity Solid apps will generate.

With Solid, you will have far more personal agency over data - you decide which apps can access it.
My immediate thought: has he met people?

Also: How the hell can somebody as bright as TBL, having seen what capitalism did with the WWW, conclude that making it easier for corporations to share data about me amongst themselves is going to be good for my privacy? It's completely clear to me that the more disagreement about me that exists between my corporate overlords the better off I am, and I'm currently reacting to Solid with the same visceral NOOOOOOOO as I initially felt for Facebook, way back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and casually uploading your entire email contacts list to some faceless corporation was Not Normal.

Streamlined, regularized, schematized, standardized personal data sharing: Do Not Want.
posted by flabdablet at 3:43 AM on November 15, 2018 [13 favorites]


that can be in their terms of use

and that right there is the undoing of the whole thing.

We have mountains of history supporting the idea that the overwhelming majority of every service's users never even read, let alone actually comprehend, the TOS of the overwhelming majority of the services they use.

People sign up to shit because other people they know have already done so. That's the whole thing. TOS don't matter in the slightest little bit until the people who wrote the TOS want to use them against troublemakers.
posted by flabdablet at 3:49 AM on November 15, 2018 [9 favorites]


of course, you encrypt things with different keys (labeled useful things like "public and searchable", "public", "people only" (which somehow recognizes bots, hey, I'm fantasizing here), "friends", "close friends", whatever

...and then you just sit back and wait for anything you've made that has any decent potential audience to show up on every BitTorrent search aggregator.

DRM For The Masses won't work any better than DRM For Corporations, because DRM doesn't work, period.

DRM doesn't work because the fundamental nature of digital information is infinite accurate replicability.

If your close friends can view your content, the advertising-installed scraperbot running surreptitiously on their poorly secured telephone can leak it.
posted by flabdablet at 4:00 AM on November 15, 2018 [7 favorites]


The last time the human race had a comparable advance in communications was the invention of the printing press. The political implications of printing were immense and they took hundreds of years to play out; we're still figuring out the details.

Every time we create a new way to communicate we create a matrix of unintended consequences which play out in the political sphere. Our institutions are based on our methods of communication, our technologies depend on them, so when they're superseded by new methods our institutions undergo a period of adaptation or extinction.

This process usually involves war. The obvious example is the Gutenberg press leading to the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, but I'd argue that the telegraph was partially responsible for World War I. Suddenly a world once separated by days, communicating by mail and travel, could send messages almost instantly, and the friction that resulted from suddenly being that close and communicating that quickly was, at the time, unmanageable.

I don't know what's going to become of the internet in the long run, but it's pretty clear that our current social and political institutions aren't coping with it very well. I think that eventually we'll figure out what it means to be connected to the rest of humanity in this new way, but getting there is going to suck.
posted by MrVisible at 4:26 AM on November 15, 2018 [19 favorites]


I wonder if Berners-Lee has ever read Frankenstein?
posted by Thorzdad at 4:42 AM on November 15, 2018 [3 favorites]


I'd argue that the telegraph was partially responsible for World War I

And I would argue radio had a lot to do with WW2
posted by schadenfrau at 5:34 AM on November 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


This wouldn't have happened if we'd stuck with with Gopher.
posted by heatherlogan at 5:41 AM on November 15, 2018 [17 favorites]


Maybe it's time to reevaluate the idea that being "really smart" means that you will beat giant corporate power
posted by thelonius at 5:55 AM on November 15, 2018 [5 favorites]


Maxwellington, I'm interested in your ideas and would like to sign up
posted by rebent at 5:59 AM on November 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


rebent, you can find the public key for my e-blast! newsletter on the front page of wikileaks, in the source code of any of the 3,578 Facebook React "components" which make up the new WordPress "Gutenberg" editor, or from any "senior White House official". I'm not sure why this is, but it's the last time I use Safari for anything important.
posted by maxwelton at 6:43 AM on November 15, 2018 [6 favorites]


I’m just glad that somewhere since the last time I looked at Solid they have actually attempted to write a semi-coherent explanation of what it is and why anyone would want it. I don’t think I’m gonna start running a Solid server alongside the Mastodon instance I run but at least now I have *some* idea of why I might want to consider it.
posted by egypturnash at 7:18 AM on November 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


The real problem with any of these "user owned" decentralized solutions is two-fold:

1] Effort. People don't want to take the time and energy to maintain their own instance of the tool. Hell, most of them don't even want to keep things updated and defragmented (as needed).

2) Stop picking at it. A fair share of people will have to tinker on their instances, well advised or not. Next thing you know, the spec is broken and it all starts collapsing, which also leads to lack of adoption.
posted by Samizdata at 7:19 AM on November 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


This wouldn't have happened if we'd stuck with with Gopher.
Douglas Adams: "Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."

This is all because we thought digital watches were a pretty neat idea.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 7:55 AM on November 15, 2018 [7 favorites]


I agree with whoever upthread that this is a social problem not a technological problem. Forgive my vagueness but my understanding is that in less affluent markets where phone users cannot really afford data Facebook is access is free and basically is the internet. I don't know what percentage of the globe works this way but it seems like some version of this is coming for everyone.
posted by Pembquist at 8:25 AM on November 15, 2018


True, for the most part, but there is a technical component as well. I have a hand-wavy idea of what it is, but I imagine so does TBL, and he's way smarter than me.

No, there really isn't (or more to the point, any technical "solutions" will only work if they enforce the needed social ones.) And for everyone talking up Berners-Lee's intelligence, why is it that he's been studying this problem for going on three decades, and yet continues to persist with the idea that if he engineers the right system, then everything will fall into place? Why hasn't he acknowledged that he just doesn't have the toolset to fix things?
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:46 AM on November 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


(Imagine this is done in a consumer-friendly way, not some endless command-line bullshit.)

Yeah, that's the hard part. Encryption is an unforgiving mistress and she will destroy you if you forget your passphrase.

And anyway, none of this stuff is high-value by itself. Your tweets/toots/posts/honks/blorts are just ephemeral public statements and only become a problem if someone has the whole thing for everyone the way Facebook and Google have. Encryption seems like overkill.

This is why I think the whole federated social media thing may be sufficient. Any one provider can give you access to the network so they compete on quality and price, where the baseline is my buddy running an instance for fun on a $7/month VPS. Nobody has a big enough critical mass to profit from the sort of crap Facebook is doing and if they did, they'd quickly lose it as their users moved to a less obnoxious instance.

(Sends invoice to mastodon.social.)
posted by suetanvil at 8:57 AM on November 15, 2018


yes! YES!! save us, old-school web guy! use your coding skills and superior wisdom to create a supervirus that destroys social media once and for all!

Imagine if all your current apps talked to each other, collaborating and conceiving ways to enrich and streamline your personal life and business objectives? That’s the kind of innovation, intelligence and creativity Solid apps will generate.


ah. well. never mind, somebody please roundhouse kick this dipshit into the sea.
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:16 AM on November 15, 2018 [6 favorites]




Zuckerberg promised Congress he would combat the spread of conspiracy theories—while his company was doing the opposite

nobody can block his shtoyle
posted by flabdablet at 9:32 AM on November 15, 2018


I really don't get this. The success of the web was based purely on the fact that it was a bunch of simple, open source technologies that anyone could easily use. So of course that meant "anyone", not just end-users or consumers or whatever. Anyone. And he's surprised that this is what happened? I mean, I really find it difficult that he's actually surprised. I would have assumed that he'd have figured out that this was basically the cost of the technology. Vint Cerf WORKS FOR GOOGLE (not that there's anything wrong with that). Does Google really need an internet evangelist? I mean, every last thing they do is about the internet! Of course, people are going to monetize this platform, and do all sorts of bad things with it along with the good. Did he really think it would be otherwise, even in the early days?

I mean, I was around back then too. I'm not as smart as TBL by a long shot, but even I knew then that this kind of stuff was inevitable. The technology that only provides benefits without any costs has yet to be invented.
posted by me & my monkey at 9:57 AM on November 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


Maybe i'm a skeptic, i don't think a new internet protocol for federation of personal data is going to do much to prevent the problems that he is describing. This ultimately reads like libertarian fiction where the lack of control and the good faith of everyone involved with decentralized systems saves the world. You may as well claim that bitcoin is going to lead to a more fair monetary system for the people at large, and totally definitely will not be used for the aggregation of wealth for a select few, money laundering, and out of control speculation, and certainly not with total disregard for the sheer cost of energy and other resources and externalized costs used to fuel it.

If you haven't learned that you aren't going to solve social and structural issues via technical solutions after 30 years of observation of the ill effects of the very tools you created, there's no reason for you to be taken remotely seriously. This would be like the version of Terminator 2 where Miles Dyson survives, and decides that he's going to build an AI controlled weaponized robotic system, but this time it will DEFEND humanity. This is engineers disease once it has metastasized.
posted by MysticMCJ at 8:07 PM on November 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


Here's my suggestion to make the internet a slightly better place. I'd like to hear the knowledgeable people of Metafilter poke holes in it or improve it.

Start paying for it.

A social site like Facebook is not a bad thing per se, it means I can connect with friends in many other cities and countries. Imagine if it wasn't free, but cost $5 or $9 a month. No ads. This would change a lot of things. When you pay for the services you use, you are the actual customer, not raw material to be aggregated and sold. Since there are no ads, the company that runs the site doesn't need to spy on you. Today, advertising means surveillance. The same thing goes for email. Start paying for it. There's no need for the company that provides email to read your mail in order to show you ads. Take back the internet by paying for the services you use - when you pay for it, it's yours, not theirs. The "free", advertising-based internet needs to disappear.

Also, Google needs to be destroyed.

It's absurd that a private company has become the de facto operating system of the internet. You can't use the internet without search, and it's unhealthy that one profit making company has a monopoly on search. Who else could do it? What about a neutral third party like universities and national libraries? If they pooled their resources, maybe they could together build a search engine to rival Google. They would not be in it to make a profit, which means that a lot of the problems that plague the internet would disappear. Search should be a neutral, public service, not run by companies or governments.

What do you think?
posted by Termite at 11:10 PM on November 15, 2018 [3 favorites]


The problem with the idea of "let's just pay for the internet" is that at this point, a lot of the corporations involved don't want you to, because making us paying customers means that they would have obligations to us - obligations that they want to avoid like the plague.

Ultimately, the answer is what it has always been - regulation and forced breakup. Because the internet has no inherent friction to prevent consolidation, that friction has to be provided by the government. Furthermore, companies are not going to end policies that make money voluntarily, so the profit incentive needs to be removed. For example, HIPAA makes it so that PHI is liability bait, the result being that health care entities are now incentivised to restrict their acquisition and holding of it. Create similar rules around the personal information these companies collect, and they will become a lot more selective about what they keep.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:14 AM on November 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


The problem with the idea of "let's just pay for the internet" is that at this point, a lot of the corporations involved don't want you to, because making us paying customers means that they would have obligations to us - obligations that they want to avoid like the plague.

Exactly. They don't want us to, but maybe they could face some competition from companies that do want to take our money, in exchange for a service that gives us what we want, on our terms, without surveillance and other problems. That's the only kind of competition that could threaten Google - and it's about bloody time they faced some serious competition.

Personally, I would find the situation humorous (and very revealing) if we started behaving like customers, "Here, take our money" and the big corporations responded "No, we don't want to take it." That would teach us something about what's going on.

We need to grow up and behave like adults and responsible customers. Demand the services we want, on our terms, avoiding anything that is offered "for free". If we don't, we are just like a bunch of teenagers, hanging out in a mall without paying for anything, despising the big corporations who own the mall and who are pointing their surveillance cameras at us -- but too lazy to go anywhere else.
posted by Termite at 3:30 AM on November 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


Between the libertarian fantasy of a lone inventor who reshapes the internet through technology, and the liberal fantasy of a government willing to break up Google, I'd rate the libertarian fantasy as marginally more likely.
posted by Pyry at 4:01 AM on November 16, 2018


Zuckerberg promised Congress he would combat the spread of conspiracy theories—while his company was doing the opposite

Well they trusted him. The dumb fucks.
posted by meehawl at 11:49 AM on November 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


Reading the FPP I was suddenly reminded of chemical engineer Thomas Midgley Jr., who has the unfortunate distinction of playing a major role in the development of both leaded gasoline (to prevent "knocking"!) and chlorofluorocarbons (to replace the existing toxic, flammable, or explosive refrigerants used at the time!). Yeesh.
posted by heatherlogan at 6:47 PM on November 16, 2018


Is there any human invention or innovation or idea that has not been weaponised by some humans to exploit, defraud, abuse, and destroy other humans?

Why did anybody think the webified intertubies would be any different?

It is just another of the apparently endless stream of Great Filters we have to pass through, or die trying.
posted by Pouteria at 8:42 PM on November 16, 2018


Since the beginning of the web, people have been trying to apply Grand Unifying Frameworks to it and big Standards for sites to interconnect.

In many ways this goes against the true beauty of the WWW, which is its diversity, a common way of accessing a zillion unique individual sites.

(A few standards of interconnection may get adopted and abandoned from time to time. RSS. Conventions for providing data and APIs via HTTP and common file formats like XML and JSON. Etc.
I personally would have found it nice for there to be a few better ways for sites to mix and include (or transclude to use Ted Nelsons term) stuff from other sites. And these are all useful.)

A major problem with Facebook is that it erases the individual identities of sites providing e.g. news stories. They all run together and they end up having the same perceived authenticity. This is the key dark pattern fueling the spread of misinformation and lies on the platform... Similarly most other efforts to unify the world into one common schema or framework or system necessarily homogenize everything.

Anyway, remember FOAF? Is Solid essentially FOAF but a lot more complex?

(Sorry for posting in an old thread, just got around to it.)
posted by thefool at 11:20 AM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


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