As someone working in this space, I think standards and standard governance are important, but just as important are the economics. Right now, tech is largely dominated by platforms designed to extract resources in various ways, and to redistribute those resources to investors. To create a public interest internet, we will have to find a dwindling sense of collective and individual responsibility to our collective interests, and that includes recognising the very real and pressing economic implications of technofeudalism. That then means putting resources into digital public infrastructure, through pressure on our collectively held assets, such as pension funds and government procurement.
> So, say you want to create a new web standard...
This and the following image have a misguided understanding of the market. We know how this situation plays out because we ran exactly that experiment in the 2000s with Firefox and IE6. Those market share numbers are contingent on Google doing the best possible job as curators insofar as the userbase can tell.
If there are browser features that users want (like tabs) or web standards that enable Cool New Stuff (like modern JS) then users will go out of their way to install browsers that support them. Firefox got all the way to around 20-30% of the market before MS's control of the web collapsed and we entered the current era.
The "problem" that competitors of Google face is that Google is a rather competent steward of web standards. Their browser engine is hard to compete with because it is very good, their web standards are hard to compete with because they are largely appropriate.
Although I stand by a prediction I have that the next wave will be when a Brave-like model takes hold and the price of browsing the web drops from free to negative. With crypto we are surely getting to spitting distance of advertisers paying users directly to look at ads instead of paying Google to organise the web such that users look at ads.
"If there are browser features that users want (like tabs) or webs standards that enable Cool Stuff (like modern JS) then users will go out of their way to install browser that support them."
Pretty sure that tabs were introduced by a software developer without any prior request from any user.
Same goes for "Cool Stuff". Few users even know what JS means, except that if they do not use it or disable it, they will constantly be met with pages instructing them, even commanding them, to enable it or use a browser that supports it. These were introduced by software developers on their own initiative. Users will go out of their way to try to make stuff work. If a page instructs them to install some software, then, generally, they will follow the instructioins.
Once users become familiar with something then they will expect it. That is quite different from users asking for something that does not exist. (Usually such requests for features are never filled as they would go against advertisers' interests in web browsers. Users want a web free of ads. Software developers depend on a web full ads. In this regard, users do not get what they want. Software developers do.)
Users have little control over web browsers. Software developers at the advertising companies, e.g., Google, and their business partners, e.g. Mozilla, have the control. The companies serve their own interests and the interests of their customers who purchase online advertising service. Those customers are advertisers, not users.
For example, browsers like Firefox and Chrome have at times hidden the full URL from the user in the address bar. No user ever requested that. Nor were any users asked if they wanted it. Chrome introduced a feature called FLoC. No user ever requested that. Nor was any user asked if they wanted it. The list of "features" like this is ridiculously long.
Users do not get features because they "want" them. They get the features that software developers decide to give them, without prior consultation.
Whether they want the features or not, they generally are stuck with them.
> If there are browser features that users want (like tabs) [...] then users will go out of their way to install browsers that support them.
The prerequisite of this is that such a web browser exists, which is not a given. I'd sacrifice an arm for a web browser that has non-disappearing natively themed scroll bars since due to accessibility issues I struggle with scroll wheels.
This is not a big technical ask, yet to date, the only one I've found that offers this is Falkon, which unfortunately stuck on an old version of qt's webkit port meaning a bunch of websites break with it.
You have a lot of choices but almost all of them are the same, or suck; or both.
> Their browser engine is hard to compete with because it is very good, their web standards are hard to compete with because they are largely appropriate.
Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say "good" and "appropriate"? Good for whom? Appropriate why?
Usually it's salesmen who want Slow New Stuff, users want fast interoperable software. And to force them install one electron app per site they need to be nagged by "we don't like your browser" error pages.
This is coming around full circle to the early days of the internet when people had toolbars installed on their browser that displayed adverts and they slowly earned pennies for the time they spent browsing (and seeing the toolbar adverts).
Won't the price then be the electricity to prove work (if that's the variety of crypto used, and that question may reveal my ignorance on the subject)?
> With crypto we are surely getting to spitting distance of advertisers paying users directly to look at ads instead of paying Google to organise the web such that users look at ads.
Who would take that deal? Getting paid $.02 in some cryptocurrency to look at an ad? So that I can then maybe spend more money on the product being advertised? Why would I ever agree to that? It's a bad deal for me. Why would the ad agency do that? It's a bad deal for them versus paying for captive eyeballs.
I would much prefer the state compete with market actors, not commandeer their operations.
The state has significant advantages when competing against private market actors because it can sustainably fund public goods, due to the fact that its vast tax collection apparatus can capture a much higher proportion of the value generated by public goods than private actors can.
An adequately funded public good has several advantages over private goods:
* Wide public buy-in: Due to the absence of barriers to contribution, such as secret code or restrictive licensing requirements for modifications.
* Generally favorable public perceptions: Public goods often enjoy more trust and support.
If the state provides a compelling option, it can naturally attract users, and without having to impose mandates on existing market options.
This is greatly preferrable to the regulatory approach, which can have unintended consequences that slow innovation and reduce market options. For example, if regulations impose heavy compliance burdens on tech companies, they would divert resources to legal and administrative expenses, leading to less resources for R&D.
Regulatory regimentation to ostensibly achieve some public policy goal, can also prevent companies from experimenting with new ideas and approaches, which ultimately slows the industry's rate of progress.
So by having the state compete rather than regulate coercively, we get the benefits of market-driven innovation while also testing the potential of public goods to provide superior value than what market-provisioned goods can.
Such state-funded public options can also be used to non-coercively bolster open standards, by giving then the critical mass of adoption needed to become market standards.
It took me like 12 days to read the whole article, so, this comment is super late but someday maybe you'll run across it. All I want to say is that's a great idea. Back when email started entering wide use I was flummoxed as to why the post office didn't offer its own email options.
I see some discussions about browsers. I think they are not that relevant for the current state of the Internet. I use ff, and 99% of the web looks, and behaves correctly.
imho search engines affect page contents, and 'style' of the web. They define what is visible, and what is not, what is acceptable, and what is not. According to the chart Google controls 91% of that pie.
I do feel that most of what is wrong with the Internet is because of ads. The next thing is that corporations and governments use it to wield, exert power. The next thing is that contemporary search fails spectacularly at "discovery". When have you found 'a new blog' via google search? When did you find a new 'music band' using google search? When did you found fun web radio station? Google is answer machine. It is not a good place to find new things. It is not a good place to find retro things.
As a thought example lets think that alternative is possible. Let's say someone creates "a new search" that is successful, and makes Internet fun again. The corporations can sniff the trends and will move their presence to that space. Governments will also move there. They will make the pressure again on the "new successful search engine" to bend it to their rule. They will force their willpower eventually. They will perform enshittification again.
One way to break this trend is to have Internet federated, but this road is not funded enough. Why would anybody invest in hosting parts of the Internet? I was thinking about government funding for such projects, but I would be really surprised if that road resulted in anything good.
That is why I created an offline cache of the Internet [1]. I do not need to host it, yet anybody can use it. I can easily find "amiga" related domains, and start my search using just this.
Do not provide web apps. Provide data. Provide files. Provide something that works off-line. "File over app".
Allow me to open with a wildly speculative question: What if the internet were public interest technology? I mean "internet" the way most people understand it, which is to say our whole digital sphere, and by "public interest" I don't mean tinkering at the margins to reduce harm from some bad actors or painting some glossy ethics principles atop a pile of exploitative rent-seeking — I mean through and through, warts and all, an internet that works in support of a credible, pragmatic definition of the common good.
The moment you try to define a singular "common good", you wind up with a variety of competing factions all putting forth their own wildly divergent and often contradictory notions of what that common good consists of.
Most people have an unfortunate tendency to project their own values and preferences onto the world at large, and fail to recognize when they cross the boundary out of their own spaces and into other people's.
Recognizing this means advancing solutions that primarily aim to minimize conflict among many parties, each pursuing their own particular concept of the good within their own boundaries, and avoiding trying to universalize any singular set of terminal values.
Attempting to pursue solutions that depend on everyone agreeing on the same set of terminal values will always fail, and will often generate intense conflict that escalates well beyond the bounds of the original question and causes a great deal of collateral damage.
I mean to be honest something like the early social media platforms like myspace or even reddit up to a degree were public interest platforms.
And back then nobody really thought all that mich about financing, so these spaces weren't about extracting user data or shaping their opinions. The algorithms were simplistic as hell and the timelines still deserved that name.
The state runs libraries not just to give people access to books, but also because they are social community spaces. Why not provide something like that, just online. Something that doesn't need to make money, but provide a service that people can trust in a different way that a corporation.
A good start would be to demand that internet infrastructure operators do just that - and nothing more.
Internet providers do just that one job: Routing IP. No peeking into my packages please.
Strengthening and regulating the underlying world-wide infrastructure: undersea cables, transcontinental fiber networks - with oversight that prevents any org (public or private) from intercepting traffic would go a long way to protect the Public Interest.
In my opinion the first step in a more decentralized internet,
or at least a big part in being able to move in that direction would
be a system for a global easy system for (micro)payments.
That is preferably modelled like cash. (more anonymous).
and ubiquitous, they can also be used in the real world.
It would be nice for me, if someone reads an article I wrote and they
give me ¤0.01 ¤0.001 or something. (Given that a lot of countries,
people make vastly less money than others what constitutes a "micro"payment.
That would of course mean that transactions were either utterly inexpensive
or free.
We would have a ubiquitous, distributed, untraceable", distributed means of
conducting international transactions.
I think we have all the technical issues solved.
but
No Western government will ever allow it.
(Nor most other governments).
Since it would rob them of a lot of power,
and we would hear:
"Terrorism, child pornography, bypass economic sanctions,
election manipulation, disinformation" etc etc.
The usual stuff.
laurex|1 year ago
localfirst|1 year ago
Do you have mechanisms to play legal/jurisdiction arbitrage?
What happens if a bunch of government/special interest groups declare your garden illegal?
We are only as good as what is allowed.
roenxi|1 year ago
This and the following image have a misguided understanding of the market. We know how this situation plays out because we ran exactly that experiment in the 2000s with Firefox and IE6. Those market share numbers are contingent on Google doing the best possible job as curators insofar as the userbase can tell.
If there are browser features that users want (like tabs) or web standards that enable Cool New Stuff (like modern JS) then users will go out of their way to install browsers that support them. Firefox got all the way to around 20-30% of the market before MS's control of the web collapsed and we entered the current era.
The "problem" that competitors of Google face is that Google is a rather competent steward of web standards. Their browser engine is hard to compete with because it is very good, their web standards are hard to compete with because they are largely appropriate.
Although I stand by a prediction I have that the next wave will be when a Brave-like model takes hold and the price of browsing the web drops from free to negative. With crypto we are surely getting to spitting distance of advertisers paying users directly to look at ads instead of paying Google to organise the web such that users look at ads.
1vuio0pswjnm7|1 year ago
Pretty sure that tabs were introduced by a software developer without any prior request from any user.
Same goes for "Cool Stuff". Few users even know what JS means, except that if they do not use it or disable it, they will constantly be met with pages instructing them, even commanding them, to enable it or use a browser that supports it. These were introduced by software developers on their own initiative. Users will go out of their way to try to make stuff work. If a page instructs them to install some software, then, generally, they will follow the instructioins.
Once users become familiar with something then they will expect it. That is quite different from users asking for something that does not exist. (Usually such requests for features are never filled as they would go against advertisers' interests in web browsers. Users want a web free of ads. Software developers depend on a web full ads. In this regard, users do not get what they want. Software developers do.)
Users have little control over web browsers. Software developers at the advertising companies, e.g., Google, and their business partners, e.g. Mozilla, have the control. The companies serve their own interests and the interests of their customers who purchase online advertising service. Those customers are advertisers, not users.
For example, browsers like Firefox and Chrome have at times hidden the full URL from the user in the address bar. No user ever requested that. Nor were any users asked if they wanted it. Chrome introduced a feature called FLoC. No user ever requested that. Nor was any user asked if they wanted it. The list of "features" like this is ridiculously long.
Users do not get features because they "want" them. They get the features that software developers decide to give them, without prior consultation.
Whether they want the features or not, they generally are stuck with them.
marginalia_nu|1 year ago
The prerequisite of this is that such a web browser exists, which is not a given. I'd sacrifice an arm for a web browser that has non-disappearing natively themed scroll bars since due to accessibility issues I struggle with scroll wheels.
This is not a big technical ask, yet to date, the only one I've found that offers this is Falkon, which unfortunately stuck on an old version of qt's webkit port meaning a bunch of websites break with it.
You have a lot of choices but almost all of them are the same, or suck; or both.
Zambyte|1 year ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say "good" and "appropriate"? Good for whom? Appropriate why?
GoblinSlayer|1 year ago
darreninthenet|1 year ago
meristohm|1 year ago
Hasu|1 year ago
Who would take that deal? Getting paid $.02 in some cryptocurrency to look at an ad? So that I can then maybe spend more money on the product being advertised? Why would I ever agree to that? It's a bad deal for me. Why would the ad agency do that? It's a bad deal for them versus paying for captive eyeballs.
ETH_start|1 year ago
The state has significant advantages when competing against private market actors because it can sustainably fund public goods, due to the fact that its vast tax collection apparatus can capture a much higher proportion of the value generated by public goods than private actors can.
An adequately funded public good has several advantages over private goods:
* Wide public buy-in: Due to the absence of barriers to contribution, such as secret code or restrictive licensing requirements for modifications.
* Generally favorable public perceptions: Public goods often enjoy more trust and support.
If the state provides a compelling option, it can naturally attract users, and without having to impose mandates on existing market options.
This is greatly preferrable to the regulatory approach, which can have unintended consequences that slow innovation and reduce market options. For example, if regulations impose heavy compliance burdens on tech companies, they would divert resources to legal and administrative expenses, leading to less resources for R&D.
Regulatory regimentation to ostensibly achieve some public policy goal, can also prevent companies from experimenting with new ideas and approaches, which ultimately slows the industry's rate of progress.
So by having the state compete rather than regulate coercively, we get the benefits of market-driven innovation while also testing the potential of public goods to provide superior value than what market-provisioned goods can.
Such state-funded public options can also be used to non-coercively bolster open standards, by giving then the critical mass of adoption needed to become market standards.
troyvit|1 year ago
renegat0x0|1 year ago
imho search engines affect page contents, and 'style' of the web. They define what is visible, and what is not, what is acceptable, and what is not. According to the chart Google controls 91% of that pie.
I do feel that most of what is wrong with the Internet is because of ads. The next thing is that corporations and governments use it to wield, exert power. The next thing is that contemporary search fails spectacularly at "discovery". When have you found 'a new blog' via google search? When did you find a new 'music band' using google search? When did you found fun web radio station? Google is answer machine. It is not a good place to find new things. It is not a good place to find retro things.
As a thought example lets think that alternative is possible. Let's say someone creates "a new search" that is successful, and makes Internet fun again. The corporations can sniff the trends and will move their presence to that space. Governments will also move there. They will make the pressure again on the "new successful search engine" to bend it to their rule. They will force their willpower eventually. They will perform enshittification again.
One way to break this trend is to have Internet federated, but this road is not funded enough. Why would anybody invest in hosting parts of the Internet? I was thinking about government funding for such projects, but I would be really surprised if that road resulted in anything good.
That is why I created an offline cache of the Internet [1]. I do not need to host it, yet anybody can use it. I can easily find "amiga" related domains, and start my search using just this.
Do not provide web apps. Provide data. Provide files. Provide something that works off-line. "File over app".
[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
recifs|1 year ago
Gormo|1 year ago
Most people have an unfortunate tendency to project their own values and preferences onto the world at large, and fail to recognize when they cross the boundary out of their own spaces and into other people's.
Recognizing this means advancing solutions that primarily aim to minimize conflict among many parties, each pursuing their own particular concept of the good within their own boundaries, and avoiding trying to universalize any singular set of terminal values.
Attempting to pursue solutions that depend on everyone agreeing on the same set of terminal values will always fail, and will often generate intense conflict that escalates well beyond the bounds of the original question and causes a great deal of collateral damage.
imagineerschool|1 year ago
I'm in.
atoav|1 year ago
And back then nobody really thought all that mich about financing, so these spaces weren't about extracting user data or shaping their opinions. The algorithms were simplistic as hell and the timelines still deserved that name.
The state runs libraries not just to give people access to books, but also because they are social community spaces. Why not provide something like that, just online. Something that doesn't need to make money, but provide a service that people can trust in a different way that a corporation.
beders|1 year ago
A good start would be to demand that internet infrastructure operators do just that - and nothing more.
Internet providers do just that one job: Routing IP. No peeking into my packages please.
Strengthening and regulating the underlying world-wide infrastructure: undersea cables, transcontinental fiber networks - with oversight that prevents any org (public or private) from intercepting traffic would go a long way to protect the Public Interest.
Alas, a pipe dream.
mvc|1 year ago
Or "tube" dream as it were.
ThinkBeat|1 year ago
It would be nice for me, if someone reads an article I wrote and they give me ¤0.01 ¤0.001 or something. (Given that a lot of countries, people make vastly less money than others what constitutes a "micro"payment.
That would of course mean that transactions were either utterly inexpensive or free.
We would have a ubiquitous, distributed, untraceable", distributed means of conducting international transactions.
I think we have all the technical issues solved.
but
No Western government will ever allow it. (Nor most other governments). Since it would rob them of a lot of power, and we would hear: "Terrorism, child pornography, bypass economic sanctions, election manipulation, disinformation" etc etc. The usual stuff.
(Even though all of that is going on already....
pessimizer|1 year ago
[deleted]