[beders]

As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point.

The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations)

For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you to run services over their lines. When DSL was around (I guess it still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect. ISP control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet.

The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.

So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is free of back-doors and remote control. There's no guarantee for that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised. We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors.

As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis here other than picking the best tool for the job.

In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.

[shevy-java]

> In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.

We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible.

People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.

[brazzy]

> We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible.

Maybe we can, but it is A) a far bigger, older, and more difficult problem than how to structure a computer network, and B) fundamentally not solvable through technological means.

No matter how much technologists love the idea of technology as a liberating force, our worst instincts and dynamics always reassert themselves and soon figure out how to use that same technology to destroy liberty.

[pkphilip]

The world has actually become worse over time - especially the Internet, when it comes to free speech, freedom, the ability for individuals to make a difference etc.

[okanat]

> We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible.

Where does such informed political and economic interest and power exist? With whom do we construct such society? Do they have the power and will to fight for it?

Normies live with normie standards and with incresing social media exposure with more and more emotional animal-like manipulated world views. They are either ignorant or ambivalent.

Will tech people gather on a piece of land and declare independence? Most of my tech worker colleagues are also quite pro-social media and they heavily use it to boost their apparent social status. We cannot even trust our kind.

Similar examples of new technology being used to motivate and mobilize masses have always ended with devastating wars and genocides. Previously the speed of propagation of information gave advantages to statespeople like FDR to put an end to increasing racism/Nazism/violent tendencies (of course not everywhere, when let to its own devices new technology almost perfect for constructing dictatorships). Now everybody has equal access to misinformation.

[tvink]

Honestly if we could have we would have, we can't even tax the people destroying our world, how are we going to create utopia

[glitchc]

Kumbaya is never a motivator. Now, self-interest, on the other hand...

[aerhardt]

Even in our fabulously wealthy societies, people are mostly worried about paying their bills, taking care of their families, and putting food on the table, not in getting together in a quixotic enterprise and paying for thousands of kilometers of communal fiber. Also like in most communist utopias what would probably happen is that the control infrastructure would be captured by special interest groups and now you’ve traded one evil for another, but in addition you’re left holding the capex bag and you’re poorer for it.

[trueno]

The technology is the easy part, the people are the hard part. The reality is that we simply don't have thought leaders in charge anymore, there's no innovations or anything that are coming to correct course, very few if any channels even exist anymore for good ideas to flow upwards that result in good & proper solution implementations that positively preserve/protect/harden what we want the web to be. I think a lot of bright minds who could be solutioning for some of these things understand the dynamics at play even if they've never taken a huge moment to think about it. Subconsciously they are aware that becoming a person to try and steer such a big ship would require a monumental exertion that is maybe not worth it anymore. The great leaders never actively seek out leadership positions, similarly I don't think the people who could be good decision makers and influence these types of ideals coming to fruition in society actively seek out such positions. The possible mental tax of getting there is probably enormous. It is not an economic win for anyone to take up the mantle of trying to steer ships this size, it is a massive sacrifice. People who would be fit for the task probably just want to sign off at the end of the day and... have a good life and exist/be a benefit in their communities. In some ways perhaps that makes them.. unfit for carrying this torch. Perhaps there are simply too few people out there that are adequately qualified to carry this torch, we are in dire need of competent people at the helm of many fronts and we simply don't have that, that's just the real life variables at play right now.

We plebs are just driftwood floating in massive waves of nation state decision making. I don't doubt there are people who literally work at ISPs who are depressed at the state of things, depressed that theyre not allowed to take action on certain things, depressed that they see first-hand what kind of control mechanisms they're forced to implement or disallowed from implementing and more. It's got to be a trove of BS in an age of misinformation which has always been an information systems problem that humanity has implemented checks notes zero solutions for. And at the end of the day they, probably like all of us, just want to live a good and meaningful life.

That's not to say just... give up on ideals. But instead to acknowledge the realities of ideals not being enough on their own. Have some real conversations on what it would actually take to embed these types of fundamentals into a society, get comfortable with the uncomfortable realities. So much work needs to be done before new ideals can even be shared. Outreach alone to spread ideals is a massive uphill battle at this point due to conglomerate control of broadcast media and concentrated ownership of social media apps. A lot of these particular ideals require a decent understanding/background of technology in general which most people don't even have, making these things an incredibly unlikely basis for a society where these things are well-enough understood. So the circus trick here is how do you make it a digestable topic that touches the souls of many and galvanizes them to take the correct stance so that these things become embodied in the set of ideals a society values, so that legislators and whatever other proxies that are tasked with decision making give these things the resourcing or policy making attention they deserve. That's the mega hard part, which is then additionally compounded in difficulty by ... most households in our societies just never having these types of discussions make it to their TV/computer screens. Hackernews types like to call these people "normies" and tack the blame on them, but they can't seem to wrap their mind around that not everyone could or should have a deep compsci background. We should be coexisting with people of a variety of backgrounds and instead we should be looking at their "normie"-ness as a thing to account for, not blame. It would be absurd to have a "normie" expect us to be exceptional at rebuilding car engines or any other broad subset of knowledge that we haven't ourselves committed our own lives/spare time to.

So that leaves the other route to take which is just... renegade fine-we'll-do-it-ourselves. Which can succeed, but has its own set of challenges. Fronting infrastructure for a lot of stuff is expensive, so donors are needed on sometimes vast scales. To another commenters point like... ain't none of us on the renegade front laying undersea cables any time soon which are multi-billion dollar projects to cross the Pacific. Often times we see these underground efforts fail in their infancy simply because the UX just flat out sucks and we're up against entities who can giga-scale all their infrastructure/resources & ultimately capitalize on making whatever app thing fast&pleasant for users. It feels like we're drowning against titans sometimes, it's overwhelming.

[squeefers]

who pays for it then?

[pessimizer]

> People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.

Not when people make arguments based on dreams, hope, and optimism.

If somebody tells me that we can build a shed, I want them to talk about wood, nails and concrete, or to stop talking.

[reppap]

The assertion that an uncensored internet is a better world should probably require some motivation.

If everyone was a normal (as far as anyone is normal) law abiding citizen perhaps I would agree, but sadly that is far from the case. I think history has quite clearly shown that there is a minority of people out there that will take advantage and ruin things for everyone else. It's the same reason we have militaries, police forces, government checks and balances, etc. The internet is no exception to this.

I don't think the world is simple enough where anyone could be absolutist about freedom, it's all grey areas and complicated lines drawn.

[txrx0000]

There is hope. It's not only possible, but it is likely and is already underway. DNS can be replaced. IPv4/v6 can be replaced. We just need to build a layer on top that ignores the access controls of the underlying layer (the Internet), then replace the underlying layer altogether with new infrastructure.

There will be more efforts like this: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io

Those who want control over other people's mouths and eyes and ears, and rely on it to maintain their undeserved authority and prosperity are going to have a bad time.

[EQmWgw87pw]

First step to have a protocol that depends on mass adoption to be useful: choose an unpronounceable name

[DrScientist]

I think some of those barriers are going away ( in the UK it's now possible to get symmetric full fibre at a reasonable price ), static IPs, ISP's without filtering etc.

I think the main barrier is still the complexity of running your own service - it's a full time job to keep on top of the bad actors.

For example, if you have your own domain it's perfectly possible to run your own email server - however it's quite a lot of ongoing effort - it's not just set up and forget.

[npodbielski]

> however it's quite a lot of ongoing effort - it's not just set up and forget.

I have seen those kinds of opinions on internet already few times. No it is not that complicated. Yes you need to buy server. Yes you need to setup the DNS. Yes you need to maintain, and update server and its software. But this is like that with everything you selfhost.

Beside that you need mostly 1 time operations like: - setup domain entries - setup SPF - setup DKIM - setup certs - install server (of course) - test if this works - setup some Google Postmaster account because they do not like new domains sending them emails

I do not remember anything else beside some administrative tweaks here and there. But!

I never attempted to run postfix, dovecot combo myself. I was aiming to run whole thing on Docker and forget about configuring dozens of config files on Linux host. With docker you can just migrate whole set of volumes to new machine and that is it. I am running Mailcow BTW.

Lately I moved whole thing to new machine by just running one script https://docs.mailcow.email/backup_restore/b_n_r-coldstandby/...

On the other hand you need to have some technical knowledge, but I do not think this is harder then any other containerized software.

[dollylambda]

> We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors

In some countries that may be possible (if only for now). Where chips are produced makes that an impossibility for most. That is, you can have certain guarantees if you run the chip fab, although if you are downstream of that, it can be a tall order to guarantee your chips are sovereign. So, while I like the sentiment that you have some sort of control behind your router, I'm really unsure how true that is given the complexity of producing modern day chips. Disclaimer, not an expert, just an opinion.

[bobthepanda]

I would even say unless you truly have full custody of the transportation of components as well, that is unlikely. Israel’s pager bombs in Lebanon were supplied via a third party, not the manufacturer.

[phendrenad2]

This is just the "No True Scotsman" fallacy (with a dash of "appeal to tradition" fallacy). Yes, the internet has never been perfect, but it was really good for most users a long time and has only lost freedom for the majority of users recently with the rise of coordinated multi-state online censorship. Yes, there have been problems in the past, but if you can't compare now to then and see that things have radically shifted, I don't know what else to say to convince you.

[fuzzfactor]

>there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.

I'd settle for a maximally private totally uncensored IPV4 like there used to be. Broadband turned out to be over-rated in some ways.

One of the good things about dial-up was the way it was built on a peer-to-peer network that "everybody" already had, their land-line telephone service.

Way before actual "networking", anybody with a modem could connect privately with anybody else who had one.

An ISP could be formed by taking incoming calls from all active digital users simultaneously, and that was where the networking was done, plus connection to other networks around the world.

You could still contact any one computer user privately if you wanted to, without going through an ISP, just like it was before the web.

Also connect one network with another distant one, such as one office building to another, without ISP.

If anybody wanted to form their own working ISP, they could do it privately anytime as an interested group and not even tell anybody about it if they didn't want to. It might not be a commercial ISP but there was no mainstream to begin with where it was assumed that an ISP must be commercial or make any money at all.

These connections were intended to be "totally" private by law, it was well-established that a court order was required to do a wiretap, and the penalty for violation was based on the concept that spying on Americans was one of the worst crimes, and needed to deter those who acted to compromise the privacy & freedom that America cherished so deeply. And preserve citizen rights the country was chartered to uphold, no differently than before the telephone was invented.

There's nothing like this any more, land-line copper is in miserable disuse so the only remaining wire if any is TV cable. But the only way to do peer-to-peer contact over cable is through an ISP, how private is that and why is there not a court order necessary before privacy can be compromised and very select Americans be subject to espionage?

Cell phones won't help you now, they can be tapped without wires.

The options are far fewer than the possibilities offered when dial-up first got popular.

[bsder]

> The democratization ends at your router.

Mostly because we have allowed the ISPs to collapse into monopolies.

People have forgotten that the US used to have competition in broadband back at the point where the Internet was rolling out to everybody.

[nine_k]

> there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back.

What do you mean "back"? It was never free, as in zero-cost. It was also not very unlimited; I remember times when I had to pay not only for the modem time online, but also for the kilobytes transferred. Uncensored, yes, because basically nobody cared, and the number of users was relatively minuscule.

The utopia was never in the past, and it remains in the future. I still think that staying irrelevant for large crowds and big money is key.

[beanjuiceII]

he literally said "we never had it in the first place"

[adrianwaj]

"If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised."

Is that like owning a car and having some third-party (who?) remotely cut the brake cable because the manufacturer fitted that "feature" in stealth? Or maybe they did something more benign (ie disable car speakers) just as a reminder as to "who is the boss?"

[xg15]

> The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.

Not really having a plan here, so if nothing else this is out of curiosity, but I'd like to know who is actually owning that stuff.

For something that seems so ubiquitous and familiar like the internet, it would probably be good to understand who owns most of its infrastructure.

[okanat]

The most is owned by Big Telcos, previous national monopolies. Deutsche Telekom from Germany, NTT from Japan, AT&T and Level3 and Lucent from US, Vodafone from UK, some private lines for Big Tech. There are lots of privately owned companies for connecting all sorts of big and small companies' infrastructure (cables and routers) together in Internet Exchange Points all over the world. Some of them are again owned by big telcos, some of them are private independent companies, some of them are government owned, or any combination of the options.

[WD-42]

There is a transpacific cable landing in my town. Large unmarked building, seems lightly staffed judging by the parking lot.

It’s Verizon.

[DeathArrow]

>The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP.

We can have other protocols on top of TCP/IP and build a new Internet over the existing one, much like TOR/I2P/Hyphanet/Lokinet but without many of the disadvantages of those.

[EQmWgw87pw]

Instead of thinking about cables, have we considered the idea of satellites getting cheap enough to launch?

[dijit]

there is already so much “space stuff” that launching spacecraft is increasingly difficult.

The next comment will be “but they can have short orbits” but that betrays the fact that they can collide with other objects and if its so cheap we will launch thousands for bandwidth.

As always: technical solutions to political problems is a band-aid and makes everything worse, lets beat our politicians to death (metaphorically) instead.

[embedding-shape]

Or use WiFi and decentralized networks, Freifunk, Guifi and NYCMesh already demonstrated it's possible, and you can easily with consumer hardware setup 1km links with directed antennas, so as long as you have line of sight to another already connected node, you too can participate and help build another network that is separate from the internet :)

[avmich]

ISP is to only transfer IP packets. All the rest is up to you. And more: if suddenly many need a lot of upload speed, both marketing and lawmaking forces are in their favor. I think you overestimate this trouble.

[idiotsecant]

>ISP is to only transfer IP packets

This is a fine aspiration but not at all reflected in reality.

[musicale]

> For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds

This seems to be changing somewhat; even cable ISPs are adopting full duplex via DOCSIS 3.1 (now rebranded as 4.0?) and later.

[bodegajed]

Yeah, it's kinda sad reality and I suddenly felt gloomy. Do you have a more optimistic view that you can share?

[embedding-shape]

Let me introduce you to the decentralized alternative to ISPs, connecting and collaborating with the new-ish wireless mesh networks that are still active and maintained. The three biggest AFAIK are Freifunk (Germany), Guifi (Spain) and NYCMesh (NYC/US?).

Basically, you can as a private individual set up a wireless node, talk with your nearest node that you have a visual line of sight to, and get connected to a completely separate network from the internet, where there is a ton of interesting stuff going on, and it's mostly volunteer run.

[m4rtink]

>The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations)

I don't know - the rate of adoption of MeshCore and similar technologies is quite astonishing.

[singpolyma3]

To be fair with fibre to the home rolling out in more and more places upstream speeds are improving.

[amlib]

The upstream bandwidth sure improved but ISPs are still hostile to self-hosting by limiting ports, resetting connections every x days and not providing an ipv4 for a reasonable charge.

[ArchieScrivener]

What about Jack's latest Bitchat? Seems free of ISP control.

[EQmWgw87pw]

It’s vibe coded and doesn’t really work for now

[kokanee]

There's also no hope of creating a web that is resistant to enshittification and power consolidation as long as it can technically support any form of economic transaction.