Comment by matheusmoreira
14 hours ago
The internet will be destroyed as countries the world over seek to impose all of their silly and incompatible laws on it. The international network will fracture into multiple national networks with heavy filtering at the borders.
I've been making this prediction for years now. Words can hardly capture the sadness I feel when I see evidence of its slow realization.
I'm happy to have known the true internet. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
I share your feelings - both the sadness about the path we seem to be going down and the wonder about what the Internet used to be.
I do believe, however, that the future does not "exist" in any real sense, but is constructed - every day, little by little, by each and every one of us. What the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day.
Put another way - this is a rhetorical question - can do we do anything about it? Maybe.
I've given up on trying to change the world.
> What will the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day.
That's the problem.
This "us" you're referring to. People. They're the problem. They have no principles. They stand for nothing. They think they do, but the reality is their principles are easily compromised. They are highly susceptible to manipulation by way of emotion. Powerful emotions like terror and rage.
Conjure up some drug trafficking, money laundering, child molesting terrorist boogeyman and they'll compromise immediately. Suddenly freedom is being traded away for security. Suddenly free speech is no longer absolute. Then you see that these weren't principles that entire nations were founded upon, they were more like guidelines, thrown away at the first sign of inconvenience.
The harsh truth is that danger must not only be accepted but embraced in order to have true freedom and independence. The internet that connects us also connects criminals, the cryptography that protects us also protects criminals. There is no way around it. Compromise even a little and it's over.
People are the problem. They endlessly compromise on things. No ideal can ever be reached. It's an existential problem that cannot be solved.
To be an idealist is to be an extremist. Sadly people are not prepared to pay the costs of idealism. The ideal of a decentralized, encrypted and uncensorable communications medium, for example. It requires that they accept the cost that criminals will not only use it but be enabled by it. They won't accept it. Thus we march not towards the ideal but towards its opposite: centralized plain text surveilled and controlled communications.
Attitudes like yours are ones that "they" want us to adopt. Chat Control just got defeated by people power TWICE. Never ever think that you have no power. Why else would they try to control you?
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I don't necessarily disagree with you, broadly.
The good news is that, I think, we don't really need - if fact, we probably don't really want - most people to accept anything, at least the specific context of this thread. It's about whether we can carve out a space - some space - for people like you and me.
> I've given up on trying to change the world.
I don't think you have. Speech matters. Ideas matter. I'm not going to try to quantify such things, but looking at your HN submissions and your comments - including this one - I think you are actively changing the world, for better or worse. If nothing else, you believe in objective truth, I think. We have a surprisingly large number of people who don't.
> Believe in Truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
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> The internet that connects us also connects criminals, the cryptography that protects us also protects criminals.
Agreed. If only we could also agree that not everyone who thinks this is not a good trade is evil/malignant/stupid etc.
idk - it feels like a simple case of priorities. Freedom and privacy are not everyones
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Your path seems to be one towards chaos and anarchy. You are part of the people you are referring to, if I may say so.
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The future is an immediate result of the present, which is an immediate result of the past. The laws of physics dictate this with no wiggle room. It's complicated and functionally impossible to predict with any certainty, but the future is certain. It is as fixed as the past, and the present that arises from it.
You are mistaking a realization of a random process for the random process itself.
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I for one take every consumer survey opportunity to spell out why these things are a bad idea, and routinely contact my elected member of parliament to ask about this - she's sympathetic. The other opportunity to rebel is just to be difficult. Route all your traffic always through an anonymising VPN with defence against traffic analysis. If someone geoip blocks you from making a purchase, reach out to their customer support and gently reeducate them. Spend money on open source things, personally and professionally, and never buy DRM. Advocate for e2ee (I work partly in medicine - this is an easy sell) and highlight how decentralisation and encryption puts power in the hands of practitioners rather than big tech giants. If a large corporation breaks eg gdpr rules, report them to the regulator. Be the change you want to see in the world.
I don't like the way it's going either, but the array of technical solutions from mesh networks like zero tier and tailscale to briar, i2p and freenet right the way through to technologies such as wush, v2ray and x-ray, tor or daita all give me some hope that there will be a technological out for a long while yet. The social issues are best served socially though.
Yes, I believe this too. The internet is heading the way of balkanization - politically divided subnetworks. Archival services are more important than ever, as well as software such as Tor, WireGuard, and v2ray.
We're not doomed. More people are starting to realize the problem, and it's possible to solve if we put in some effort. A free Internet can be achieved, if we can push back against malicious laws for a little longer to buy a little more time. We need to especially defend the right to use VPNs and the ability to run servers at home.
We can create a decentralized VPN service that can't be blocked or sued by improving on SoftEther VPN, which is open-source software that can make VPN connections camouflaged as HTTPS, so it's invisible to DPI firewalls and can't be filtered.[0] It's already sort of decentralized, as it has a server discovery site called VPNGate that lists many volunteer-hosted instances.[1] But we can make this truly robust by doing a few more things. First, make a user-friendly mobile client. Second, figure out a way to broadcast and discover server lists in a decentralized manner, similar to BitTorrent, and build auto-discovery and broadcasting into the client. Third, make each client automatically host a temporary server and broadcast its IP so others may connect to it whenever it's in use. That should be enough to keep the Internet free in most countries because most forms of censorship would become impossible.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN
[1] https://www.vpngate.net/en/
In the long term, we can take things even further and build a decentralized hosting provider, like AWS/Azure but your web services don't run on a physical server that has an IP address and physical location. Instead, the entire network of physical computers around the world together behaves like a single computer: an Internet-sized virtual machine. No node knows what the entire machine is up to, but every node may store things and run programs on it. The amount of compute/storage a node contributes equals the amount of compute/storage it's allowed to use. This would truly make the Internet open and free worldwide and draw out its full potential.
For the short-term goals, there's already concrete progress. The long-term goal needs more theory work but the missing ideas are probably buried in existing literature.
Not the entire internet, these developments are just about the WWW.
Any part of the internet which starts to become popular faces the same fate. It's been known at least since September 1993 [1]. The "true internet", as people (myself included) remember so fondly, can only live on in obscurity. This is the dark forest hypothesis [2] for the internet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
> these developments are just about the WWW.
The article is literally about DNS.
And? It is literally a service for looking up Internet Protocol addresses.
(The whole http://example.com/index.html thing is considered a mere application on the Internet among many, called World Wide Web, and not the Internet itself, but this is also quite pedantic)
Realistically, how could it have worked otherwise?
The internet was just ignored for a long time because it was at first a) too small and then b) too beneficial with the current architecture to try to tame.
However we're in stage c) it's too big and too dangerous for countries so it needs to be placed back in the country box.
Kind of like the history of oil, which was at first a) about individuals (Rockefeller), then about b) companies (Standard Oil), and finally, about c) countries (most big oil companies are either fully state owned or so tied at the hip with the government that they're basically state owned).
It's complicated, but ultimately, utopia doesn't exist. Most people don't really want open borders (and those that do, haven't fully thought things through), and countries in our current configuration, are still a good thing in most places. So yeah, we were always bound to reach some sort of "national internet" stage.
> The internet will be destroyed as countries the world over seek to impose all of their silly and incompatible laws on it.
> I'm happy to have known the true internet. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
I'm old enough to have been around for the whole thing. I used to kind of share this view, but I don't anymore.
I think it's impossible to reconcile this point of view with the obvious observation that huge aspects of life have gotten really dramatically worse thanks to the internet and its related and successor technologies.
It has made people more addicted, more anxious, more divided, or confused. It has created massive concentrations of wealth and power that have a very damaging effect on society, and it is drastically reducing the ability of people to make decisions about how they want to live and how they want their society to be structured.
It's also done a tremendous amount of positive good, too, don't worry. It's obvious to me, like it should be obvious to any rational person, that there are huge benefits too. And of course, to some extent, there's a bit of inevitability to some parts of this.
While certainly there are examples of silly laws in the world, it's worth noting that that's the exception, not the rule. In general, laws are things that society does on purpose with the intent of making the world match its values.
I think countries should in fact be governed by the consent of their own citizens and by the rule of law. I welcome changes that make that more likely.
I also like Archive.today, and I hate paywalls, they're annoying. This may not be the best place to post my counterpoint, but I think it's worth mentioning and it doesn't get repeated enough.
I was around in the 90s, and I'm very familiar with the techno-utopian approach of the first internet generation. It failed.
We don't disagree. I acknowledge its failure. I am merely mourning the loss. We could debate the reasons for it all day, it won't change a thing...
I'm becoming increasingly elitist. Things change profoundly for the worse every time the masses are allowed into our spaces. People have money which attracts corporations which corrupt and destroy everything, thereby eventually attracting governments as well. Whatever techno-utopia there was in the early days, its destruction was inevitable. It would have been so much better had it remained an impenetrable environment for nerds.
The problem with this idea is that it's the elite that caused the problem.
It's the nerds that turned out to be sociopathic predators.
I say this with love - I was one, but maybe this isn't the group that was best suited to decide how society is structured.
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The 90s were a utopian time. I am happy I got to see them, and the early internet. But as a grown-up millennial, I look at my less-connected friends, an I can't help but think id have been better off that way.
But do you think it's something to be dictated to people? I lived more years than anyone in my circle without a smartphone, without any messengers or social networks, and that was solely my own decision, because I was fed up with people glued to their screens. I joined the bandwagon in order to be able to pay my bills, because freelance became unviable, and interaction with coworkers was via Telegram and our github org required 2FA. But doing so was also my own conscious decision.
But you people are trying to use this argument about how dependent the world became on the Internet - which it did of course - to excuse the FORCED withdrawal from the Internet, by the very same entities that pandered its delopment and raked stupid money off it.
Fuck all this nannying the adults about what they should or must do!
P.S. And it's not even that government wants to detox anyone from the Internet dependency or something. They absolutely want people dependent on the Approved Internet, on the government portals, on official news, official messengers, official propaganda - as opposed to one where they can freely communicate, collaborate and think outside of the box of allowed narratives.
Don't despair boys and girls, remember there is always a deeper layer. All this AI slop? Well the powers wont even be suspicious of steganography until there are many terabytes per second of nonsense pictures moving in all directions