Comment by udbhavs
12 hours ago
Genuinely asking here: is there a future where we end up with a version of the open web where everything isn’t paywalled or ID gated?
The article mentions the IETF is working on standards to deal with the proposed legislature and frustration of site operators. Almost any solution is going to be at the expense of user convenience and privacy. I see two interesting solutions mentioned here: micropayments, and proof-of-work. It seems unlikely the future of the open web will land on either. Both are inconvenient but at least could be done by anybody, potentially in a privacy preserving way. Using reputation based decentralized identity is another one (eg. proving you’re coming from a web domain or group), that seems more inconvenient for the platform because of false positives that could come through.
Meanwhile, a worse outcome is requiring attested hardware to get access to anything on the web. This already exists from the media companies pushing for controlled access to streaming. Netflix requires an hardware attested device to stream in 4K. Imagine a future where you now need one to read a New York Times article.
I can see some pushback against the alternatives (eg. digital ID), but if privacy preserving proofs are built in from the get go, it’s much better than not being able to see recipes because I have a rooted Android.
Yeah the time for micropayments is arriving. You need to be able to pay a few cents to load a page or call an API or whatever. And the site owner needs to get most of that. And you need to do it somehow without having an account set up on every website you use.
I think it’s far more likely the internet reverts to its 1998 state: hobby sites which don’t expect payment. Will the quality of some sites go down? Sure, but there are so many people on the internet with niche interests that I think we still end up with plenty of content. Reviews, music, discussion, news, etc. If anything this change represents less centralisation. Maybe it’ll be more confusing to know where to find certain discussion or reviews on a particular product, but this is why search engines were invented. We kind of forgot that.
Great, yet another way for corporations to nickle and dime us to death.
There is, this entire thread is peanuts in the grand scheme of things. The real problem is whether it'll be possible to write to the web without some form of ID, and there's some good news there too:
There's also always going to be an anonymous unmoderated "dark web" where everyone and their LLM can shitpost all day long, it's just questionable how many humans are involved in it. It's also broadly irrelevant since the important messages will eventually be reposted by "legitimate" users on their moderated channels for the "normies" to read.
You can get pretty far with messages signed by certificates issued by authorities that check one-another. You can go further with a gossip protocol on how many bytes have been signed by each certificate on each website.
Yes. It's content addressed instead of server addressed. We can serve content to each other from our browser caches. The original server doesn't even have to stay up, just as long as there's sufficient saturation among the clients. The internet also doesn't have to stay up so long as somebody on your local mesh has what you need.
We just gotta rethink the application layer to make it easier to reference by hash instead of by name, and a few other tweaks.
So like peer to peer? What incentive is there to keep seeding?
It would be the default setting. That's it. No one will go out of their way to turn it off when it's very little benefit to them and harmful to other users.
> is there a future
As long as it's legal and feasible for two remote computers to talk to each other, yes.
Sure, but would that be one that contains services and apps ordinary people use everyday, or would they all have jumped ship like Netflix did? That version would still be an open web, just a very different one.
> ...is there a future where we end up with a version of the open web where everything isn’t paywalled or ID gated?
Absolutely! When OpenAI and Anthropic fail to secure enough funding to keep operating, the VCs backing the customers from which most of their money comes from will turn off the money faucets. This will dramatically reduce the amount of money being spent on the attack^Wover-exuberant scraper bots, which will drop that noise down dramatically.
Once folks aren't paying out the ass to serve up data for bots that really never use it, then a lot of the folks who have built or are building walls now will be able to tear them down.
Also, a great alternative to providing a government-issued photo ID and/or live biometrics is for Web Services to be obligated to use a government-provided categorizing scheme to categorize the things that their service provides and does, for major OS providers to be obligated to allow a local system administrator to set categories of things that certain accounts on that system cannot see or do, and then for the major web browser producers, people-who-publish-in-"app stores", and Web Service providers to be obligated to honor those sysadmin-configured restrictions.
This is really good because not only does it not require anyone to provide an ID and/or biometrics to some cut-rate third-party vendor, [0] but it allows -for example- both typical twelve-year-olds as well as dementia-damaged adults to be protected. The current systems pretend that every XXX-year-old is pretty much identical, and that zero people over the age of seventeen will ever need to be protected, which are obviously untrue things.
[0] ...who is 100% going to inevitably lose control of a large fraction of that data...
[dead]