The state of the Internet

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That is a subject of a memorial symposium for John Perry Barlow. So far, I have only read James Boyle’s essay asking whether the Internet is over. In a footnote, he writes,

6 One of the true architects of the internet, Vint Cerf, has a slide deck about blockchain with one slide in it. It takes the form of a flowchart. The flowchart box asks the question “Do I need a blockchain?” The arrow goes to a single answer. “No.”

Here is a provocative remark:

only the state has the power, status and administrative capability to become the Kantian superego of corporations

What I believe Boyle is saying is that a corporation is just a set of contracts, not a human being capable of understanding and following the Golden Rule. Therefore, only a set of legal constraints imposed by the government can induce corporations to act as if they were moral human beings.

Pointer from Alex Tabarrok. Some thoughts of mine.

1. Hal Varian took Barlow’s economic ideas very seriously, even though Barlow was no economist. Back when I was just starting to try to figure out the Internet, Varian recommended to me Barlow’s “economy of ideas” article in Wired, which now ironically resides behind a paywall.

2. In 1993, I heard a talk on the Internet’s governance structure by Vint Cerf (a last-minute substitute speaker!) at an MIT alumni dinner. I was struck by the beauty of it–the way that the IETFs formed, solved problems, an then went away.

3. I wrote a brief essay on the topics related to the symposium which I called How the Internet turned bad. It’s a good essay. A sample:

The masses came to the Internet. Many of the new arrivals were less technically savvy, were more interested in passively consuming entertainment than in contributing creatively, and were less able to handle uncensored content in a mature way. They have been willing to give up autonomy in exchange for convenience.

Also,

catering to the mass market can lead software developers to focus on making the software easy to learn rather than easy to use. This distinction may be useful for understanding how Facebook triumphed over blogging.

12 thoughts on “The state of the Internet”

  1. How did the internet turn bad?

    Because it was not new anymore? Back in 1990s everything on the internet was new and different so even lame ideas worked. When explaining the Dotcom economy to my teenage kids, I stated everybody thought they had a billion dollar idea and it just the economy can reward so many billion dollar ideas. Or think about the marketing of the Blair Witch Project and how went viral on the internet and if it is real. (That would not happen today.)

    In terms of average people and discourse, in 1995 my first exposure to the internet at my parents house was a website of people reacting to Melrose Place. And most of the comments were about everybody ideas on how to brutally kill the hated new character Brooke Armstrong (Kristen Davis)

    • I finished reading this manifesto, which is no small feat considering it is 9000 words long. The article ends with this thought:

      The future forms and protections of intellectual property are densely obscured at this entrance to the Virtual Age. Nevertheless, I can make (or reiterate) a few flat statements that I earnestly believe won’t look too silly in 50 years.

      I’m not sure if the amount of silliness will start to accumulate closer to the 50 year mark but its looking quite prescient after 25 years. Some of the most important insights, such as the following quote, have not yet played out:

      While I believe that the failure of law will almost certainly result in a compensating re-emergence of ethics as the ordering template of society, this is a belief I don’t have room to support here.

      I’ve mentioned Bill Gates’ “Open Letter to Hobbyists” as a key milestone in digital products since it clearly outlines the ethics surrounding making low-cost digital copies without the creators consent. This is the “ethics” aspect that John Perry Barlow speaks of and Gate’s letter represents the start of a conversation that shaped the “Social Contract” (as Barlow calls it) that evolved.
      I haven’t read the other symposium articles/links (in pdf format, another irony) yet but given the March 1994 publishing date, the sentiment expressed seems as relevant to the dawn of the Internet Age as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was to the dawn of the Industrial Age.

  3. The internet is a global unsecured network. The ecosystems that grew around it are mostly indefensible. When that defense inevitably evolves to sufficiently protect the end-users, many sites will not survive the burdens that imposes.

    • I disagree. The system is evolving but adding a TLS Certificate and using a CDN like Cloudflare with DoS Protection (Denial of Service) is easy and free for all but the largest and most complex sites.

      NOTE TO KLING: your site is not safe because it does not require https. Adding a TLS Certificate is now free using “Let’s Encrypt”, a consortium of large Internet corporations that acted on the rent seeking of existing certificate authorities. A quick search show the steps required to add a certificate to a WordPress site.

      • You misunderstand me. Security at the corporate server level will be less revolutionary because it is a focused set of resources to protect. It’s the end-users that are vulnerable.

        It will never be possible to expect billions of users to defend their systems directly, and the costs of predation will continue to increase until it is unbearable. Eventually, users will have to go behind defensive structures en mass and stop giving up their privacy for free stuff. A lot of the current business models will fall apart.

        • I understood. Kling adding a TLS certificate and enforcing https doesn’t protect his server, it protects us from man-in-the-middle attacks and all kinds of nastiness associated with them. As far as web sites/apps go, https everywhere and all the time solves a vast amount of security problems. The main obstacle was the excessive cost and complexity involved with TLS certificates and Let’s Encrypt has mostly eliminated those monetary/mental costs and the stated goal of this effort was to make the Internet safe.

          Once you have https everywhere, DoS attacks are the last refuge of malicious players with asymmetrical skills/knowlege and vendors like Cloudflare have effectively tackled this problem for the greater good; even to the point of fretting over their decision not to extend their DoS Protection to 8Chan.

          Most of the security breaches we hear about are comedies rather than tragedies. Your characterization of the Internet as a global unsecured network is out of date, in my opinion.

          • Encryption solving man-in-the-middle attacks only deals with one class of vulnerability, so even if it’s free and easy to do, it does just so much.

            The risk profile is expanding rapidly and the cost of exploitation is falling. More defense is inevitable. That will mean using the internet through intermediaries.

  4. The search engines connect us up by our identifiable dialects. Only the bot can read the master code book. Like block chain, on needs a an extractor bot to recover anything resembling a balance sheet. Our personal semantics end up being a tiny part and we will need special tools to really understand the whole. We are trapped.

  6. “only the state has the power, status and administrative capability to become the Kantian superego of corporations”

    and quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

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