I recently noticed that one of the most favorably-viewed essays of mine on medium is the one about How the Internet Turned Bad. It says many things, including
I compare IETFs with government agencies this way:
— IETFs are staffed by part-time or limited-term volunteers, whose compensation comes from their regular employers (universities, corporations, government agencies). Agencies are staffed by full-time permanent employees, using taxpayer dollars.
— IETFs solve the problems that they work on. Agencies perpetuate the problems that they work on.
— A particular group of engineers in an IETF disbands once it has solved its problem. An agency never disbands.
When I hear calls for government regulation of the Internet, to me that sounds like a step backward. The IETF approach to regulation seems much better than the agency approach.
The whole essay is worth a re-read.
Ads are a nightmare. Nightmare for the user, nightmare for network stability. We might be bounded by the problem, the next level of free service may induce an unstable ad barrage.
The most immediate repair is to use the AI to configure ads to fit right into a bloggers post stream, and have the material related to the bloggers themes, and it appears like a blog post with the ‘sponsored content’ tag. That works, Zero Hedge uses that.
The long term repair is micro pricing. Micro pricing gives the AI algorithms a linear weighting scheme, they will understand the reader much better. Micro pricing removes the need for walled garden, our local search engines able to maintain our individual walled garden for a buck a day.
The original web was the rotary press.
That tech allowed trade press interspersed with ads well suited to the theme, and essential for distribution of mechanical parts. X Windows, the windowing system for linux systems was modeled after the rotary press, seriously. So the concept of an integrated ads and blog stream is our natural destiny, we will be buying our individual ‘trade magazines’. The cost will be trivial, the protocol simple because a buck a day is low risk, and accounts settled nightly or weekly. No fancy block chain needed, ad companies will cover the risk of a few bucks.
The problem with both ads or paying on the web is that the tollkeepers are too obnoxious and nosy. Imagine not being able to pay to cross a bridge without handing over your whole life history and declaring your intentions.
If you have to pay – even if you merely want to pay a donation – you almost always have to give up anonymity and a lot of privacy, and expose yourself to third party hacking risks for records that could be eternal. Normal market incentives will encourage ad people to try to make ads as effective as possible, which means they will always try to learn as much as possible about the viewer, which usually involves running all kinds of bordeline-malicious tracking code, or (increasingly) breaking the rendering of a website if you try to stop it.
I run Blokada on my Android and it blocks 100,000 tracking attempt events per month, and I don’t even have any social media apps installed.
I would be willing to pay for an interface service which provides a clean, ad-free, and very private internet experience, where somehow I can access content, ensure content-creators get paid, and not have anybody able to learn anything about me in the process. But how do I pay the intermediary, and how can I trust them?
Maybe the blockchain people can think of a way.
I don’t believe pure micro-pricing will work.
However, a Universal Digital Basic Income of $100 / month, to be tied to a specific person, given by the gov’t but only saved for 1 month on a use it or lose it basis, might allow more micro-payments and ways for users to avoid the ads.
I’m against UBI, because I strongly prefer a Job Guarantee / National Service (voluntary only), and pushing folk to work in order to live. But some universal benefits might well be worth it.
YouTube is a huge infotainment collector — I would certainly push to have YouTube nationalized, at the Library of Congress, to have a US section and a World section, with all the digital videos in the world. Available for a tiny micro payment, to include automatic royalties to the content creators.
The winner-take-all mentality took over.
I think it was network effects leads to a winner-take-all result.
VHS vs Betamax, was better for video to have just one format.
MS – Apple OS – Linux, we do have 3 viable OS families for PCs.
Android – Apple IOS, we have 2 smartphone systems; Some say WinPhone is “not dead yet (doesn’t want to go on the cart).” Wrong – no more updates.
Oligopoly, including illegal collusion to keep top tech worker wages suppressed by not poaching tech stars in Silicon Valley by VC funded billion $ firms, like Apple.
I like blogs better, too — but Facebook is far far better for keeping up with friendly acquaintances and family and sharing photos. Which is more social.
Had AOL offered better MySpace “sites” with free photo & video sharing, it might well have become dominant.
Given the willingness of most lazy folk to give up so much privacy and authority, so as to get convenience, I do think it’s time to regulate more strongly with some Digital Utility Commission.
I’m now more afraid of PC-Klan eLynch mobs than the US gov’t. There’s already far too much Free Speech suppression due to mostly peaceful, voluntary, PC-Klan cooperative action by non-gov’t Dems to punish conservatives.
Conservatives are far safer from the gov’t than they are from Facebook, Google, & the PC-Klan dominated Tech Giants. (Tho there may be a small pushback going on at MS)
Example: my Twitter account is suspended, despite me only retweeting a couple of posts, not having any of my own. https://twitter.com/TomGreySVK
Funny, the Marxist idea of workers owning factories also fails because most workers want the benefits of being an owner of a successful factory, in order to spend more and have an easier life — but most times they don’t want their own wealth tied up in a non-consumptive factory, and would rather sell the future and buy stuff for today.
FB far better for keeping up with family and sharing photos…
“In short, how can we sustain an ethic of individual responsibility while enjoying the benefits of extreme interdependence?”
I’d say it is an either/or tradeoff. Safer to forego the benefits of the major platforms.
The film Brazil anticipated the present day internet. Classic scene presaging the loss of individuality to social media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_00bbE9oxQ