This analysis is flawed in that it equates size of traffic with individual user actions. Of course YouTube or another video heavy site like FB is going to dominate when only size is considered.
A better metric would be a measurement of user initiated actions. Now sure how to pull that off, but it would be a more accurate measure of how the net is changing.
There are a lot of other video content websites that aren't YouTube and are struggling to compete with the large players like YouTube and Netflix that can put a box in every ISP in the world.
Seeing this got more attention than I assumed - at Peer5 (YC W2017) we attack this by doing distributed video delivery.
It's very challenging to figure out how to do this in a way that benefits users and improves user experience - we are very careful about being fair to users on mobile connections - but I think that a distributed web platform is the future and the only way we can combat the (lack of) net neutrality.
Agreed, I wonder how many youtube videos are embedded as well.
Bandwidth is expensive and many let youtube host the video for free instead of paying to host it themselves which is why it is no surprise that Youtube tops the list.
This is easily solved by switching to peer to peer protocols, which would work like a charm if our providers did the sensible thing and gave us a symmetric bandwidth to begin with.
I was talking about using Bittorent to distribute videos.
I was also talking about the ADSL tragedy. We should have had SDSL from the beginning. (And yes, the corresponding decrease in raw download rate would have been worth it).
How do you think pervative NATs were enabled in the first place?
First came dial-up modems. Can't have a server with those without monopolising the phone. Then came the DSL. Providers noticed that nobody has a server, and deduced in their immense commercial wisdom that they didn't want a server. So they made the DSL Asymmetric. Now people could have a server, but the upload was so terrible it wasn't worth it. Conclusion: the ISPs were right: nobody wants a server.
There was this P2P fluke, but the copyright lobby kindly explained this was only used for illegal stuff. Everything's mostly back in order now.
Anyway, now we've established nobody needs nor wants a server, we can put NATs everywhere and nobody will notice.
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DSL was the first avoidable mishap in a long string of centralisation trends.
Phones don't have a puplic IP to begin with. That's not even an internet connection. (Not just my opinion, it's also the legal interpretation in France, and I suspect most of Europe: if you're hidden behind a big NAT, that's not an interet connection. Which is why our ads no longer talk about "unlimited internet", but about "data plans".)
If your only connection is through your phone, I have to feel a bit sorry for you.
That's increasingly the case, though. Even on HN I've often seen people saying they only use 4G connections. I had some hope that IPv6 would bring sanity to mobile connections, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
Radio has some unique properties that make symmetric connections tricky. Most people aren't hosting content locally and with good reason. Goodbye 1990s dreams of everyone has a server.
Why would that be sensible, from their perspective? Seems to me that P2P is an ISP's nightmare, even if only from the logistical perspective of routing.
Well implemented P2P can reduce pressure on their external pipes by keeping some traffic local. Back before we had "unlimited" caps, my ISP had three levels of caps - International (1GB), National (20GB) and in-ISP (Unlimited) - and some national developers actually made a fork of Emule that could filter and prioritize peers to prefer the closest ones.
Peer-to-peer has benefits... and cons. It's not a magical cure-all.
How would _you_ implement a secure P2P where you (and only you) can rapidly change content (dynamic web pages) and control who has access to authorized pages?
What about credit card info? Passwords?
I imagine there "are" implementations that solve many of those issues. But it's sure-as-heck not common knowledge if there are "easy" answers to all those problems.
I can't help but feel "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson screaming at me. How do you ensure every bit of the web stack isn't hacked on every computer in the network, as opposed to your own?
In fact, when dealing with P2P, you're more likely than not, to be full of compromised programs. Many unintentional, but many others intentionally. Torrent users who run clients that don't upload. Every P2P game ever made being hacked. (See the entire purpose behind QuakeWorld moving to a client-server model over P2P, over the original quake.) And every Kazaa uploader had viruses on his PC back-in-the-day.
I'm not saying P2P is impossible. But first, you've got to define what application you want to implement (webpage, vs public video hosting) because the solutions are completely different. And even then, you're still walking into dangerous territory when you can't control the machines your relying on.
What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give? You can't simply "install more servers" or "buy more bandwidth" when your "server" is every user connected to your site.
And what happens when you roll out new versions, and some users don't upgrade?
The list goes on. And I say all of this as someone who has considered using distributed computing model for game hosting, where machines assist in computations and bandwidth. It's possible to do, but it opens up entire dimensions of additional problems to solve.
Many of the problems you talk about are off topic.
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The trust problem still applies to HTTP. We still download viruses on the web, and we still lose our credit card numbers to con artists. The only reason there's more malware on current P2P network is because those networks are disproportionately used to infringe copyright. The risk doesn't come from the distributed nature of the network, but from the lack of legality of the content.
Securing peer to peer communications to current web levels is trivially easy: just sign the damn data, and have a certificate authority ascertain the identity of the signer. For static content such as YouTube videos, you can also use a content addressable system.
While that would require some level of centralisation, it woulndn't exceed that of DNS, and would definitely solve the bandwidth issue.
> What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give?
I won't happen, because we enjoy symmetric bandwidth, thanks to our regulators being sensible, competent people. (At least that's the case in my rainbows & unicorns world). Seriously, though, symmetric bandwidth is the ultimate and only solution to many problems: it ensures total upload keeps up with total download, so we get the equilibrium we want.
It's the video itself that throws off the statistics. In that is it hundreds of times more bandwidth intensive that text traffic is. Of course others can host the video, but how many people actually DO that? Its easier and cheaper just to upload it to YouTube and put a link on your site.
a measurement of user initiated actions
how to pull that off
Sounds like a horrible idea to enable such behavior. It’s a quick window into bandwidth throttling, for any number of reasons.
Traffic is traffic, and it’s no one’s business whether I’m watching a video, clicking a button, issuing shell commands, or typing a reply to a message.
No thank you, to the idea of changing protocols, or forcing people onto the application layer, in furtherance of analyzing our already-over-analyzed activities with an electron microscope.
Andre, you're a swell developer and running into you in open source repos and here has always been educational. I would love reading what you write a lot more if there was less click-bait and sensationalism.
This problem (the fact Google has a large majority in web browser and mobile device sales) is very concerning to me - the data is interesting and the points are relevant but I have a very hard time reading past titles like "the web is dying". I hope you read this with the intended respectful tone I wrote it in.
Click bait titles have a bad reputation because they either lie or don't go in-depth into the topic. That's not the case here. I wrote with depth and research, and the body of the article is truthful to the title. I believe the title is, although sensationally shocking, true.
> the body of the article is truthful to the title
With all due respect, I don't see how the article backs up this utterly exaggerated claim.
Unless, of course, you're using the word "dying" in the sense that everybody and everything will die at some time. But I don't think this is meant here, as that wouldn't be "shocking" at all.
huh? He's describing a future where the web no longer exists. Only Google, facebook and amazon's network exists. This seems pretty representative of the term dying.
It's _not_ click bait if it describes exactly what the thesis of the article is.
It's a simple explicative sentence.
Maybe you folks have just been conditioned enough by click-bait now that you can't distinguish the difference, and I don't mean to denigrate you by stating that.
I agree with what you're saying, but you can't know if the title is sensationalist until you actually read the article. Which is the point of click-bait titles.
Your argument is that the web is now mainly controlled by two companies, not “dead”.
The technology is still there but the diverse hosting options and the creativity that many of us associated with it (what could be called “the spirit of the original web”) could be in peril.
I don’t think that you are arguing that Google and Facebook are fighting HTTP/HTML - although they are offering alternatives that they present as technologically preferable.
Not remotely true, the web isn't dying, it's changing, but that's less clickbaity :) For such a hard claim you have to specify what do you exactly mean by "the web".
"The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party."
This web is still alive and well, nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish. Tim was a bit naive that he assumed profit seeking won't mess with his creation.
The underlying protocol is still the same as it was 20 years ago. With 3,885,567,619 internet users this dying platform is the best thing in computing we had so far. Of course it's changing, but the web is much larger than GOOG, FB, AMZN.
Yo are ignoring the long tail and that tail is very long.
And, yet, network effects being what they are, how does anyone with an independent thought rise to visibility, outside of someone else's platform, when the "web" completely dominated by 100 web properties?
I don't know, make it be the individuals problem to spread their individual and original thought. That might sound harsh so I clarify a bit.
If I have a big, world changing individual thought and I create something good, then it will probably be picked up by the endless blogs, magazines, journals. I can place it on GitHub or buy a $10 server and I'm good to go, in that case I manage almost everything about it. It's not the web's jobs to filter out the gems.
If my individual thought is not much better than "Mondays suck" then Twitter is probably a good place for it to be forgotten.
That's a different question and has nothing to do with the web dying, which it isn't. The freedom to put your voice out there has never included the right to be heard or popular. You have more ability today to be heard than ever before, but you're one of billions, it's not supposed to be easy.
> nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish.
plenty does!
if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.
you could try sharing it with friends on facebook and hope for a social network effect, but just ask the journalism industry how organic reach is working out as of late
selling something online? your only hope is FBA. where the A stands for Amazon. I guess etsy might work too. so, okay...duopoloy!
and even if you don't care to be found, and aren't selling anything, it is TRIVIAL to take down any kind of not-expensive hosting (your raspi @ home, your DigitalOcean VPS, or colocated server) with a DDoS attack.
AWS, GCP, & Azure can weather most attacks, but it will cost you. And if it's large enough they'll shut you off anyway. and then send you a bill you can't pay.
so no, there is plenty stopping you from launching anything on the internet. the cost structures (be it time or money or both) greatly favor the massively entrenched incumbents. and not a little bit of favor. they favor them....bigly.
You're confusing "making money" with launching/publishing. I can publish anything I want to the web in under a minute. Who's stopping me? Getting people to read what you've published has been difficult since the early days of the web, but publishing is trivial.
"This web is still alive and well, nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish"
True, you'll be able to do that, but if most of people will have "free internet package" that will allow them to access GOOG, FB, AMZN only, having the domain will not make much sense.
Exactly.
This reminds me of the 1990's AOL's walled garden model that ultimately lost to the open Web.
I wonder though, if we really descent into a multi-tier internet and if a version of a "legacy" internet survives in some form (even though not accessible by main stream FB/GOOG users), if that legacy part of the internet will become cleaner and once gain open to grass roots innovation?
Today most people have a paid access to the internet. How many people do you think will downgrade to free and get rid of 99% of the available websites? For newcomers it can be problematic, but I don't see it happening on a mass scale.
Why do you have a hard time reading that? It's generally better to solve problems before they happen. An dead Web isn't coming back, and we are trending very much in that direction.
I have to disagree with this sentiment. He's describing a future in which the web no longer exists and only google, facebook and amazon's network exists. This is a very literal interpretation of the term "web is dying", the web will no longer exist. If he's providing evidence that this is the case then the title is descriptive. That aside, we don't even really need additional evidence that this is the case, these companies have made it clear their intention to pull the ladder up behind themselves time and again, just look at Google's reversal of being opposed to net neutrality in general, this can only result in the consolidation of power in their hands. At most you can accuse this title of being apocalyptic.
I.e. If people generally knew that Bono was dying already through other sources, a headline of "Bono is dying" would be shocking by the nature of what it is, but ultimately not clickbait.
> This is a very literal interpretation of the term "web is dying"
Does smtp 'exist' now that most of it is over google, yahoo, and microsoft? Or linux considering RedHat/Cent/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian are responsible for most installs.
I think its rational to accept that big players will, naturally, take big slices and that doesn't mean you're kinda sorta making a 'x is dying' argument. If anything, the natural distribution of the network effect probably falls onto a ~80/20 relationship where the bigger players take 80% of the market and many smaller players take the remaining 20%.
The web will be no exception to this. It just took a little while to get here. Its already happened to ISPs, remember early on when every city had multiple competing DSL resellers? PC operating systems (is anyone even pretending that Windows and MacOS as a distant second will ever have real competitors anymore?), PC GPUs (two real players now), 3D game engines (2 non-in house engines dominate), does Linkedin even have competition now?, etc, etc.
Worse, the network effect for Facebook is tremendous. Its power isn't that its a great service, its mediocre at best, but its a such a pita to get everyone you know to switch over that it'll probably never happen.
Back in the old days, bloggers had to get their own domain names, find their own hosting, write their own html/css/whatever, manage their own CMS (and install it on a linux system hosted somewhere and via the commandline/ftp/whatever), etc. This meant a lot of the early web was techie-oriented types who could perform these tasks (endless sites and discussions on who is the best Star Trek captain or which was the worst Star Wars movie, not many on fighting childhood malnutrition in the 3rd world). I'm not sure how this was 'better' than what we have today.
Democratization will often lead to a network effect which will lead to consolidation. Philosophically, to some, a perfectly distributed system is 'better' but to pull that off you'd probably need communist-level social and economic controls and if you had that you most likely would never had the internet or the web.
Just the fact that we use aggregators like HN or Reddit means that we accept a whole lot of consolidation without question and often see it as better than the old system of managing a dozen different topics spread on on various specialist sites and usenet. Or are we giving special exceptions to techie approved sites like Reddit (the 4th most popular site in the USA), which is missing from the article?
The web thrives on competition, but the author is suggesting that the major tech companies just stopped directly competing with each other and focused on their little bubbles. That shift, as posited by the author, happened around 2014 based on certain strategic decisions by FB and Google. And as a result, the competitive forces tapered off
This is one of the caveats of debating in the HN echo-chamber... People start making bizarre analogies using 'parallels' from tech (in this case, SMTP), for the sake of it, hoping that the blatant inaccuracies of their comparison will fly over the heads of the audience, in favour of their esoteric appeal.
Take some figures plucked from thin-air and you have a recipe for retort success!
Thankfully, it's only a caveat that happens 20/80 of the time, sort of like how TCP does such a good job of filtering out the riff-raff. /s
"People start making bizarre analogies using 'parallels' from tech (in this case, SMTP), for the sake of it, hoping that the blatant inaccuracies of their comparison will fly over the heads of the audience, in favour of their esoteric appeal."
I thought the analogy to SMTP was a very good one and, considering the audience, was not esoteric at all.
My mail usage is far more agnostic to its protocol than my web usage is. Google may hold far too much data to generate a profile of me and relevant ads, but using GMail doesn't fundamentally affect the content of my email or inbox, or even how I use email. But if I switch tabs to YouTube (i.e. The Web), targeted content and traffic funnelling is immediately apparent.
You proved my point about esoteric appeal because my argument was opposite to how you viewed it: that us techies get blinded by irrelevant concepts because we can relate to them, that are otherwise esoteric outside the HN bubble.
This is not the first time consolidation of power has happened. Intel and Microsoft pulled all kinds of stunts to hold on to their monopolies. Are you worried about your chip and OS today?
I don't see Google(Search/Chrome/Android) and Amazon in the same sphere as Facebook/YouTube/Twitter in doing damage to the web.
I am much more worried about the societal chaos that Facebook/YouTube/Twitter are producing across the globe than any net neutrality issues.
There was a good reason to be worried about Intel and Microsoft back in the day, and it's good we didn't let them get to full monopolies. Remember the Microsoft anti-trust trial?
The anti-trust trail didn’t result in much in the end. The market forces that clipped Microsoft’s wings were a magnitude larger, and would have been the same regardless. The DOJ was nothing compared to Ballmer laughing the iPhone off, or Linux dominating embedded devices and internet servers despite all the FUD.
I don't think the picture is quite that clear. There's a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that Microsoft was genuinely gunshy about wielding its monopoly power thanks to the trial.
Yes, Google and Apple found ways to break that monopoly, but a chastened Microsoft wasn't prepared to wage the type of scorched earth campaigns that it became famous for.
As a matter of fact, I am. And we have palpable consequences today, with that trusted computing débâcle (backdoors on CPUs that threaten to turn into full blown vulnerabilities…)
As a GNU/Linux user, I'm not too worried about my own OS. But I am scared that Apple managed to locked down its systems in a way that would have Microsoft sharded into oblivion. Numeric prisons are now not only acceptable but downright fashionable.
YES! with my cpu running 2 kernel rings deep that the OS is not aware of. What is even worse if you try to disable it and the cpu kernel detects it will disable the hardware. Makes me truly worried where person computing is headed, aka I'm not in control of my device I paid for!
Agree - Staltz seems to assume that nobody will disrupt GOOG-FB-AMZN. It does feel like it's getting harder to disrupt over time, because the incumbents are ever more powerful. But technology's lever also becomes more powerful over time.
Companies' have achilles heels. They are built into the way they think in the era when it was started, when it was agile and fit in the mind of one person, before it got big and cumbersome, impossible to steer, profit-magnetized and impossible to even think longer term than a quarter. This business cycle is inherent to our laws and culture, it happens to all companies eventually.
Startups 20 years from now will be built by today's toddlers who pinch-zoom magazines and "Alexa, play Spice Girls" an empty room. The incumbent generation can't imagine what the next generation will bring, almost definitionally. But they will have disruptive ideas too. They will probably look stupid to us old people and we won't see it coming until it's too late.
Open-data-web is a good today-generation example. There are chickens and eggs to be solved, maybe the economics are impossible. Or maybe just nobody figured out the path yet. There were a hundred crypto currencies before bitcoin that went nowhere. But if someone figures out a strategic path that gets there, we know that person won't be Facebook, because open data will wreck Facebook's core business.
The key concern here is the collusion from ISPs. If they were to truly sell prioritized traffic to GOOG-FB-AMZN at a hefty discount, then it stands to reason most businesses will stop wasting their time trying to build things that don't leverage those avenues. Even as it stands today, how many "SEO gurus" are optimizing for Bing? If you want to be seen, you optimize for Google. So while I agree that all companies have an Achilles heel, this one is fairly sturdy for the foreseeable future.
Good point. I generally share the same view. On one hand, there were so many corporate consolidations in the past few years. On the other hand, people's discontent probably also led to the rise of Blockchain tech.
Respectfully disagree. The end of the post is absolutely true and supports the title:
> On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account. As private businesses, GOOG, FB, and AMZN don’t need to guarantee you access to their networks. You do not have a legal right to an account in their servers, and as societies we aren’t demanding for these rights as vehemently as we could, to counter the strategies that tech giants are putting forward.
This specific part (that dominant companies can ban individuals with no recourse) shouldn't be tolerated.
I'm sorry, but I can't get behind the idea that you're entitled to an account on a private company's site. Are they obligated to protect accounts for shitposters, to the detriment of everyone else's experience?
Nobody is stopping you from starting your own blog and posting your views there. But, just like no one is obligated to seek out a flyer you post on a telephone pole, no one is obligated to seek out your writings.
When a thread becomes as much about a title as this one has, it's in HN's interest to have a different title on the front page, so we've changed this one.
Suggestions for a better replacement are welcome. 'Better' in this case means accurate, neutral, and using representative language from the article itself.
I'd rather the original title of the article if it's not too long or is deceiving the HNers. The original title is kind-of clickbaity but not really deceitful at all, so I suggest we keep the original title here.
I'd wager that FB is at its summit now and it'll become more obvious as more young people who ignore it now continue to do so growing up and the people who use it continue to die.
Facebook is not the blue website. It's also Instagram, WhatsApp and whatever they buy next. And those are not being ignored by young demographics. At all.
It's effectively a kind of hedge fund that dabbles in internet and social-specific assets. The more they diversify their portfolio and occasionally branch out, the harder they will be to fully kill. This is the pattern with a lot of companies. They just become portfolio asset managers with a specific area of interest.
but we don't need to kill them to be successful. It's all about offering alternatives and making the switch to alternatives easier. This keeps platforms competing with each other, which keeps them in check.
Fair point, and I accept it. But, it's important to add that our task is much harder because they get added "synergies" they get from the "connectedness" of their portfolio.
However, Instagram is not really monetizable - I can't see them making real money with it without making it shitty in the process. And WhatsApp is encrypted with Signal and others waiting in the wings, good luck with that. What else do they have? tbh? VR?
Not yet; they're still expanding in developing countries, going as far as building their own internet (same what Google does) so that they can control it. They've already been slapped on the wrist for breaking net neutrality rules there (free access to FB, pay for the rest). And they're doing it under the guise of providing access to everyone, not the real reason, getting everyone hooked on their products and their slice of the internet (not unlike how we were taught how to work with Windows and Office in school and never even heard of the alternatives until later).
It's especially interesting when you consider that Google has now, for the first time, a fully globe-spanning own network that can interface with any ISP directly, without relying on any intermediate ISP.
Google now has at least one product in the entire stack of the internet.
You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server.
At this point you can use most of the functionality of the internet without ever leaving the Google ecosystem.
But also Google is so terrible at making successful physical products in a lot of these spaces, its hard to say the products give them a lot of power in the market. Google Pixel, Google Home, Google TV, do not represent large install bases. If they want a walled garden, it can't be the size of a postage stamp.
Not just physical devices. A lot of the Google stuff I have to use seems half-baked, unfinished or with crappy UI/UX. And Google Cloud is complete shit compared to AWS. I guess that's what happens when engineers lead a company. They'll never have the customer focus that has made Amazon dominant.
Well for a start you have to stop a GCE instance to add a new scope to it. So if your devs want to use a new API and you're running a massive production K8s cluster, you somehow have to stop your instances to add the new scope and otherwise mess around. Of course if you know this in advance you can plan to do blue-green deployments with K8s, but if you don't know that you won't architect for it and it'll bite you.
Their authentication in general seems convoluted and complicated, their console is slow and useless (why aren't all the search results preloaded? I type in 'iam' and it takes several seconds for the results to appear). Oh, and also alpha K8s clusters will terminate after 30 days whether you like it or not (perhaps you're using a feature that's apparently stable but languishing in alpha - I'm looking at you, cronjob). There's a lack of services in general (an elasticache type service would be nice) and development seems to move glacially.
Also, they seem to have multiple versions of SDKs, some with outstanding bugs that were reported years ago but are just closed or there are comments in the README that only critical bugs will be addressed. There's no indication which SDK to use where there are several versions. Oh, and if you only want to use one service in python, you have to install about 40 different packages because splitting them up is too difficult.
We've had DFP buckets have their configs get screwed up so we mysteriously couldn't access them, logs stopped being delivered, etc. Apparently Google have such poor monitoring that we had to prompt them about these things which took too longer to get resolved. I could go on...
Holy smokes I feel you on the cronjob thing. They just went to beta with it in k8s 1.8, so now I'm waiting for that to get stable on GKE. That plus a managed Redis/memcached would be all that I need right now.
An easy workaround for the scope issue is to set a custom service account when creating the instance (template). You can then modify the IAM roles for that service account without having to take the instance offline. Allow that service account to have full access to all APIs on the instance level, then fine-tune what's actually possible through IAM Roles.
> You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server.
...viewing content authorized by Google DRM.
> "After taking a look backstage, we can confirm that after recent updates Safari is no longer a supported browser for Web Player"
> Riegelstamm further dug into the details of the Web Player, discovering that the discontinuing of Safari support might have something to do with Google's Widevine media optimizer plugin, which Spotify requires for music streaming on the web and Apple opposes due to potential security issues.
Echoing that i felt there was a change in the way they handled Android the day they announce that the Android Marketplace (later rebranded the Google Play Store) would be offering movies (musics joined them a few months later).
Soon after the storage handling in Android got that much more convoluted, making it much harder to get data out of an Android devices without there being some kind of Google daemon sitting between user and storage.
Yeah I remember how much worse it was going from Android 2 to 4 as far as accessing storage was but 4 to 7 seems even worse. I've found KDE connect to be the best option for me so far for accessing android storage. Though as far as I know you need to have a KDE desktop environment to use it.
My impression is that their purpose isn't to take the market, but to provide an example that others can emulate. If a Nexus is so much better than a Samsung, then Samsung will improve until that is no longer the case, to everyone's benefit. Likewise with Fi and Fiber.
These are minority services and destined to remain so. Google's core competency will probably never by customer service.
I do miss when there was more web on the Web. I've been wondering if the problem is that I don't search as much as I used to, or if there just isn't as many fun sites to visit these days. There actually used to be hangouts on the web outside of chat and social media, like bizarre, bangedup, or the old 4chan. It used to be a blast just to read through 4chanarchive, to see how many times Pawn Stars got called during the last BattleToads thread. I used to see anons in front of the Scientology building in Cincy on a regular basis. I think that's why I enjoyed HWNDU so much.
You say "more web the Web", but your main example is that your bubble was 4chan; this article implies the exact same thing, but with the bubbles being Google, Facebook and Amazon.
I think his point is more that Web used to be plenty of smaller bubbles, with distinct culture and separate communities. Now we have only giant bubbles, which get homogenised, as everything of that scale is. I share the sentiment.
Yeah, you definitely articulated it better than I could have. But I mentioned other sites besides just 4chan. Even IRC had networks full of active rooms, with people from around the world. I just know there used to be more things that I considered fun, and now I'm hard pressed to find such things. I'm not going into Freenet or Tor just to find something that doesn't violate YouTube or Facebook rules.
I know there's a freenet on IRC, but it seems to be people mostly talking about programming. Which is handy sometimes. But the freenet I was actually referencing was this project https://freenetproject.org
We've asked you before not to post unsubstantive comments. Here you've crossed into incivility as well. If you keep doing this we're going to ban you, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and clean up your act?
All: Other comments being bad doesn't mean it's ok to make the site even worse. The guidelines cover this issue too, so please read and follow them!
I can’t (and I won’t try to) tell how hair-raising was your experience of 4-chan, but Facebook has groups with… interesting content. Nothing that would get Facebook itself in legal trouble (actual CP & terrorism) but those still exist, if more discreet.
If you object to having your name associated to it, reddit also has fun places.
I definitely reddit, and try to cultivate subreddits I find interesting. But just commenting and looking at funny pictures is only fun for so long. I know that old 4chan carries some other connotations, but I don't think people realize how much other stuff was happening there. It was more about things happening in real life, but just written down for posterity.
It's hard when the search engines you use are actively guiding you to things that are similar to what you searched for before. Try google from a library computer some time and you'll see the bubble that's been created for you.
I'd like submissions with clickbait headlines to get deleted instantly.
If your post needs clickbaity embellishments it's probably not worth my time to read it, if it doesn't need any, the post should be able to reach frontpage without them.
Should note: much of the web is now 'mobile' and on mobile people use apps considerably more often.
So - while possibly not 'the web' as in 'browser' - it's arguably 'the web' nevertheless because almost all these apps depend on a great deal of http-ish interactivity etc...
Also - though it's hard to say how much change there has been on the desktop - remember that people do use desktop apps for socially and webby oriented reasons etc..
Imagine: Spotify App vs. Spotify Web, Gmail vs. local client - etc. etc..
This is quite a demarcation.
Finally, one might consider also that 'web experiences' have expanded.
We may not be uses 'other things' less, rather, FB is a new experience that is taking up addition time allocated to the web.
So - we had 'the web' - now we have 'the web + FB web'.
How come the number of websites is increasing if the web is dying? How are these websites getting their attention?
Maybe smaller websites are getting less absolute visits than in 2010, but even if that was true, you should say that the web was dying in the 90's.
It's also difficult to believe the web will stop working, or that people will stop making websites just because more people are browsing just on the "trinet" (remember, 20 years ago people already wrote websites, even if they would expect only 3 visits per month). Would Facebook, Google and Amazon come up with a plan to stop ISPs from serving other domains? Why would they do that?
> It's also difficult to believe the web will stop working, or that people will stop making websites just because more people are browsing just on the "trinet"
Is it? Lots of small companies and social groups rely on having a Facebook page as their primary way of contact and advertisement, where they would have created a web page of their own in the past.
I realized something was wrong when many local web design/development shops started redirecting their domains to Facebook profile pages. Never thought I'd miss outdated Flash-only sites.
Of course, the saying about the cobbler's children still applies.
It is not in Facebook or Google’s interest to have other websites disappear: they make their value and their money from those quite directly and obviously. Executive of both companies have said so, and I don’t think anyone could doubt this: both companies make money by getting their users onto other websites (well… until they have a fully integrated sales system, like YouTube Red and Facebook Marketplace). Both companies provide website creators with a lot of help, some tied into their platform, some fully open-sourced.
What the original post is showing is that a lot of heavy load of the content (videos) and actual access and control (including optimisation for fast loading on mobile clients) is now being controlled. It lowers barriers to entry and success as a YouTuber (no need to fiddle with hosting anymore, like Ze Frank had to). However, having users instinctively connect to a handful of platforms every day, rather than decide to see your content means you might have to pay for most views, pay as high as your margins would allow you to and not make a significant profit.
An equivalent (I’m not saying it’s a perfect metaphor) is if there be more taxis roaming the street but to go from an old model where you used to hail marauding cabs from the curb to a new model where all taxis, to get business, have to be affiliated to Uber and Gett. All the revenues of those taxis are now controlled by Uber and Gett. Those revenues might be shaved down to operating costs thanks to heavy-handed optimisation. Upsides of those include better control (you grope your passenger and you are out/you write that this ethnic group should be eradicated and you are out), more free rides/free articles thanks to VC-sponsored acquisition vouchers/advertising. Downsides include that you might, in the future, have to pay whatever profit VCs expect as soon as competition is kept away with deep moats -- and lack of innovation.
Being uncomfortable with the Big-Brotheresque aspect of Uber isn’t fully solved by having a single competitor, too. So if you do things in the back seat that some drivers object to (say, French kissing); or if you post something that some people find objectionable (say, show your nipples) then you might lose your ability to travel or publish anymore.
Facebook (and I’m assuming Alphabet) employees themselves will acknowledge that they can’t make perfect judgement-calls at their scale. They love (and often actively participate themselves) alternatives. If you see the other options become victims of either margin-squeezing or editorial control, that admission becomes a little too damning.
Google has gone from a welcomed tool (indexing a priori data) to telling what should be the data (ranking). It switched naturally and logically so, but it's a problem IMO.
Lastly, when a domain becomes a social organ, everything changes. It has to be regulated, will cause tension, economic impact ..
google never really recovered from SEO. once professionals started pouring money into gaming the system it stopped working.
google search results are actually terrible these days. nothing but commercial sites, ads, and a few hand picked non-commercial sources like wikipedia, stack overflow, etc.
i cant remember the last time i found an interesting new site searching on google.
I think it's not Google or google being gamed by SEO.. I think the web went from a cute jungle of documents into a boring market filled by baseless content.
Today my heuristic is: the older the HTML the better. Often the horrendously crafted website were the work either of naive individuals that had no hidden agenda beside having fun with webpages, or passionated ones that would put long articles full of interesting facts.
i would strongly disagree. I think there is far more good content on the web now than ever before .... but .... the signal/noise ratio is lower. The good content has increased but the crap has increased much more.
Google's original algorithm of giving weight to inbound links was a very good way of surfacing good content programmatically but I don't think they ever solved how to make it work in an adversarial environment.
Google's other algorithmic approach is to measure user response to sites (what do they click on, how long do they view it, does it satisfy their query, etc). that algorithm is great for maximizing revenue but is bad at surfacing new original content.
In the end they also had to hand curate, which is what failed to work before them, and what they originally replaced, so really we are back to DMOZ and Yahoo now. Just with a very sophisticated monopolist as the gate keeper.
The hand curation is coming back and not only at Google and there's a weird feeling that in the end we want "humans" as much as "results". Even the most satisfying algorithmic result don't have the same as a collection made by a group (considering that algorithm cannot pass some SEO version of the Turing test of course).
I was thinking something related this morning, that one of the reasons uptime is important to google, apart from the usual reasons, is because if they were switched off for a day people would realise the extent to which they have so many of their eggs in one basket, and a basket over which they have no control. I would expect that would trigger some concern, and significant numbers seeking alternatives, and building them.
You can do your part as a developer and tell managers about the dangers of AMP. It is a stupid idea technically (we have HTML, you can build a slim sites, Google can rank them higher) and stupid business wise by giving away the control, branding, options.
I have convinced one project manager to not implement AMP and will continue to try in the future. Please do your part by spreading word of the dangers of GOOG and FB.
Depends on the user – if they like fast page views, AMP's 100KB of render-blocking JavaScript is a problem, and if they care about sharing the fact that it makes the real URL hard to get is also annoying. If they like not being phished, AMP is really bad since it leads a lot of people to believe they're reading something Google has vouched for.
This is the inevitable conflict from Google putting their marketing needs ahead of the user experience. If they used site performance as the rating metric, AMP would just be one option for better performance but since the goal was to keep traffic on google.com we're stuck with a worse experience because that's better for Google.
I'm really concerned with this current crop of "have to please Google" that is become so prevalent by SEO. The current trend is one of reactionary fear. "We have a great website... it would be a shame for its ranking to slip". I can't say that Google is actively, passively, or even part and parcel to promoting that fear. Unfortunately, the biggest reason I see AMP being adopted by many, has nothing to do with it being faster or a better experience. It has everything to do with pressure by Google. (and a belief that it'll improve search ranking)
Google is most definitely actively encouraging that. Right now the proposition is that you either use AMP and let Google host your pages on their server or your competitors' content will appear above your content on search results pages. The fact that they're technically not changing the search ranking isn't significant as long as the prominent carousel which appears first is restricted to hosted AMP content.
Until all peering agreements become null and void, you can always create another ISP to compete in a free market. Sure, it's expensive and complicated to bury fiber, and radio spectrum is limited. But it's not technical or logistical difficulty that keeps people restricted to specific providers. It's usually political, and incumbents always have a huge upper hand.
The reason OSPs like AOL became so ubiquitous in the 90s was they made everything easier, and people were willing to pay for that, even if it effectively locked you into a 'smaller internet'. It still provided you internet access because that by itself was still a value-add. Will ISPs & OSPs charge you differently to access different content? Of course, because they know their customers don't give a shit about some romantic vision of unrestricted peering agreements.
There's one big elephant in the room that nobody talks about in discussions like this: Content. Whoever controls the Content gets to swing a multi-Billion dollar dick around, and they keep a hundred-Billion dollar advertising dick on a leash. Most people are obsessed with media & entertainment, a 700-Billion dollar industry, and the rest is cat memes and bargain bin chinese vacuum cleaners.
The leading lights of the web barely break the budget of a fraction of M&E. They are constantly dogging at each other because the web industry knows that without content, they have no leverage. Which is why Amazon & Netflix make their own content (though a very small amount, and not very valuable). If Google lost its advertising catbird seat, it would die screaming (almost all of its money comes from ads). And you can't sell ads if you can't get access to eyeballs or earholes.
This is a good article. Andre, don't pay attention to the usual HN cynicism. You posed a good thesis and defended it. The web, as we have traditionally defined it, is dying. Or dead. Yes, technically the protocols still work, but the day-to-day structure and use of the web is completely different than anybody expected or wanted it to be.
I think the key place where we went wrong is that we envisioned the web as a utility to help expand each person's mind and communication abilities. Instead it's morphing into a service where large groups of people can clan and waste time around the virtual water cooler. It was supposed to be a brain super-power. Instead it's a shared newsletter for angry mobs. It was supposed to free us up to find out amazing things about the world around us. Instead it's freed up the world around us to examine us in exquisite detail. We don't surf the internet anymore. The internet surfs us.
And yes, that sounds a lot like hyperbole, but such is the nature of essays like this. When I wrote "Technology is Heroin" ( http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is... ) I didn't mean it was literally heroin. I meant it was taking on the role that dangerous drugs had in times past. The web isn't literally dying. It's changing into something so different than what we wanted that it is for all intents and purposes dead. Many folks are getting wrapped up in the semantics of the discussion instead of the underlying meaning.
Many thanks! I share your thoughts that tech is "heroin", in fact I've been thinking that UX is killing us, it has become so good, that it's addicting. This is true clinically too, as social media instant gratification releases Dopamine and its usage is an activity comparable to gambling.
There is a way forward, though. Between the Old Web and GOOG-FB-AMZN's Trinet, we can build something else: the New Web based on decentralized protocols like IPFS, Dat, blockchains, secure-scuttlebutt, and others. That's what I'm working on.
I have seen articles and repos for various technologies that claim to be the new "decentralized" web, but so far I haven't seen anything that provides a cohesive experience. Could you provide more information as to what you're working on in particular?
A not-insignificant portion of HN is employed by the three you've accused of killing the web, and with a somewhat convincing argument. It must be a tough pill to swallow when hearing that the employer you love is killing the platform that has defined your adult life.
But if, as you predict, ISPs/infrastructure only support GOOG, FB, and AMZN packets, what good will alternative protocols be? Seems like there will be no opportunity for new information-innovations like Bitcoin.
Seems like the solution is to begin treating infrastructure as a public utility, but I can hardly imagine that actually happening.
I'd twigged on "the dopamine meme" by April 2014, you're right about that.
What creates decentralisation is distance and transport costs, not (merely0 prottocols, and definitely not efficiences: they are inherently centralising.
> DeQuincey wrote a later book called “Miseries of Opium” in which he went on at length about how opium completely destroyed his life. But nobody bought that one.
Do you have a link to a bibliography where this book appears?
Actually, the thesis is quite cynical :) Which doesn't mean it's wrong.
By the way, I found your article interesting too. I do think it has a blind spot, in that you're missing a very big addiction that has stayed with us for a long time: work.
"It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic."
The web needs to really become decentralized. Even Tim Berners-Lee has said it [1]. He has started a project to re-decentralize it called Solid [2].
Email was decentralized but now it's become super centralized with GMail etc. And look at how easy it is for the NSA to vacuum all that up from one spot.
Wordpress powers 20% of the decentralized web. Because it's a free, open-source piece of software with a plugin ecosystem that runs on a popular runtime - PHP. We need stuff like that, but for things like SOCIAL MEDIA. Nothing currently exists that can rival facebook, google+ etc.
I believe that the software can change the internet's topology. Right now all signals go through giant centralized server farms. Consider how people use Google Docs for collaboration Facebook / Slack for conversation or Dropbox for their files. The default is to immediately connect to "the cloud" which is in reality some company's server farm. AWS just capitalized on this trend and made it easier.
In fact, you can do all of it LOCALLY by default. There's no reason that bits need to go through Google's servers for a classroom to collaborate on a document, or for an African village to plan a community dinner. Except one: lack of open source software that can run locally, and rival Facebook, Google etc. in ease of use.
We are building that software and started around 2011. My company Qbix [3] wants to decentralize not just the web, but also identity [4], data [5] and social networking [6]. We look to partner with companies who want to decentralize cellphone signals (like gotenna) and energy generation (like solar panels) so human networking in the future has a LOT more local options to utilize before ever jumping onto the public internet.
PS: Whenever I post this topic, with links to back it up, I get downvoted heavily. But I never get any explanation why. If you are an HN member who disagrees with this thesis, first of all that's not enough reason for a downvote. And secondly, I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHY you feel so strongly against what I'm saying here: that the web, cellphone signals and energy generation should be decentralized. Contribute constructively to the conversation, and explain what alternatives do you think are better. Are you so ferventlu against developing software to run on local networks as to militate against comments advocating it? Am I breaking some HN rule by linking to our work that we passionately believe in and spend most of our time on? What are the words behind your downvote?
The problem not a technical one, it is a social/economic/political one.
It is how the big players gets to dictate policy virtually unchecked.
Email, on the protocol level, is still decentralized. But Google and a few other big players have via their spam filters dictated how every email server on the planet is to behave, or else.
And we are seeing similar things happening with web servers and browsers, just look at the railroading the W3C DRM spec got.
W3C DRM happened because of Tim Berners-Lee himself. And I agree that, since W3C is a central point, it is the target for attacking. But it's possible to decentralize things in a way that stays decentralized, for LOCAL communications.
Email spam is only a problem across the global internet. Not within local networks. Same goes for other types of communications.
Human speech for example has remained peer to peer even as radio was invented :)
I really think the problem is a technical one. The social and political outcomes are almost inevitable, just like the two party system is a nearly inevitable outcome of the first-past-the-post ballot.
Lots of paradigms changed as technologies were introduced. The phone, radio, the printing press etc. Technology has a great impact on society.
Amazon/AWS is mentioned as one of the big three in the article, since they're far and away one of the largest. That said, if it weren't them, it'd be someone else.
Here's a comment from this thread that I am having issues with:
> if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.
And yet, Andre and his blog clearly 'exist' (i.e. can be accessed and read, and perhaps even found in a search engine if search terms are relevant enough). Medium blogs (or other indexable and searchable media) obviously 'exist'. Reddit and Hacker News definitely 'exist'.
Perhaps that comment refers to commercial viability of internet media, or to their overall reach, but what do we, regular netizens, care about such pecuniary stuff? It's up to executives to think about business models and profitability; while it's up to us to use whatever suits us best on the Internet.
A quick Google tells me that Andre's currently at the #2 position on Google (at least in my search bubble) for "The Web dying", #4 for "The Web is dying", and so on. And of course he's at the top by a country mile for the exact article title.
Hacker News regularly dominates Google queries, and Reddit does too.
I do agree that the statement that search engine rank is all misses a rather significant element, that being virality / social reach.
If you can regularly gain enormous traffic from Reddit, Facebook, or even HN, you don't necessarily need search engine rankings. If you can afford to pay for ads, likewise.
It's if you're in none of those three camps that you might as well not exist on the Web. Tree falls, forest, no-one to hear it, etc.
This will be horrible for freelancers and people who want to learn web development. There will be no incentive for those people as the globalist mega tech corps create a boring homogeneous internet.
I believe this could be easily solved with a simple regulation - mandatory 50/50 sharing of downstream and upstream on customer level.
How Web is supposed to be decentralized if the means of accessing it directly support centralization? You will always prefer external services if your own get capped pretty easily. You cannot have truly distributed web if access points are basically one-way connections.
The fact that the author doesn't see any Chinese companies is an illustration of fragmentation.
However, I think it's worth noting that each of these fragmented sub-nets are have more traffic and servers than the global Internet did even a few years ago (how many? I'm not sure).
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadA better metric would be a measurement of user initiated actions. Now sure how to pull that off, but it would be a more accurate measure of how the net is changing.
Besides, the direction and relative values show clear and growing dominance.
It's very challenging to figure out how to do this in a way that benefits users and improves user experience - we are very careful about being fair to users on mobile connections - but I think that a distributed web platform is the future and the only way we can combat the (lack of) net neutrality.
We already have a distributed internet, just not as distributed as we had hoped for from a censorship perspective.
Bandwidth is expensive and many let youtube host the video for free instead of paying to host it themselves which is why it is no surprise that Youtube tops the list.
This is easily solved by switching to peer to peer protocols, which would work like a charm if our providers did the sensible thing and gave us a symmetric bandwidth to begin with.
I was also talking about the ADSL tragedy. We should have had SDSL from the beginning. (And yes, the corresponding decrease in raw download rate would have been worth it).
First came dial-up modems. Can't have a server with those without monopolising the phone. Then came the DSL. Providers noticed that nobody has a server, and deduced in their immense commercial wisdom that they didn't want a server. So they made the DSL Asymmetric. Now people could have a server, but the upload was so terrible it wasn't worth it. Conclusion: the ISPs were right: nobody wants a server.
There was this P2P fluke, but the copyright lobby kindly explained this was only used for illegal stuff. Everything's mostly back in order now.
Anyway, now we've established nobody needs nor wants a server, we can put NATs everywhere and nobody will notice.
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DSL was the first avoidable mishap in a long string of centralisation trends.
If your only connection is through your phone, I have to feel a bit sorry for you.
One can still have an R-Pi at home.
These devices are also thermally constrained.
There's far more to this than upload speed.
However 5G promises much higher bandwidth and more symmetric data rates
By the way, even now, a user have to send requests to the right place to get any data. IP packets still have to go both ways.
How would _you_ implement a secure P2P where you (and only you) can rapidly change content (dynamic web pages) and control who has access to authorized pages?
What about credit card info? Passwords?
I imagine there "are" implementations that solve many of those issues. But it's sure-as-heck not common knowledge if there are "easy" answers to all those problems.
I can't help but feel "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson screaming at me. How do you ensure every bit of the web stack isn't hacked on every computer in the network, as opposed to your own?
[1] [PDF] http://vxer.org/lib/pdf/Reflections%20on%20Trusting%20Trust....
In fact, when dealing with P2P, you're more likely than not, to be full of compromised programs. Many unintentional, but many others intentionally. Torrent users who run clients that don't upload. Every P2P game ever made being hacked. (See the entire purpose behind QuakeWorld moving to a client-server model over P2P, over the original quake.) And every Kazaa uploader had viruses on his PC back-in-the-day.
I'm not saying P2P is impossible. But first, you've got to define what application you want to implement (webpage, vs public video hosting) because the solutions are completely different. And even then, you're still walking into dangerous territory when you can't control the machines your relying on.
What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give? You can't simply "install more servers" or "buy more bandwidth" when your "server" is every user connected to your site.
And what happens when you roll out new versions, and some users don't upgrade?
The list goes on. And I say all of this as someone who has considered using distributed computing model for game hosting, where machines assist in computations and bandwidth. It's possible to do, but it opens up entire dimensions of additional problems to solve.
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The trust problem still applies to HTTP. We still download viruses on the web, and we still lose our credit card numbers to con artists. The only reason there's more malware on current P2P network is because those networks are disproportionately used to infringe copyright. The risk doesn't come from the distributed nature of the network, but from the lack of legality of the content.
Securing peer to peer communications to current web levels is trivially easy: just sign the damn data, and have a certificate authority ascertain the identity of the signer. For static content such as YouTube videos, you can also use a content addressable system.
While that would require some level of centralisation, it woulndn't exceed that of DNS, and would definitely solve the bandwidth issue.
> What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give?
I won't happen, because we enjoy symmetric bandwidth, thanks to our regulators being sensible, competent people. (At least that's the case in my rainbows & unicorns world). Seriously, though, symmetric bandwidth is the ultimate and only solution to many problems: it ensures total upload keeps up with total download, so we get the equilibrium we want.
That would be flawed if individual sites couldn't also host videos -- or if we didn't care whether they do.
Traffic is traffic, and it’s no one’s business whether I’m watching a video, clicking a button, issuing shell commands, or typing a reply to a message.
No thank you, to the idea of changing protocols, or forcing people onto the application layer, in furtherance of analyzing our already-over-analyzed activities with an electron microscope.
This problem (the fact Google has a large majority in web browser and mobile device sales) is very concerning to me - the data is interesting and the points are relevant but I have a very hard time reading past titles like "the web is dying". I hope you read this with the intended respectful tone I wrote it in.
Click bait titles have a bad reputation because they either lie or don't go in-depth into the topic. That's not the case here. I wrote with depth and research, and the body of the article is truthful to the title. I believe the title is, although sensationally shocking, true.
With all due respect, I don't see how the article backs up this utterly exaggerated claim.
Unless, of course, you're using the word "dying" in the sense that everybody and everything will die at some time. But I don't think this is meant here, as that wouldn't be "shocking" at all.
And I hope it won't stop others who are allergic to clickbait titles to read your article, because it is very well documented and very insightful.
I am, too, afraid of the end of net neutrality and the future you describe is really scary.
It's a simple explicative sentence.
Maybe you folks have just been conditioned enough by click-bait now that you can't distinguish the difference, and I don't mean to denigrate you by stating that.
The technology is still there but the diverse hosting options and the creativity that many of us associated with it (what could be called “the spirit of the original web”) could be in peril.
I don’t think that you are arguing that Google and Facebook are fighting HTTP/HTML - although they are offering alternatives that they present as technologically preferable.
"The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party."
This web is still alive and well, nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish. Tim was a bit naive that he assumed profit seeking won't mess with his creation.
The underlying protocol is still the same as it was 20 years ago. With 3,885,567,619 internet users this dying platform is the best thing in computing we had so far. Of course it's changing, but the web is much larger than GOOG, FB, AMZN.
Yo are ignoring the long tail and that tail is very long.
If I have a big, world changing individual thought and I create something good, then it will probably be picked up by the endless blogs, magazines, journals. I can place it on GitHub or buy a $10 server and I'm good to go, in that case I manage almost everything about it. It's not the web's jobs to filter out the gems.
If my individual thought is not much better than "Mondays suck" then Twitter is probably a good place for it to be forgotten.
plenty does!
if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.
you could try sharing it with friends on facebook and hope for a social network effect, but just ask the journalism industry how organic reach is working out as of late
selling something online? your only hope is FBA. where the A stands for Amazon. I guess etsy might work too. so, okay...duopoloy!
and even if you don't care to be found, and aren't selling anything, it is TRIVIAL to take down any kind of not-expensive hosting (your raspi @ home, your DigitalOcean VPS, or colocated server) with a DDoS attack.
AWS, GCP, & Azure can weather most attacks, but it will cost you. And if it's large enough they'll shut you off anyway. and then send you a bill you can't pay.
so no, there is plenty stopping you from launching anything on the internet. the cost structures (be it time or money or both) greatly favor the massively entrenched incumbents. and not a little bit of favor. they favor them....bigly.
True, you'll be able to do that, but if most of people will have "free internet package" that will allow them to access GOOG, FB, AMZN only, having the domain will not make much sense.
I wonder though, if we really descent into a multi-tier internet and if a version of a "legacy" internet survives in some form (even though not accessible by main stream FB/GOOG users), if that legacy part of the internet will become cleaner and once gain open to grass roots innovation?
I.e. If people generally knew that Bono was dying already through other sources, a headline of "Bono is dying" would be shocking by the nature of what it is, but ultimately not clickbait.
Does smtp 'exist' now that most of it is over google, yahoo, and microsoft? Or linux considering RedHat/Cent/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian are responsible for most installs.
I think its rational to accept that big players will, naturally, take big slices and that doesn't mean you're kinda sorta making a 'x is dying' argument. If anything, the natural distribution of the network effect probably falls onto a ~80/20 relationship where the bigger players take 80% of the market and many smaller players take the remaining 20%.
The web will be no exception to this. It just took a little while to get here. Its already happened to ISPs, remember early on when every city had multiple competing DSL resellers? PC operating systems (is anyone even pretending that Windows and MacOS as a distant second will ever have real competitors anymore?), PC GPUs (two real players now), 3D game engines (2 non-in house engines dominate), does Linkedin even have competition now?, etc, etc.
Worse, the network effect for Facebook is tremendous. Its power isn't that its a great service, its mediocre at best, but its a such a pita to get everyone you know to switch over that it'll probably never happen.
Back in the old days, bloggers had to get their own domain names, find their own hosting, write their own html/css/whatever, manage their own CMS (and install it on a linux system hosted somewhere and via the commandline/ftp/whatever), etc. This meant a lot of the early web was techie-oriented types who could perform these tasks (endless sites and discussions on who is the best Star Trek captain or which was the worst Star Wars movie, not many on fighting childhood malnutrition in the 3rd world). I'm not sure how this was 'better' than what we have today.
Democratization will often lead to a network effect which will lead to consolidation. Philosophically, to some, a perfectly distributed system is 'better' but to pull that off you'd probably need communist-level social and economic controls and if you had that you most likely would never had the internet or the web.
Just the fact that we use aggregators like HN or Reddit means that we accept a whole lot of consolidation without question and often see it as better than the old system of managing a dozen different topics spread on on various specialist sites and usenet. Or are we giving special exceptions to techie approved sites like Reddit (the 4th most popular site in the USA), which is missing from the article?
Take some figures plucked from thin-air and you have a recipe for retort success!
Thankfully, it's only a caveat that happens 20/80 of the time, sort of like how TCP does such a good job of filtering out the riff-raff. /s
I thought the analogy to SMTP was a very good one and, considering the audience, was not esoteric at all.
You proved my point about esoteric appeal because my argument was opposite to how you viewed it: that us techies get blinded by irrelevant concepts because we can relate to them, that are otherwise esoteric outside the HN bubble.
Glassdoor shows job opportunities side-by-side with company reputations. I'm certainly more inclined to use that over LinkedIn!
I don't see Google(Search/Chrome/Android) and Amazon in the same sphere as Facebook/YouTube/Twitter in doing damage to the web.
I am much more worried about the societal chaos that Facebook/YouTube/Twitter are producing across the globe than any net neutrality issues.
Yes, Google and Apple found ways to break that monopoly, but a chastened Microsoft wasn't prepared to wage the type of scorched earth campaigns that it became famous for.
As a matter of fact, I am. And we have palpable consequences today, with that trusted computing débâcle (backdoors on CPUs that threaten to turn into full blown vulnerabilities…)
As a GNU/Linux user, I'm not too worried about my own OS. But I am scared that Apple managed to locked down its systems in a way that would have Microsoft sharded into oblivion. Numeric prisons are now not only acceptable but downright fashionable.
YES! with my cpu running 2 kernel rings deep that the OS is not aware of. What is even worse if you try to disable it and the cpu kernel detects it will disable the hardware. Makes me truly worried where person computing is headed, aka I'm not in control of my device I paid for!
Yes, Intel is still pulling these stunts and there are not many viable alternatives.
Companies' have achilles heels. They are built into the way they think in the era when it was started, when it was agile and fit in the mind of one person, before it got big and cumbersome, impossible to steer, profit-magnetized and impossible to even think longer term than a quarter. This business cycle is inherent to our laws and culture, it happens to all companies eventually.
Startups 20 years from now will be built by today's toddlers who pinch-zoom magazines and "Alexa, play Spice Girls" an empty room. The incumbent generation can't imagine what the next generation will bring, almost definitionally. But they will have disruptive ideas too. They will probably look stupid to us old people and we won't see it coming until it's too late.
Open-data-web is a good today-generation example. There are chickens and eggs to be solved, maybe the economics are impossible. Or maybe just nobody figured out the path yet. There were a hundred crypto currencies before bitcoin that went nowhere. But if someone figures out a strategic path that gets there, we know that person won't be Facebook, because open data will wreck Facebook's core business.
> On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account. As private businesses, GOOG, FB, and AMZN don’t need to guarantee you access to their networks. You do not have a legal right to an account in their servers, and as societies we aren’t demanding for these rights as vehemently as we could, to counter the strategies that tech giants are putting forward.
This specific part (that dominant companies can ban individuals with no recourse) shouldn't be tolerated.
Nobody is stopping you from starting your own blog and posting your views there. But, just like no one is obligated to seek out a flyer you post on a telephone pole, no one is obligated to seek out your writings.
Suggestions for a better replacement are welcome. 'Better' in this case means accurate, neutral, and using representative language from the article itself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Facebook is a large conglomerate business that grows by purchasing young successfull social networks in multiple areas of services.
I'm not aware of any internet.org region in which Facebook is the only unbilled service.
But they have big plans to provide internet access to underdeveloped countries etc.
They are not going away anytime soon.
Google now has at least one product in the entire stack of the internet.
You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server.
At this point you can use most of the functionality of the internet without ever leaving the Google ecosystem.
And this is just going to be expanded.
Google has launched 5 social networks, 4 messaging apps, and dozens of phones by now.
The only reason it's not yet a walled garden is because Google is incompetent at it for now, but we can't bet the future of the open web on that.
that is a bold statement. care to elaborate?
Their authentication in general seems convoluted and complicated, their console is slow and useless (why aren't all the search results preloaded? I type in 'iam' and it takes several seconds for the results to appear). Oh, and also alpha K8s clusters will terminate after 30 days whether you like it or not (perhaps you're using a feature that's apparently stable but languishing in alpha - I'm looking at you, cronjob). There's a lack of services in general (an elasticache type service would be nice) and development seems to move glacially.
Also, they seem to have multiple versions of SDKs, some with outstanding bugs that were reported years ago but are just closed or there are comments in the README that only critical bugs will be addressed. There's no indication which SDK to use where there are several versions. Oh, and if you only want to use one service in python, you have to install about 40 different packages because splitting them up is too difficult.
We've had DFP buckets have their configs get screwed up so we mysteriously couldn't access them, logs stopped being delivered, etc. Apparently Google have such poor monitoring that we had to prompt them about these things which took too longer to get resolved. I could go on...
...viewing content authorized by Google DRM.
> "After taking a look backstage, we can confirm that after recent updates Safari is no longer a supported browser for Web Player"
> Riegelstamm further dug into the details of the Web Player, discovering that the discontinuing of Safari support might have something to do with Google's Widevine media optimizer plugin, which Spotify requires for music streaming on the web and Apple opposes due to potential security issues.
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/08/spotify-web-player-no-s...
Soon after the storage handling in Android got that much more convoluted, making it much harder to get data out of an Android devices without there being some kind of Google daemon sitting between user and storage.
These are minority services and destined to remain so. Google's core competency will probably never by customer service.
>> I'm not going into Freenet
Well there's your answer.
All: Other comments being bad doesn't mean it's ok to make the site even worse. The guidelines cover this issue too, so please read and follow them!
If you object to having your name associated to it, reddit also has fun places.
If your post needs clickbaity embellishments it's probably not worth my time to read it, if it doesn't need any, the post should be able to reach frontpage without them.
So - while possibly not 'the web' as in 'browser' - it's arguably 'the web' nevertheless because almost all these apps depend on a great deal of http-ish interactivity etc...
Also - though it's hard to say how much change there has been on the desktop - remember that people do use desktop apps for socially and webby oriented reasons etc..
Imagine: Spotify App vs. Spotify Web, Gmail vs. local client - etc. etc..
This is quite a demarcation.
Finally, one might consider also that 'web experiences' have expanded.
We may not be uses 'other things' less, rather, FB is a new experience that is taking up addition time allocated to the web.
So - we had 'the web' - now we have 'the web + FB web'.
But great article, thanks for that.
Maybe smaller websites are getting less absolute visits than in 2010, but even if that was true, you should say that the web was dying in the 90's.
It's also difficult to believe the web will stop working, or that people will stop making websites just because more people are browsing just on the "trinet" (remember, 20 years ago people already wrote websites, even if they would expect only 3 visits per month). Would Facebook, Google and Amazon come up with a plan to stop ISPs from serving other domains? Why would they do that?
Is it? Lots of small companies and social groups rely on having a Facebook page as their primary way of contact and advertisement, where they would have created a web page of their own in the past.
Of course, the saying about the cobbler's children still applies.
What the original post is showing is that a lot of heavy load of the content (videos) and actual access and control (including optimisation for fast loading on mobile clients) is now being controlled. It lowers barriers to entry and success as a YouTuber (no need to fiddle with hosting anymore, like Ze Frank had to). However, having users instinctively connect to a handful of platforms every day, rather than decide to see your content means you might have to pay for most views, pay as high as your margins would allow you to and not make a significant profit.
An equivalent (I’m not saying it’s a perfect metaphor) is if there be more taxis roaming the street but to go from an old model where you used to hail marauding cabs from the curb to a new model where all taxis, to get business, have to be affiliated to Uber and Gett. All the revenues of those taxis are now controlled by Uber and Gett. Those revenues might be shaved down to operating costs thanks to heavy-handed optimisation. Upsides of those include better control (you grope your passenger and you are out/you write that this ethnic group should be eradicated and you are out), more free rides/free articles thanks to VC-sponsored acquisition vouchers/advertising. Downsides include that you might, in the future, have to pay whatever profit VCs expect as soon as competition is kept away with deep moats -- and lack of innovation.
Being uncomfortable with the Big-Brotheresque aspect of Uber isn’t fully solved by having a single competitor, too. So if you do things in the back seat that some drivers object to (say, French kissing); or if you post something that some people find objectionable (say, show your nipples) then you might lose your ability to travel or publish anymore.
Facebook (and I’m assuming Alphabet) employees themselves will acknowledge that they can’t make perfect judgement-calls at their scale. They love (and often actively participate themselves) alternatives. If you see the other options become victims of either margin-squeezing or editorial control, that admission becomes a little too damning.
Google has gone from a welcomed tool (indexing a priori data) to telling what should be the data (ranking). It switched naturally and logically so, but it's a problem IMO.
Lastly, when a domain becomes a social organ, everything changes. It has to be regulated, will cause tension, economic impact ..
google search results are actually terrible these days. nothing but commercial sites, ads, and a few hand picked non-commercial sources like wikipedia, stack overflow, etc.
i cant remember the last time i found an interesting new site searching on google.
Today my heuristic is: the older the HTML the better. Often the horrendously crafted website were the work either of naive individuals that had no hidden agenda beside having fun with webpages, or passionated ones that would put long articles full of interesting facts.
Google's original algorithm of giving weight to inbound links was a very good way of surfacing good content programmatically but I don't think they ever solved how to make it work in an adversarial environment.
Google's other algorithmic approach is to measure user response to sites (what do they click on, how long do they view it, does it satisfy their query, etc). that algorithm is great for maximizing revenue but is bad at surfacing new original content.
In the end they also had to hand curate, which is what failed to work before them, and what they originally replaced, so really we are back to DMOZ and Yahoo now. Just with a very sophisticated monopolist as the gate keeper.
The hand curation is coming back and not only at Google and there's a weird feeling that in the end we want "humans" as much as "results". Even the most satisfying algorithmic result don't have the same as a collection made by a group (considering that algorithm cannot pass some SEO version of the Turing test of course).
I have convinced one project manager to not implement AMP and will continue to try in the future. Please do your part by spreading word of the dangers of GOOG and FB.
This is the inevitable conflict from Google putting their marketing needs ahead of the user experience. If they used site performance as the rating metric, AMP would just be one option for better performance but since the goal was to keep traffic on google.com we're stuck with a worse experience because that's better for Google.
Weight loading times higher in the Pagerank algorithm, and voila. (They do this already, but it's mild)
Where AMP gets a disproportionately high representation in search results, making an obvious target for content creators, and encouraging lock-in.
Until all peering agreements become null and void, you can always create another ISP to compete in a free market. Sure, it's expensive and complicated to bury fiber, and radio spectrum is limited. But it's not technical or logistical difficulty that keeps people restricted to specific providers. It's usually political, and incumbents always have a huge upper hand.
The reason OSPs like AOL became so ubiquitous in the 90s was they made everything easier, and people were willing to pay for that, even if it effectively locked you into a 'smaller internet'. It still provided you internet access because that by itself was still a value-add. Will ISPs & OSPs charge you differently to access different content? Of course, because they know their customers don't give a shit about some romantic vision of unrestricted peering agreements.
There's one big elephant in the room that nobody talks about in discussions like this: Content. Whoever controls the Content gets to swing a multi-Billion dollar dick around, and they keep a hundred-Billion dollar advertising dick on a leash. Most people are obsessed with media & entertainment, a 700-Billion dollar industry, and the rest is cat memes and bargain bin chinese vacuum cleaners.
The leading lights of the web barely break the budget of a fraction of M&E. They are constantly dogging at each other because the web industry knows that without content, they have no leverage. Which is why Amazon & Netflix make their own content (though a very small amount, and not very valuable). If Google lost its advertising catbird seat, it would die screaming (almost all of its money comes from ads). And you can't sell ads if you can't get access to eyeballs or earholes.
I think the key place where we went wrong is that we envisioned the web as a utility to help expand each person's mind and communication abilities. Instead it's morphing into a service where large groups of people can clan and waste time around the virtual water cooler. It was supposed to be a brain super-power. Instead it's a shared newsletter for angry mobs. It was supposed to free us up to find out amazing things about the world around us. Instead it's freed up the world around us to examine us in exquisite detail. We don't surf the internet anymore. The internet surfs us.
And yes, that sounds a lot like hyperbole, but such is the nature of essays like this. When I wrote "Technology is Heroin" ( http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is... ) I didn't mean it was literally heroin. I meant it was taking on the role that dangerous drugs had in times past. The web isn't literally dying. It's changing into something so different than what we wanted that it is for all intents and purposes dead. Many folks are getting wrapped up in the semantics of the discussion instead of the underlying meaning.
Looking forward to seeing more of your work!
There is a way forward, though. Between the Old Web and GOOG-FB-AMZN's Trinet, we can build something else: the New Web based on decentralized protocols like IPFS, Dat, blockchains, secure-scuttlebutt, and others. That's what I'm working on.
Like guns kill people, right?
Seems like the solution is to begin treating infrastructure as a public utility, but I can hardly imagine that actually happening.
What creates decentralisation is distance and transport costs, not (merely0 prottocols, and definitely not efficiences: they are inherently centralising.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/240xss/the_dop...
Do you have a link to a bibliography where this book appears?
By the way, I found your article interesting too. I do think it has a blind spot, in that you're missing a very big addiction that has stayed with us for a long time: work.
The web needs to really become decentralized. Even Tim Berners-Lee has said it [1]. He has started a project to re-decentralize it called Solid [2].
Email was decentralized but now it's become super centralized with GMail etc. And look at how easy it is for the NSA to vacuum all that up from one spot.
Wordpress powers 20% of the decentralized web. Because it's a free, open-source piece of software with a plugin ecosystem that runs on a popular runtime - PHP. We need stuff like that, but for things like SOCIAL MEDIA. Nothing currently exists that can rival facebook, google+ etc.
I believe that the software can change the internet's topology. Right now all signals go through giant centralized server farms. Consider how people use Google Docs for collaboration Facebook / Slack for conversation or Dropbox for their files. The default is to immediately connect to "the cloud" which is in reality some company's server farm. AWS just capitalized on this trend and made it easier.
In fact, you can do all of it LOCALLY by default. There's no reason that bits need to go through Google's servers for a classroom to collaborate on a document, or for an African village to plan a community dinner. Except one: lack of open source software that can run locally, and rival Facebook, Google etc. in ease of use.
We are building that software and started around 2011. My company Qbix [3] wants to decentralize not just the web, but also identity [4], data [5] and social networking [6]. We look to partner with companies who want to decentralize cellphone signals (like gotenna) and energy generation (like solar panels) so human networking in the future has a LOT more local options to utilize before ever jumping onto the public internet.
PS: Whenever I post this topic, with links to back it up, I get downvoted heavily. But I never get any explanation why. If you are an HN member who disagrees with this thesis, first of all that's not enough reason for a downvote. And secondly, I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHY you feel so strongly against what I'm saying here: that the web, cellphone signals and energy generation should be decentralized. Contribute constructively to the conversation, and explain what alternatives do you think are better. Are you so ferventlu against developing software to run on local networks as to militate against comments advocating it? Am I breaking some HN rule by linking to our work that we passionately believe in and spend most of our time on? What are the words behind your downvote?
1. https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web
2. https://solid.mit.edu
3. https://qbix.com
4. https://github.com/Qbix/auth
5. https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0
6. https://qbix.com/platform
It is how the big players gets to dictate policy virtually unchecked.
Email, on the protocol level, is still decentralized. But Google and a few other big players have via their spam filters dictated how every email server on the planet is to behave, or else.
And we are seeing similar things happening with web servers and browsers, just look at the railroading the W3C DRM spec got.
Email spam is only a problem across the global internet. Not within local networks. Same goes for other types of communications.
Human speech for example has remained peer to peer even as radio was invented :)
I really think the problem is a technical one. The social and political outcomes are almost inevitable, just like the two party system is a nearly inevitable outcome of the first-past-the-post ballot.
Lots of paradigms changed as technologies were introduced. The phone, radio, the printing press etc. Technology has a great impact on society.
Do you remember what was it like before the TECHNOLOGY of the internet was created and deployed?
> if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.
And yet, Andre and his blog clearly 'exist' (i.e. can be accessed and read, and perhaps even found in a search engine if search terms are relevant enough). Medium blogs (or other indexable and searchable media) obviously 'exist'. Reddit and Hacker News definitely 'exist'.
Perhaps that comment refers to commercial viability of internet media, or to their overall reach, but what do we, regular netizens, care about such pecuniary stuff? It's up to executives to think about business models and profitability; while it's up to us to use whatever suits us best on the Internet.
Hacker News regularly dominates Google queries, and Reddit does too.
I do agree that the statement that search engine rank is all misses a rather significant element, that being virality / social reach.
If you can regularly gain enormous traffic from Reddit, Facebook, or even HN, you don't necessarily need search engine rankings. If you can afford to pay for ads, likewise.
It's if you're in none of those three camps that you might as well not exist on the Web. Tree falls, forest, no-one to hear it, etc.
Unless of course we all fight back.
How Web is supposed to be decentralized if the means of accessing it directly support centralization? You will always prefer external services if your own get capped pretty easily. You cannot have truly distributed web if access points are basically one-way connections.
The fact that the author doesn't see any Chinese companies is an illustration of fragmentation.
However, I think it's worth noting that each of these fragmented sub-nets are have more traffic and servers than the global Internet did even a few years ago (how many? I'm not sure).
Then I noticed the small print under the table: it's peak time mobile usage in Latin America.