It is good that he is talking about people, their motivations, their rights, their responsibilities, than about technology. (e.g. "Technology X is going to save us")
I like the principles, but I am pessimistic he can persuade the tech companies and many of the governments (China, Russia, Iran, for instance) to adopt them. That's because they have such strong motivations to keep things as they are, and even make them worse.
Almost all the points are deliberately left so vague that almost anyone can claim that they’re abiding with them.
A goodly number of points are also left so vague that almost anyone can claim that their opponent isn’t abiding by them, providing a perfect environment for anarcho-tyranny.
"We were excited to support their stated goals but have now resigned as we disgaree strongly with the way they have changed their focus and departed from sense to something wholly unworkable which makes us all sad." --googbrick
2 sweeps:
1) How many of those words will actually be meaningfully different when their statements are released?
2) When will they pull the trigger to make that happen?
Option (b) is of course regulatory capture whereby googbrick innoculate themesleves from any meanigful future competition. They'll definitely try that and will embrace totally if they can make it work in some financially meanigful way in their favour.
Does Berners-Lee have any form in policy? Did he have genuine inventive insight or just right place right time permissive license? These are genuine questions I'm asking to which I don't have answers - maybe he's saved the web before, and his inventive insight was utterly brilliant for all I know?
Latch on to the plan from the start so they can influence it when it starts to look like it's going to impact their bottom line while also looking like they're the good guys.
In my opinion, any form of action that is based on a political or social arrangement is doomed to fail as it is subject to hijacking at best. Any potential solution(s) has to be routed in actual technological changes that are backed by well designed protocols that cannot be changed over night or misused in the benefit of whomever wields the stick at any given point.All else is waste of time.
The political and social arrangement of the U.S. Constitution, for example, is worth trying to preserve. It will only endure if most of us, and our leaders, agree to follow it.
Most such arrangements are shared illusions that are doomed, unless we agree to follow them. It really boils down to that, because we are all fundamentally free to act as selfish savages of we want.
But the internet is a political and social arrangement. It's easy to forget in cyberspace the very physical situation of electrons and photons moving through wires and air. All this exists in pipes on the surface of the earth, in satellites overhead, and in undersea cables. These are all owned by somebody, or some thing. If you want to really get at the root causes of the issues TBL is raising, you're going to have to address the idea of private property. TBL isn't doing that (as far as I can tell), and so of course everyone (and thing) is on board.
> Three more principles call on individuals to create rich and relevant content to make the web a valuable place, build strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome, and finally, to fight for the web, so it remains open to everyone, everywhere.
The "build strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome" point seems impossibly idealistic. And indeed, for lack of a better word, boring. I'd rather have a diversity of communities, run however they choose. If someone doesn't feel "safe and welcome", they can just go away.
> a. Adopting best practices on civil discourse online and educating the next generation on these matters.
Why must all discourse be "civil"? I mean, that's a value here at HN. But it's not one for the chans. So shouldn't people have the right to choose?
> b. Committing to amplify the messages of systematically excluded groups, and standing up for them when they are being targeted or abused.
I can't help laughing at this. Because I'm like 99% sure that they aren't including neo-Nazis here. Or even the incels who aren't even vaguely neo-Nazi.
Anyway, in my ideal internet, everyone could post whatever they want, as anonymously as they want, and as resistant to takedown as they want. And everyone else could choose what to access.
strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome
A “strong” community necessarily has members and non-members, insiders and outsiders. If it doesn’t it’s not a community in any meaningful sense, it’s just an amorphous crowd. The idea of a community that welcomes everyone literally is a contradiction in terms.
If you think of the internet, as a whole, as a single "community" then you're right - and I think it would be infeasible to apply a particular moral or ethical (and inevitably cultural and political) standard at that level, since "the internet" literally encompasses all of humanity.
But if the internet is seen for what it is, a network of networks and the web a community of communities then there's no paradox - if one is not comfortable or welcomed in one community, one can move to, or start, another community that more accepting.
But then, that allows for exactly the sort of toxic and abusive communities and users that TBL and many others believe are "destroying" the web.
And they're kind of correct, but not because these communities exist, per se, or because the 'wrong sorts of people' are allowed to use the web, but because visibility and dialogue has been mostly centralized along a few large platforms with disproportionate influence, and as a result of the effect of SEO and social media algorithms, much of the diversity of the web has been filtered out for the sake of extremist and commercial content.
That's incompatible with copyright enforcement and censorship of child porn, etc. Our society won't tolerate a completely open web because of those things.
I'm really sick of these "influencers" doing horrible things and then coming back and expecting us to give them blank checks as defenders of the web, when they only seem to do the right thing when it's convenient for them. Get your own house in order before coming out and trying to fix everybody else's.
Agreed, I think Tim has gone off the deep end. The time to be vocal about the future direction of the web was in the wake of the dot com bubble. I think this is just a case of him trying to secure his legacy.
I am not saying I would have done any better than him in the circumstances but let’s be honest: TBL didn’t invent hypertext and the WWW is just a poor knock-off of Englebart’s ideas. It has taken millions of people decades to turn the WWW into something that can be secured and scaled and actually be useful to ordinary people. TBL was in the right place at the right time but don’t overestimate his actual contribution.
But does anyone remember trying to use IE2 on Win3.11 or IE3 and having to explicitly type http:// all the time? I actually like seeing the full address instead of the "let's dumb it down instead of educating people" approach modern browser address bars implement (hide everything but the most basic URL).
I don't think it was as usable as we like to remember (he did develop it on a NeXT Cube after all, not an average everyday machine), as the spelling-out of domain addresses on the BBC was always a drawn-out lengthy "haych tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash double-u double-u double-u DOT bee bee see DOT com forward slash..." etc etc etc because it was so new in the 1990s.
Of course I do look back in fondness before the unleashing of commercialism on the Internet and it turning into the world's leading cesspit of garbage, tracking and colossal webpages, but that's for another discussion.
People had been trying to implement powerful, useful hypertext systems for decades and done a terrible job, they were all awful. They were built as monolithic centralised applications with built-in databases and a host of over-engineered features.
TBL threw all of that out of the window in favour of a simple, lightweight, extensible decentralised system. This was not at all an obvious thing to do. Previous high priests of Hypertext were incensed that this toy system lacking so many 'essential' features became more popular and useful in couple of years than their systems had in decades.
None of this was inevitable. If it had been obvious, someone would have already done it.
Like many inventions, it wasnt so much originality, as combining the right pieces in an elegant and useful way.
The WWW he invented was HTTP+HTML+URL. Three things that may have already existed on their own in some sense. He took giant ideas, off others shoulders, and melded them.
I wonder, does his web contract apply to apps that use HTTP+URL but not HTML? Does he intend the word web to be inclusive of not website tech, or does he not care about the rest of the internet thats not "web."
I wonder what is the true story behind all this DRM. There has to be some corruption, selling out, some people who are staying silent on the issue to this day. Everyone seems to consider this as a negative - why did this get passed then?
Principles on paper won't work. We need to build these principles into the technology at a fundamental level so that anyone using it can't do anything else but use it based on those principles. The technology should require it and not be able to work otherwise unless you break it.
No tech is fool proof, although we should always try for the practical best.
But, say our current tech is as good as we know how to make it. Data breaches, for example, would be much less s problem if we held relevant people accountable for due care. Who was the last CxO who went to jail, or was even criminally investigated and found innocent, for a data breach into their org? Or a perpetrator, for that matter?
In the long term "laws" won't work. What we see throughout history is that they never work and those who are elected to see to it that it works themselves are corrupt.
The best option is to code it in the technology. For example, we can make laws and regulation to see to it that governments don't take more debt or print more money than they should in order not to cause inflation and economic crisis, but what we've seen throughout history is that this never works in the long term.
The better solution was the one Satoshi came up with: program the fixed amount of currency into the Bitcoin technology with computational and mathematical checks. Now it's extremely difficult to do anything else unless you can somehow control or convince the majority of the nodes to accept it.
The same kind of solutions should be developed for the web.
What if there were a way to create some sort of centralized/decentralized identity store... where anyone wanting access to your information would have to request it, you then supply them a 'key' to gain access...like a pgp key... they can then use your data for business purposes that you allow... you can destroy keys at will so you ALWAYS have the means to shut off a business who's abusing your information, or you could drop off the entire grid by basically revoking all keys...
This would apply to images as well with your likeness (ai-made or w/e)...though I'm not sure how you'd enforce that, unless the protocol also did facial reck/search online notifying you of images of you, that you can then force to be taken offline through legal means.
Of course there's the argument of who owns the copyright -- the person in the picture or the photographer even if they took photo w/ or without your permission/knowledge...etc...
I'm not sure how this would work in the wild, and it's just a concept idea... It would be nice though in the case of a true dystopian future to be able to pull yourself off the grid easier than it is today.
I have also pondered on variations of this idea of users _owning_ their own data and only granting access to their data to apps they trust, as a means to counter the status quo of every company holding users' data hostage in their own walled gardens and preventing data mobility between apps.
However, the one thing that I've always struggled with is how to handle apps that need write access to users' data in order to be useful. For instance, a messaging app needs to be able to write new messages onto the user-owned data store, but if we allow arbitrary reads/writes to some namespaced path to the store, an app simply needs to encrypt the data with some secret key that the user doesn't know in order to build a decentralized walled garden that stifles data mobility in the same way that centralized walled gardens do today.
Sometimes problems are better solved legally rather than technically. You could spend all year thinking of a way to prevent this or you could just have a law that states that users must have access to machine readable copies of all the data you collect about them.
To a computer there is very little you can do to distinguish between obfuscated and regular data but to a human/legal system the difference is clear.
the app would have rights to clone data locally, however certain 'fields' would source content via key from source of truth... for instance username/profile name... so that if you revoke key the content remains but the username/name on account would be redacted...similar to how reddit has content w/ a deleted_user...
Sans the encryption - it's been looked as, IIRC, but not there yet. I'm not sure whether that would actually make it easy to revoke access though; as soon as someone has a key to decrypt it, they can just copy the decrypted information elsewhere, right?
(Disclosure: I work at inrupt, TimBL's startup that exists to stimulate Solid adoption. Opinions are my own.)
Want to save the web quick? Enable 402 Payment Required through some form of digital wallet that will allow anonymized payments. The lack of payment streams is the biggest driver of garbage
A big problem with sites being paid directly by users is how to treat that transaction legally. It may require the site to register as a business in every jurisdiction it has paying visitors, collect taxes for each jurisdiction, and comply with each jurisdiction’s consumer protection, privacy, and content restriction laws.
I don’t think you will see any large scale movement to micropayments until at least the EU and the various US states change their legal frameworks for digital goods to characterize these transactions as being solely under the jurisdiction of where the site resides.
Just like how the real world has shadow-banking to serve the marginalized, so should the internet.
I'm keen on the idea that a vibrant portion of internet commerce should be opaque to governments. Perhaps not the best place to start a formal business in; where you have to think about accounting and taxes, but it will be a boon for ad-hoc informal businesses.
I'd like to think of it as facilitating the primordial soup that will give rise to new ways of doing things.
I've seen postit notes in London advertising (illegal) weed sale by chatting on encrypted messenger and paying with crypto coin. Both attempts to keep the authorities in shadow.
Add this to the black markets for exploits, data dump leaks, and skimmed CC info - I'd say that certainly there is a healthy shadow market on the webz out there.
The only thing - it's not as visible as it was, say, 10 years ago, when Silk Road was well known, and we all know how that ended.
not just a problem, it is THE problem. It can be done, perhaps by having a browser wallet with a limit $/person/month, and the transactions can be verifiable, but anonymous. Tax systems from 2 centuries ago do not serve us well anymore
The digital financial system is too big a stick in terms of political soft power for any government to willingly give up on principle. Any concession thereof will also be used as the basis for black market/illegal transactions/tax evasion purposes.
AML/KYC exists as it does for a reason, and it isn't going away any time soon I'm afraid. I've worked in the industry for far too long to even entertain a fantasy that a system as you describe could ever work. Once you try to encapsulate any financial transaction processing capability with the wrapper of a business, you have to extract operating cost from the financial activity you are facilitating to at least fund a compliance/legal/risk department as your organization has become the lever with which the government enacts accountability for the transactions you're processing.
The only way around that is to drop a fully functional banking suite in every user's hands, which in a fractional reserve based economy comes with it's own problems. (I.e. What do you mean I can't declare myself a billionaire?)
The entire financial system is such a house of cards it simply wouldn't be able to survive a true democratization of the capability to transfer money. It wouldn't be feasible to regulate, and no one would want to be left holding the responsibility bag for the higher risk financial traffic. The level of oversight of every last citizen, if actually attempted would quickly result in excessive chafing as people who aren't even guaranteed to know how to file their taxes now need to figure out how to meet the big boys regulatory burden. No exceptions. Not exercising your capability for monetary transfer either wouldn't necessarily be a guard against regulatory issues, since that would be indistinguishable from someone not reporting.
The level of crash and burn once people realize that the entire system only works because there are such high barriers to entry would be entertaining though.
Then again, maybe I'm just jaded from being in there for so long. Maybe people would realize that the line they've been fed to put all their money in 401k's which serve as investment vehicles to further entrench established players (who were paying that wage in the first place) does nothing but perpetuate the business cycle, and exclude new market entrants due to hyper optimization.
Maybe financial literacy and community spirit would bloom, and entire communities would come together to pool cash to maintain their own infrastructure, and to take care of their own without exploitative behavior becoming the norm.
Maybe starting and growing a local business would become a more attractive venture, deconsolidating the market and turning the dial back on the too big to fail Hobbesian monoliths we're surrounded by today; engines of fundamental income inequality looking to extract the most while minimizing liabilities; ensuring that wages only barely appropriate to keep people coming back to work get paid to ensure that shareholders are getting what they paid for, even if by doing so, it destabilizes life for those who can't afford to buy in and handle the chaos of meeting the challenges of pay-check-to-paycheck life.
Regulations have grown to absurd Kafkaesque proportions in recent years to the point where they 're being exppensive for small business here in the EU, and it's clear they are doing it to feed the financial sector jobs, not because suddenly there is a lot more fraud in europe, or because there is a bigger benefit out of it.
I'm not so sure it is "not going to happen" especially as millenials age and realize there is a clear dichotomy between generations owning property/cash vs generations who don't own anything tangible and have basically lived rented lives. Unfairness usually leads people to turn their backs to inflated assets like property, and instead to create their own generation's bubbles.
> Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone
> 1. By crafting policies that address the needs of systematically excluded
> groups
> a. Designing gender responsive and inclusive data plans targeting women and
> other systematically excluded groups.
What's he suggesting? Give women discounted internet?
The fact that it is ambiguous leaves room for it to mean whatever the controlling party wants it to mean. As long as people can't agree on something as fundamental as the goal, it's doomed to fail.
> Give women discounted internet?
Somehow I don't think he was suggesting a "pink tax" or some kind of "ladies internet" that filters some explicit pictures. I think "inclusive" roughly translates as favorable in sentences like these.
Surely the fact that the internet is the exact same price for everybody, regardless of group characteristics, is the ultimate goal? I don't think it is sensible to begin adding bias where there currently is none.
> Somehow I don't think he was suggesting a "pink tax" or some kind of "ladies internet" that filters some explicit pictures.
It's my impression that the price of internet access is at least somewhat proportional to local cost of living. And I don't see why there shouldn't be income-based discounts.
But, perhaps bizarrely enough, I do think that filtered internet access is a very sensible idea. I mean, it's not uncommon for parents to restrict access by their underage children. HN has "maxvisit" and "minaway" settings so users can manage their usage. And many search sites have "safe search" settings.
So why not let users set that up at the ISP level?
> It's my impression that the price of internet access is at
> least somewhat proportional to local cost of living.
Typically as is the cost of food, housing, wages, etc.
> And I don't see why there shouldn't be income-based
> discounts.
Is it really the job of the ISP to account for such things? Not that I agree with this, but: Surely it would make more sense to balance income at the point of it arriving in your account, not when you go to spend it?
I don't think we want private companies to become political or biased in any way, I think this should be the soul responsibility of accountable politicians, rather than unaccountable corporate entities.
> it's not uncommon for parents to restrict access by their
> underage children
> HN has "maxvisit" and "minaway" settings so users can
> manage their usage. And many search sites have "safe
> search" settings.
> So why not let users set that up at the ISP level?
Firstly I believe people should have the ability to choose what filters they impose on themselves, such filters should never be on by default. I can fully understand and respect the cases for wanting such filtering, but it can also be extremely dangerous.
Secondly I believe in most cases that such filters do already exist - you can request such things from your ISP, purchase routers that filter such traffic, install software onto devices that perform blocking, etc. The options exist and are actively used.
One real example I remember was a parent installing a simple filter on their family computer (for their child). It would filter websites and key-words/phrases from websites, such as "sex". It so happened there was an incident reported by a local news website with something like "Local Child Sex Offender Still Not Caught", which of course was filtered to "Local Offender Still Not Caught". Their child was out playing in this quite high risk area and the parents were completely unaware of the risks.
The point is, that when acting in what we believe to be in the best interest of ourselves and others, we can actually cause more damage than good.
> The point is, that when acting in what we believe to be in the best interest of ourselves and others, we can actually cause more damage than good.
I do agree; you should not add such filters which cause those problems. But that is the customer's own decision what software to run on their computer, and not mine.
I think the filtering should be done by the customer directly, although if the ISP offers it as an optional feature, that would be OK too, as long as it is purely optional and when disabled (which you can do at no extra charge and no extra difficulty) you have a real internet connection.
There's a difference between being a social construct and not existing. The people who reject “race” as an inherent physical trait don't usually argue that it doesn't exist, but that it is a social construct, essentially identical in nature to ethnicity, which is uncontroversially purely a social construct.
It's actually worse than that; any possible definition of race is incoherent in the face of pedigree collapse, so that people who believe and act as if race were a social construction are wrong, in the same way that people who believe and act as if horoscopes predict personality and psychics predict the future are wrong.
A social construction is a shared fantasy; it's something which doesn't exist but which humans emphatically insist is real. To use an analogy, a reflection doesn't exist either, but that doesn't stop a mirror from causing animals to act as if they were standing in front of themselves. (The photons are real; the illusion that they produce in the mind of the viewer is not.)
> It's actually worse than that; any possible definition of race is incoherent in the face of pedigree collapse
I think you are confusing race with races; that definitions of races are incoherent is fully encompassed by the race-as-social-construct school. (Social constructs need not be incoherent, but the incoherence of race is not something unmentioned by those seeing race as a social construct.)
> A social construction is a shared fantasy; it's something which doesn't exist but which humans emphatically insist is real.
That's...emphatically false. A social construct is a real phenomenon. It may or may not internally reference some other thing which does not exist in the manner depicted in that reference (as the argument goes that images of race do, but law is equally a social construct but does not inherently do this, though particular constructs of law might.)
And social constructs are often incompletely shared; there is nothing unusual about race in that regard, as you seem to be referencing (though your actual argument is somewhat opaque.)
> To use an analogy, a reflection doesn't exist either,
Reflections are phenomena which certainly do exist. Now, they might trick the viewer into believing they are images of an object which does not exist (or, at least, does not exist in the position and orientation suggested by the appearance of the reflection) but the reflection itself absolutely does exist. Likewise social constructs exist whether or not they reference physical things which do not as if they did.
I think the argument still holds that people should not be paying differential data rates based on a social construct. Rates for internet should either be based on total underlying infrastructure costs (the utility model), on local infrastructure costs (the competitive market model) or on how much the market will bear (the monopoly model).
It’s funny, if you look at the stats then you will see Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat etc are all majority female. The only social network that has gender parity is LinkedIn. HN may be predominantly male (no one knows for sure) but it’s a rounding error in terms of user numbers. There’s no male equivalent of Pinterest (Reddit isn’t even close)
I'm sorry, but this just sounds like a bunch of feel-good babble that isn't taking anything seriously.
Free speech? Fundamental rights? "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"?
Yes, these are all good things. But also all in deep, fundamental conflict with each other. Moral and political philosophers have been debating how to resolve them for centuries... and the disagreements are just as strong as ever.
His plan isn't taking any strong stances at all, which would involve actually making decisions between competing values. Instead, he's just trying to have it all -- which sounds good, but provides zero actionable guidance.
It's even worse than feel-good babble. It's signaling TBL's shift from advocating a decentralized free internet towards a centralized censored internet.
"Free speech? Fundamental rights?" are what we want, but people who claim to want free speech and then claim they want "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"? ultimately mean that they want censorship.
It's basically what happened to social media and the internet. Remember that everyone from Reddit to Zuckerburg to news companies claimed they supported free speech a decade ago. Then money/politics/etc got involved and they started talking about ""Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"?" and we have a censored dystopia on our hands.
In china, they use "harmony" as a propaganda tool to justify censorship. In the west, we use "civility" along with "best in humanity", "universal human rights", etc to justify censorship.
I suppose it comes down to who defines "the best" or what good and bad is. Your definition most likely won't be the same as mine.
Times that by 6 billion (and different cultural attitudes in different lands) and it's obvious we will never always agree. The World Wide Web won't solve the differences between people.
I think we should stop pretending it will, or expecting too much of a collection of computer-served XML. That's all it is, fundamentally.
I would probably say that politics and social movements should stay out of this serving of XML, as you can't keep all of the people happy all of the time, so why try?
Increasingly the machines we use are sending data back instead of serving us, frustratingly.
Most of these answers make me think FAANG staff are a bit omnipresent on HN nowadays. You know he, standing on Vert's shoulders, invented the flipping WWW right? You know better and are trying to do what about it exactly?? Oh yeah, make money.
We can start by preventing ads that highjack pages and redirect to undesirable locations. I tried three times to read the article on my phone and was redirected to other sites.
We will need to support not breaking the internet; the web is just a part of that. Still, they should fix it by making W3C specifications so that it doesn't have the stupid stuff (because there is a lot of stupid stuff in it now); but, also is needed to protect free and open internet too, which is separate but related (and will help to save the web too, although it won't do it by itself because there are other issues than internet involved). Such as, ensure that internet packets can be freely distributed (to their intended destination) without tampering, if they follow the transport-layer protocols (application-layer protocols, such as HTTP(S), is not the job of the ISP to enforce; you can use any application-layer protocols on any port numbers in either direction (it is the job only of the two end points (client and server) to block the packets they don't want, and not anyone else)). The issues specific to web is to improve the web browser software (a lot of the stuff is stupid designs, I think). For internet, ensure you can be part of internet.
IMO, news serves the same purpose as zip files... A concise yet accurate representation of the whole.
What we have today is curve fitting of events to a narrative, taking only the sentences which create a permutation to support the bias, not seeking summation.
And/or the curve fits an emotional goal(ie to scare readers into action).
But we can measure zip's efficiency, but it's harder to measure the true accuracy of events when summarizing, because different points are of varying levels of importance to different people.
This has led me to pay attention to the signal and ignore the noise; watching the full speeches, and viewing the sources myself, but most people aren't so inclined, they just shriek & rage, baited by an inaccurate context shrinker.
Thus, we have hyper informed people who watch full context, as well as severely misinformed folks, getting bad recaps. It is like the income disparity gap with information.
6 months ago Berners-Lee was claiming to be on the road to rolling out Web 2.0, a de-centralized protocol we'd all jump on to be free of this cruft.
Fast-forward to now and his new scheme is a sort of UN for Web 1.0? And, like the UN, one that is totally powerless beyond sternly written letters and is governed by some of the greatest infringers of the very rights it's claiming to protect?
I'm going to assume he isn't as naive as one would have to be to blindly push such a doomed-to-fail proposition, so on the same assumption this has to be some sort of fight for relevancy or mere publicity.
It is not dead, but also not progressing very fast. I think low adoption rate is their biggest hurdle, and subsequent lack of network effects in the development community. Solid based on a bunch of Linked Data standards which find most traction in small academic circles. Few sexy applications or good libraries to build from.
It's not dead! It's just no longer at MIT (as is also mentioned on the website you linked). Tim founded a startup called inrupt (disclosure: I work there, opinions my own) that aims to stimulate commercial adoption. The links in the sibling comment by rapnie are an excellent place to start.
How does an organisation even stimulate others to adopt Solid? I cannot imagine your daily activities. Can you elaborate, assuming you would be comfortable to do so?
I can't disclose everything (I'm not involved with all the parts of the company), but the most important way in which I contribute to that is by building developer tooling and writing documentation for engineers looking to write apps on Solid.
If you care one wit about saving the web, then you will recognize that both the best and the worst of humanity will continue to coexist on the web so long as they continue to exist within humanity.
That does not mean that from a policy or prosecutorial perspective we should not continue to investigate and prosecute crimes as they occur, but crime will occur, and the best we can do is work to protect ourselves and others. That means security and privacy and cryptography.
Now there is the question, does the web need to be saved? I’m open to discussing whether it does, but the problem with this assertion is that it has never been easier to build and host a website containing all that you can legally host. If there are problems, they are legal, not technical. You can host webshit or family photos or pornography or your blog or a list of links to your favorite websites or a collection of selfies or a review site or a private reddit clone or your class notes or some personal research or any number of other things, because I could sit here all night typing out examples and probably find out of Hacker News has a character limit in the process.
You can serve JavaScript or ads or well designed style sheets or really really bad style sheets they make the blink tag look positively understated, or you can serve plain Jane HTML or even plainer text files, or even PDFs or DOCs or DOCX files or videos or sounds or any number of other binaries.
I’m not sure entirely what we’ve lost besides the websites that the owners have chosen not to host any longer. People have made bad choices about where to host the only copies of something they loved and built and hosted on someone else’s server, only to see those sites shut down, and will probably continue to make such choices. This is fine, an integral part of liberty is to have the ability to source enough rope to hang yourself with.
Enjoy the things you have now, for nothing lasts forever. Make that which you would like to see more of to seed the world and inspire others.
Google, Facebook and Microsoft are supporters of this? And do their names have to come before many others in the list? Do these companies now have the audacity to claim that they support or will abide by this contract? It sounds like propaganda lifted straight out of 1984 — “freedom is slavery” and “ignorance is strength”.
No thanks, this seems like it is asking governments and companies to adopt specific political positions and policies. This seems less like saving a “neutral” web and more like creating an ideological one. For example:
> Establishing policies designed to respect and promote the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those pertaining to education, gender equality, systematically excluded groups, climate, and socio-environmental justice.
Hasn’t he always had a plan to save the web? What’s one dude supposed to do against an army of close to trillion dollars mega corporations with millions of machines and tens of thousands of engineers whose sole purpose is to build models of their users and spam ads?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadI think we can safely ignore this.
> That's because they have such strong motivations to keep things as they are, and even make them worse.
And the EU, Britain, US, etc don't?
I know it's hard to believe, the leader of internet censorship isn't in China, Russia or Iran. It's in europe.
"Germany’s Online Crackdowns Inspire the World’s Dictators"
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdow...
And the leaders of tech censorship isn't in China, it's in the US since major tech companies are in the US.
This is like saying Iran is the biggest polluter because they produce oil.
These all sound very nice, but I don’t think there’s any company or government that would claim not to do these things.
If so, then either they are lying, or the plan imposes so few restrictions that it is worthless.
We’ll see if that actually happens.
A goodly number of points are also left so vague that almost anyone can claim that their opponent isn’t abiding by them, providing a perfect environment for anarcho-tyranny.
2 sweeps:
1) How many of those words will actually be meaningfully different when their statements are released?
2) When will they pull the trigger to make that happen?
Does Berners-Lee have any form in policy? Did he have genuine inventive insight or just right place right time permissive license? These are genuine questions I'm asking to which I don't have answers - maybe he's saved the web before, and his inventive insight was utterly brilliant for all I know?
That´s just my 2 cents though!
The political and social arrangement of the U.S. Constitution, for example, is worth trying to preserve. It will only endure if most of us, and our leaders, agree to follow it.
Most such arrangements are shared illusions that are doomed, unless we agree to follow them. It really boils down to that, because we are all fundamentally free to act as selfish savages of we want.
The "build strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome" point seems impossibly idealistic. And indeed, for lack of a better word, boring. I'd rather have a diversity of communities, run however they choose. If someone doesn't feel "safe and welcome", they can just go away.
Also, from https://contractfortheweb.org/:
> 1. By working towards a more inclusive Web:
> a. Adopting best practices on civil discourse online and educating the next generation on these matters.
Why must all discourse be "civil"? I mean, that's a value here at HN. But it's not one for the chans. So shouldn't people have the right to choose?
> b. Committing to amplify the messages of systematically excluded groups, and standing up for them when they are being targeted or abused.
I can't help laughing at this. Because I'm like 99% sure that they aren't including neo-Nazis here. Or even the incels who aren't even vaguely neo-Nazi.
Anyway, in my ideal internet, everyone could post whatever they want, as anonymously as they want, and as resistant to takedown as they want. And everyone else could choose what to access.
A “strong” community necessarily has members and non-members, insiders and outsiders. If it doesn’t it’s not a community in any meaningful sense, it’s just an amorphous crowd. The idea of a community that welcomes everyone literally is a contradiction in terms.
But if the internet is seen for what it is, a network of networks and the web a community of communities then there's no paradox - if one is not comfortable or welcomed in one community, one can move to, or start, another community that more accepting.
But then, that allows for exactly the sort of toxic and abusive communities and users that TBL and many others believe are "destroying" the web.
And they're kind of correct, but not because these communities exist, per se, or because the 'wrong sorts of people' are allowed to use the web, but because visibility and dialogue has been mostly centralized along a few large platforms with disproportionate influence, and as a result of the effect of SEO and social media algorithms, much of the diversity of the web has been filtered out for the sake of extremist and commercial content.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-con...
I'm really sick of these "influencers" doing horrible things and then coming back and expecting us to give them blank checks as defenders of the web, when they only seem to do the right thing when it's convenient for them. Get your own house in order before coming out and trying to fix everybody else's.
I think that's a bit harsh. His invention is one of the greatest of all time, that's quite a legacy
I am not saying I would have done any better than him in the circumstances but let’s be honest: TBL didn’t invent hypertext and the WWW is just a poor knock-off of Englebart’s ideas. It has taken millions of people decades to turn the WWW into something that can be secured and scaled and actually be useful to ordinary people. TBL was in the right place at the right time but don’t overestimate his actual contribution.
http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/158/90/
I don't think it was as usable as we like to remember (he did develop it on a NeXT Cube after all, not an average everyday machine), as the spelling-out of domain addresses on the BBC was always a drawn-out lengthy "haych tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash double-u double-u double-u DOT bee bee see DOT com forward slash..." etc etc etc because it was so new in the 1990s.
Of course I do look back in fondness before the unleashing of commercialism on the Internet and it turning into the world's leading cesspit of garbage, tracking and colossal webpages, but that's for another discussion.
TBL threw all of that out of the window in favour of a simple, lightweight, extensible decentralised system. This was not at all an obvious thing to do. Previous high priests of Hypertext were incensed that this toy system lacking so many 'essential' features became more popular and useful in couple of years than their systems had in decades.
None of this was inevitable. If it had been obvious, someone would have already done it.
The WWW he invented was HTTP+HTML+URL. Three things that may have already existed on their own in some sense. He took giant ideas, off others shoulders, and melded them.
I wonder, does his web contract apply to apps that use HTTP+URL but not HTML? Does he intend the word web to be inclusive of not website tech, or does he not care about the rest of the internet thats not "web."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machi...
But, say our current tech is as good as we know how to make it. Data breaches, for example, would be much less s problem if we held relevant people accountable for due care. Who was the last CxO who went to jail, or was even criminally investigated and found innocent, for a data breach into their org? Or a perpetrator, for that matter?
The best option is to code it in the technology. For example, we can make laws and regulation to see to it that governments don't take more debt or print more money than they should in order not to cause inflation and economic crisis, but what we've seen throughout history is that this never works in the long term.
The better solution was the one Satoshi came up with: program the fixed amount of currency into the Bitcoin technology with computational and mathematical checks. Now it's extremely difficult to do anything else unless you can somehow control or convince the majority of the nodes to accept it.
The same kind of solutions should be developed for the web.
This would apply to images as well with your likeness (ai-made or w/e)...though I'm not sure how you'd enforce that, unless the protocol also did facial reck/search online notifying you of images of you, that you can then force to be taken offline through legal means.
Of course there's the argument of who owns the copyright -- the person in the picture or the photographer even if they took photo w/ or without your permission/knowledge...etc...
I'm not sure how this would work in the wild, and it's just a concept idea... It would be nice though in the case of a true dystopian future to be able to pull yourself off the grid easier than it is today.
However, the one thing that I've always struggled with is how to handle apps that need write access to users' data in order to be useful. For instance, a messaging app needs to be able to write new messages onto the user-owned data store, but if we allow arbitrary reads/writes to some namespaced path to the store, an app simply needs to encrypt the data with some secret key that the user doesn't know in order to build a decentralized walled garden that stifles data mobility in the same way that centralized walled gardens do today.
To a computer there is very little you can do to distinguish between obfuscated and regular data but to a human/legal system the difference is clear.
Sans the encryption - it's been looked as, IIRC, but not there yet. I'm not sure whether that would actually make it easy to revoke access though; as soon as someone has a key to decrypt it, they can just copy the decrypted information elsewhere, right?
(Disclosure: I work at inrupt, TimBL's startup that exists to stimulate Solid adoption. Opinions are my own.)
I don’t think you will see any large scale movement to micropayments until at least the EU and the various US states change their legal frameworks for digital goods to characterize these transactions as being solely under the jurisdiction of where the site resides.
I'm keen on the idea that a vibrant portion of internet commerce should be opaque to governments. Perhaps not the best place to start a formal business in; where you have to think about accounting and taxes, but it will be a boon for ad-hoc informal businesses.
I'd like to think of it as facilitating the primordial soup that will give rise to new ways of doing things.
Add this to the black markets for exploits, data dump leaks, and skimmed CC info - I'd say that certainly there is a healthy shadow market on the webz out there.
The only thing - it's not as visible as it was, say, 10 years ago, when Silk Road was well known, and we all know how that ended.
The digital financial system is too big a stick in terms of political soft power for any government to willingly give up on principle. Any concession thereof will also be used as the basis for black market/illegal transactions/tax evasion purposes.
AML/KYC exists as it does for a reason, and it isn't going away any time soon I'm afraid. I've worked in the industry for far too long to even entertain a fantasy that a system as you describe could ever work. Once you try to encapsulate any financial transaction processing capability with the wrapper of a business, you have to extract operating cost from the financial activity you are facilitating to at least fund a compliance/legal/risk department as your organization has become the lever with which the government enacts accountability for the transactions you're processing.
The only way around that is to drop a fully functional banking suite in every user's hands, which in a fractional reserve based economy comes with it's own problems. (I.e. What do you mean I can't declare myself a billionaire?)
The entire financial system is such a house of cards it simply wouldn't be able to survive a true democratization of the capability to transfer money. It wouldn't be feasible to regulate, and no one would want to be left holding the responsibility bag for the higher risk financial traffic. The level of oversight of every last citizen, if actually attempted would quickly result in excessive chafing as people who aren't even guaranteed to know how to file their taxes now need to figure out how to meet the big boys regulatory burden. No exceptions. Not exercising your capability for monetary transfer either wouldn't necessarily be a guard against regulatory issues, since that would be indistinguishable from someone not reporting.
The level of crash and burn once people realize that the entire system only works because there are such high barriers to entry would be entertaining though.
Then again, maybe I'm just jaded from being in there for so long. Maybe people would realize that the line they've been fed to put all their money in 401k's which serve as investment vehicles to further entrench established players (who were paying that wage in the first place) does nothing but perpetuate the business cycle, and exclude new market entrants due to hyper optimization.
Maybe financial literacy and community spirit would bloom, and entire communities would come together to pool cash to maintain their own infrastructure, and to take care of their own without exploitative behavior becoming the norm.
Maybe starting and growing a local business would become a more attractive venture, deconsolidating the market and turning the dial back on the too big to fail Hobbesian monoliths we're surrounded by today; engines of fundamental income inequality looking to extract the most while minimizing liabilities; ensuring that wages only barely appropriate to keep people coming back to work get paid to ensure that shareholders are getting what they paid for, even if by doing so, it destabilizes life for those who can't afford to buy in and handle the chaos of meeting the challenges of pay-check-to-paycheck life.
Who knows?
I'm not so sure it is "not going to happen" especially as millenials age and realize there is a clear dichotomy between generations owning property/cash vs generations who don't own anything tangible and have basically lived rented lives. Unfairness usually leads people to turn their backs to inflated assets like property, and instead to create their own generation's bubbles.
> Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone
> 1. By crafting policies that address the needs of systematically excluded groups
> a. Designing gender responsive and inclusive data plans targeting women and other systematically excluded groups
The fact that it is ambiguous leaves room for it to mean whatever the controlling party wants it to mean. As long as people can't agree on something as fundamental as the goal, it's doomed to fail.
> Give women discounted internet?
Somehow I don't think he was suggesting a "pink tax" or some kind of "ladies internet" that filters some explicit pictures. I think "inclusive" roughly translates as favorable in sentences like these.
Surely the fact that the internet is the exact same price for everybody, regardless of group characteristics, is the ultimate goal? I don't think it is sensible to begin adding bias where there currently is none.
It's my impression that the price of internet access is at least somewhat proportional to local cost of living. And I don't see why there shouldn't be income-based discounts.
But, perhaps bizarrely enough, I do think that filtered internet access is a very sensible idea. I mean, it's not uncommon for parents to restrict access by their underage children. HN has "maxvisit" and "minaway" settings so users can manage their usage. And many search sites have "safe search" settings.
So why not let users set that up at the ISP level?
> least somewhat proportional to local cost of living.
Typically as is the cost of food, housing, wages, etc.
> And I don't see why there shouldn't be income-based
> discounts.
Is it really the job of the ISP to account for such things? Not that I agree with this, but: Surely it would make more sense to balance income at the point of it arriving in your account, not when you go to spend it?
I don't think we want private companies to become political or biased in any way, I think this should be the soul responsibility of accountable politicians, rather than unaccountable corporate entities.
> it's not uncommon for parents to restrict access by their
> underage children
> HN has "maxvisit" and "minaway" settings so users can
> manage their usage. And many search sites have "safe
> search" settings.
> So why not let users set that up at the ISP level?
Firstly I believe people should have the ability to choose what filters they impose on themselves, such filters should never be on by default. I can fully understand and respect the cases for wanting such filtering, but it can also be extremely dangerous.
Secondly I believe in most cases that such filters do already exist - you can request such things from your ISP, purchase routers that filter such traffic, install software onto devices that perform blocking, etc. The options exist and are actively used.
One real example I remember was a parent installing a simple filter on their family computer (for their child). It would filter websites and key-words/phrases from websites, such as "sex". It so happened there was an incident reported by a local news website with something like "Local Child Sex Offender Still Not Caught", which of course was filtered to "Local Offender Still Not Caught". Their child was out playing in this quite high risk area and the parents were completely unaware of the risks.
The point is, that when acting in what we believe to be in the best interest of ourselves and others, we can actually cause more damage than good.
I do agree; you should not add such filters which cause those problems. But that is the customer's own decision what software to run on their computer, and not mine.
Because in a stereotypical household with 2 parents and 2 children, you still have 1 IP and 1 ISP connection.
But yes, perhaps at the router level, managed by device MAC.
There's a difference between being a social construct and not existing. The people who reject “race” as an inherent physical trait don't usually argue that it doesn't exist, but that it is a social construct, essentially identical in nature to ethnicity, which is uncontroversially purely a social construct.
A social construction is a shared fantasy; it's something which doesn't exist but which humans emphatically insist is real. To use an analogy, a reflection doesn't exist either, but that doesn't stop a mirror from causing animals to act as if they were standing in front of themselves. (The photons are real; the illusion that they produce in the mind of the viewer is not.)
I think you are confusing race with races; that definitions of races are incoherent is fully encompassed by the race-as-social-construct school. (Social constructs need not be incoherent, but the incoherence of race is not something unmentioned by those seeing race as a social construct.)
> A social construction is a shared fantasy; it's something which doesn't exist but which humans emphatically insist is real.
That's...emphatically false. A social construct is a real phenomenon. It may or may not internally reference some other thing which does not exist in the manner depicted in that reference (as the argument goes that images of race do, but law is equally a social construct but does not inherently do this, though particular constructs of law might.)
And social constructs are often incompletely shared; there is nothing unusual about race in that regard, as you seem to be referencing (though your actual argument is somewhat opaque.)
> To use an analogy, a reflection doesn't exist either,
Reflections are phenomena which certainly do exist. Now, they might trick the viewer into believing they are images of an object which does not exist (or, at least, does not exist in the position and orientation suggested by the appearance of the reflection) but the reflection itself absolutely does exist. Likewise social constructs exist whether or not they reference physical things which do not as if they did.
It’s funny, if you look at the stats then you will see Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat etc are all majority female. The only social network that has gender parity is LinkedIn. HN may be predominantly male (no one knows for sure) but it’s a rounding error in terms of user numbers. There’s no male equivalent of Pinterest (Reddit isn’t even close)
Free speech? Fundamental rights? "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"?
Yes, these are all good things. But also all in deep, fundamental conflict with each other. Moral and political philosophers have been debating how to resolve them for centuries... and the disagreements are just as strong as ever.
His plan isn't taking any strong stances at all, which would involve actually making decisions between competing values. Instead, he's just trying to have it all -- which sounds good, but provides zero actionable guidance.
"Free speech? Fundamental rights?" are what we want, but people who claim to want free speech and then claim they want "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"? ultimately mean that they want censorship.
It's basically what happened to social media and the internet. Remember that everyone from Reddit to Zuckerburg to news companies claimed they supported free speech a decade ago. Then money/politics/etc got involved and they started talking about ""Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"?" and we have a censored dystopia on our hands.
In china, they use "harmony" as a propaganda tool to justify censorship. In the west, we use "civility" along with "best in humanity", "universal human rights", etc to justify censorship.
Times that by 6 billion (and different cultural attitudes in different lands) and it's obvious we will never always agree. The World Wide Web won't solve the differences between people.
I think we should stop pretending it will, or expecting too much of a collection of computer-served XML. That's all it is, fundamentally. I would probably say that politics and social movements should stay out of this serving of XML, as you can't keep all of the people happy all of the time, so why try?
Increasingly the machines we use are sending data back instead of serving us, frustratingly.
What we have today is curve fitting of events to a narrative, taking only the sentences which create a permutation to support the bias, not seeking summation.
And/or the curve fits an emotional goal(ie to scare readers into action).
But we can measure zip's efficiency, but it's harder to measure the true accuracy of events when summarizing, because different points are of varying levels of importance to different people.
This has led me to pay attention to the signal and ignore the noise; watching the full speeches, and viewing the sources myself, but most people aren't so inclined, they just shriek & rage, baited by an inaccurate context shrinker.
Thus, we have hyper informed people who watch full context, as well as severely misinformed folks, getting bad recaps. It is like the income disparity gap with information.
Fast-forward to now and his new scheme is a sort of UN for Web 1.0? And, like the UN, one that is totally powerless beyond sternly written letters and is governed by some of the greatest infringers of the very rights it's claiming to protect?
I'm going to assume he isn't as naive as one would have to be to blindly push such a doomed-to-fail proposition, so on the same assumption this has to be some sort of fight for relevancy or mere publicity.
https://solid.mit.edu
Is it dead?
The Gitter channels are apparently most active.
Web: https://solidproject.org/
Forum: https://forum.solidproject.org/
Gitter channels, etc: https://github.com/solid/information/blob/master/gitter-chat...
Repo: https://github.com/solid/solid
That does not mean that from a policy or prosecutorial perspective we should not continue to investigate and prosecute crimes as they occur, but crime will occur, and the best we can do is work to protect ourselves and others. That means security and privacy and cryptography.
Now there is the question, does the web need to be saved? I’m open to discussing whether it does, but the problem with this assertion is that it has never been easier to build and host a website containing all that you can legally host. If there are problems, they are legal, not technical. You can host webshit or family photos or pornography or your blog or a list of links to your favorite websites or a collection of selfies or a review site or a private reddit clone or your class notes or some personal research or any number of other things, because I could sit here all night typing out examples and probably find out of Hacker News has a character limit in the process.
You can serve JavaScript or ads or well designed style sheets or really really bad style sheets they make the blink tag look positively understated, or you can serve plain Jane HTML or even plainer text files, or even PDFs or DOCs or DOCX files or videos or sounds or any number of other binaries.
I’m not sure entirely what we’ve lost besides the websites that the owners have chosen not to host any longer. People have made bad choices about where to host the only copies of something they loved and built and hosted on someone else’s server, only to see those sites shut down, and will probably continue to make such choices. This is fine, an integral part of liberty is to have the ability to source enough rope to hang yourself with.
Enjoy the things you have now, for nothing lasts forever. Make that which you would like to see more of to seed the world and inspire others.
> Establishing policies designed to respect and promote the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those pertaining to education, gender equality, systematically excluded groups, climate, and socio-environmental justice.
Feels like ladila-feel-good article.