My instinct is also to retreat to technical solutions. But, unfortunately, it appears we engineers need to fight back in the legal and political domain to stand a chance.
I like to think someone can come along with Jobs-like charisma and redefine the public's intuition for personal computing again. Foundation models with maximally deterministic harnesses, voice assistants with honest, tasteful amounts of roboticism, maybe data tenancy that doesn't make you feel like a surveilled ecosystem prisoner.
NVIDIA local AI builds are moving in that direction, but are wildly expensive. I think a lot of the current AI backlash (esp data-centers) comes from the public's accurate intuition that the current centralized, monopolistic, cloud-centric solution disempowers them, and eats any gains this magical technology would've brought them. Plugging a sliver box into the wall and your router, with no recurring fees; that would make people feel different about "taking our jobs" because they would be the unquestionable beneficiary.
> voice assistants with honest, tasteful amounts of roboticism
Do you mean like, hey chatbot stop trying to be my best friend ?
This marketing tone that every company I do business with cares deeply about me as a person - this corrosive hypocritical nonsense has obviously been sucked up into AI training materials.
This type of response is one I keep seeing, maybe it's becoming a meme
It doesnt make any sense as an argument because nothing stops one from doing _both_: 1. use a practical solution now and 2. "fight back in the legal and political domain" hoping to achieve another solution in the future
Common sense favors pursuing #1 as the opponent in #2 has "limitless" resources and the process is extremely slow
A cynic might even see advocating #2 at the expense of #1 as a "call to inaction", i.e., "please do nothing", as almost all readers are unlikely to pursue such a difficult and costly "solution"
Framing the two options as either-or, i.e., one or the other but not #1 and not both, encourages readers to give up, accept the status quo and "let others do it", assuming they dont have the ability to pursue #2 themselves
That's no good if broad laws are passed that require age verification. It could be interpreted as even SSHing into a server that doesn't verify your age is illegal. Some decades ago it would have seemed too stupid to actually happen. Now I'm not so sure.
I've really enjoyed playing around with https://github.com/markqvist/nomadnet and the reticulum protocol in general as a peer-to-peer alternative to www
It's not the "where" but the "that you link" which is ironic: referring to it by the https:// scheme turns it into a link (a fundamental aspect of www); a scheme like ssh:// or git:// would avoid this.
The WWW was at least created with egalitarian ideals, even if it failed to meet those ideals (despite succeeding far more than people want to credit.) It was available to everyone, it ostensibly allowed anyone to publish and communicate freely. It wasn't intended for only a single culture or subculture.
Whatever comes after will either be entirely controlled by corporate and government interests or gatekept against "normies," and thus be a homogeneous cultural bubble doomed to wither into self-referential senescence and die, and will be far less free, less powerful and less capable than the web. We'll never get anything with the transformative potential of the web again.
A world where your only options are GovNet or EliteWhiteHackerDudeSpace. I don't look forward to that at all.
I would rather go back to when the web was useful, and everything wasn't either paywalled or plastered with ads too. The web will never die, but this version of it is on borrowed time.
I don't think WWW will ever die but I can see a hard split coming eventually. Most people will just put up with the current state of the internet for a long time yet.
Neither does the normal web. It became this way. The ability to run decentralized is not what is preventing enshittification.
I would argue eg. a LoRa based Reticulum network is enshittification resistant, because of physical bandwidth and range limitations. It enforces decentralization and abuse/advertisement/... inherently doesn't scale, is not worth the effort. It favors authentic, low reach human2human information sharing.
Why would I want anyone to "compete" with so-called "tech" companies if I believe their "business model" is fundamentally-flawed
The cause of this legislation is the proliferation of that "business model"
Namely, creating large audiences for advertising,^1 data collection and surveillance through intermediation, i.e., acting as a middleman, the opposite of peer-to-peer
"Big Tech" does not compete. It acquires potential competitors. It is sometimes questionable whether the "potential competitors" actually intend to compete as they are more than willing to sell out
Yeah, I feel as though people have seen the error of creating a free internet and are trying as much as possible to reverse it. It's kind of like how Photoshop (and most software companies honestly) have seen how selling a license in perpetuity does not work and opt for the rent-seeking monthly subscription route.
The age verification with the EU ID card can be implemented without leaking any identifying information. If it's gonna be like that is questionable, but it's technically possible.
Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the Internet, smartphones, AI, electric cars and countless other things. That, and the Costco hot dogs mentioned in another reply.
Smartphones and AI are tady's cancer, so good job America! Polluting the earth and its inhabitants once more. For electric cars, I have my doubts that without China we will have them, but I'll leave you simmer in your exceptionalism.
These "economic freedoms", specifically the actions of so-called "tech" companies with respect to the internet, are the cause of "age verfification" legislation
The original internet had rules against using it for commercial activity
It lacked "economic freedoms"
FWIW I still found it worth using at the time, despite no so-called "tech" companies
It also lacked websites of unmanageable size with hundreds of millions of pages of user-generated content used as bait to lure in ad targets for data collection and surveillance, so-called "platforms" or "social media"
It lacked "age verification" to access those websites because those websites did not exist
There will be at least one HN reply arguing that the original internet sucked, or some other brainless dismissal
As if the internet we have now does not suck. Clearly, it does suck for some people
It is not a lack of "economic freedoms" on the internet that has led to "age verification". It's quite the opposite
Dude, we get it, you’re a super fan but these are some intellectually lazy comments. Our military is powerful, yes, but if you want to make some exceptional claims you need to show your homework demonstrating that kind of claimed huge leap over other economies (China, Russia, Germany, etc.). Be sure to explain how Iran is doing so well for so much less.
"The global Internets progenitor was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) financed and encouraged by the U.S. Department of Defense.
In order to understand the wonder that the Internet and various other components of the Net represent, we need to understand why the ARPANET Completion Report ends with the suggestion that the ARPANET is fundamentally connected to and born of computer science rather than of the military.
The Completion Report goes on to differentiate the research ARPA supported from the research done by the computer industry: The computer industry, in the main, still thinks of the computer as an arithmetic engine. Their heritage is reflected even in current designs of their communication systems. They have an economic and psychological commitment to the arithmetic engine model, and it can die only slowly.12 The Completion Report further analyzes this problem by tracing it back to the nations universities: furthermore, it is a view that is still reinforced by most of the nations computer science programs. Even universities, or at least parts of them, are held in the grasp of the arithmetic engine concept.13
Computer networking was developed and spread widely in an environment outside of commercial and profit considerations, an environment that supported such research."
Michael Hauben
Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (1997)
IEEE Computer Society Press
ISBN 0-8186-7706-6
HN commenters/voters may reject the use of the term "military" in the origin story of the internet
That's fine
However it was American taxpayers, through the _Department of Defense_, that financed the creation of the internet
That's government spending, not "American capitalism"
The original internet was non-commercial and was not the result of "American capitalism"
As above, the American computer industry (capitalism) at the time was not focused on computer networking and using computers for communication, it was focused on computers as "arithmetic engines"
The only reason the US Gov had the expertise and resources to fund DARPA in the first place was because it was a massive capitalist country with enormous wealth
To act like no private citizens or businesses contributed to the internet because it came out of DARPA is ignorant at best. DARPA literally pays private entities to do research for them to this day. It’s their primary mechanism for action. So confidently ignorant.
Take your Reddit tier America bad slop back to Reddit.
This is not an argument against American capitalism. It is a correction of the false assertion that "without American capitalism there would be no internet"
American capitalism can create ARPA but capitalism did not create the internet
Neither American companies, nor "private citizens" looking to profit, paid for the research into computer networking that resulted in the internet. At that time, there was no commerercial incentive to support such research
"Computer networking was developed and spread widely in an environment _outside_ of commercial and profit considerations, an environment that supported such research."
Hauben, Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (1997)
Without American capitalism, specifically "Big Tech", there would be no "age verification" legislation
Let's cut to the chase. The "age verfication" problem has nothing to do with "American capitalism" or other silly HN tangents. The issue is the lack of rules governing governing data collection, surveillance and advertising, rules that would interfere with the Big Tech "business model". "Age verification" will be another means of data collection for Big Tech but it could also intefere with Big Tech's access to U16 ad targets. It could interere with "indoctrination" into a belief system where Big Tech _is_ the internet
The truth is that the internet does not require "Big Tech" in order to exist and have value. I know this because I used it before so-called "tech" companies existed and, with respect to the state of the art _at that time_, it was amazing. Information was shared between internet users without any attempt to profit from it financially. Today, so-called "tech" companies intermediate (act as a middleman for) the sharing of other peoples' information over the internet in order to profit from data collection, surveillance and advertising. This is unnecessary
The myth that commenters supporting Silicon Valley try to spread is that the internet can only exist and have value if "Big Tech" exists. Their "business model" is "free" intermediation of information retrieval or communication over the internet, thus their argument in favor of status quo becomes something like "online advertising (and associated data collection and surveillance) is essential for the internet to survive"
Their next argument may be that a "healthy AI ecosystem" is necessary for the internet to survive
Except that the www came out of Switzerland, the first electric vehicles out of Scotland and Germany, the earliest descriptions of neural networks - also Scotland, and countless other things, like Rockets and whatnot, also out of Europe. But, sure, congrats on that ARPANet thing.
It is American ingenuity that turned academic curiosities like neural nets into usable products. The missing ingredient in places like Europe or Asia is not intelligence, it is a business friendly environment and the right incentives for entrepreneurs. This is why countries like China can copy existing stuff and make derivative improvements, but don't meaningfully innovate.
The www became infested with so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries (middlemen)
Lots of folks making money from surveillance ad system on the www. Oversized, unmanageable websites calling themselves "platforms"
The www is an ad network. Not a great place for non-commercial activity
Fortunately, the internet is more than the www. The internet was not created to collect behavioral data and deliver advertising as its primary purpose
People pay for an internet subscription, not a www subscription (or now a "social media subscription")