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Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

Though I am all for an open internet, that doesn't mean that the internet should allow for the breaking of laws. Having open access to water doesn't mean you can drown another person in it if you'd like.

I disagree with the idea that an open internet is gone forever and that we will forever be under the thumb of our capitalist rulers.

Though we are currently in a troubled time of inequality, it isn't the first time the world has experienced something like this. Industrialization went through a horrible time where centralized power and capitalism took advantage of the people, but the world corrected itself (to a point). We're still on a journey to the perfect world. We may never get there, but the pendulum will continue to swing back and forth, and the internet is just one of the resources used by both sides to leverage their beliefs.

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Sunde is probably coming at this from a point of complete fatigue. Assuming this is not some PR stunt from him, he sounds like he's pretty broken.

> I disagree with the idea that an open internet is gone forever and that we will forever be under the thumb of our capitalist rulers.

I don't think latching onto Sunde's socialist rhetoric is the real message here; the greater message is that the larger Internet-using populace gladly supports the majority of the centralization he is targeting (Facebook, Airbnb, et. al.) because it reduces the cognitive load and latency between them and the panem et circenses they're really consuming on the Internet.

This whole open/decentralized/wild-west cyberpunk game is unfortunately the vocal minority, and if we want the internet to change, those that feel this way should probably try to come off less like a parody of some brogrammer in (HBO) Silicon Valley or an ancap cypherpunk. (Myself included in this criticism.) Neither side is broadcasting a message that is resonating with the greater population that is not worried about the centralization of their content sources. I'm not sure what the message is, but with some empathy toward that use case, I know the age-old messages we've all been pushing might as well be directed to /dev/null for those that don't live on Hacker News, Reddit, mailing lists, et al. I'm reminded of John Oliver's rhetoric toward Snowden and his rephrasing of mass surveillance as the government taking records of their dick pics.

The previously highly-aggregated content of television/radio now seems to have a sort of burnished nostalgic glow. I mean... "Dallas"? Really?

Of course it burned out and faded away, but at least it was something. We now have meta-broadcast in the mold of "Deadwood"; some of it is striking. "Manhattan", "Vikings", "Fargo".

Only Adult Swim seems to be moving content off the Internet onto cable, and I'm not sure about that frankly. It's not like "The Heart She Holler" has an audience other than people who studied Southern Gothic in college/read Faulkner in earnest. It's brilliant but...

We are just talking to ourselves here.

All the power struggles matter now, but they won't later. It'll all be absorbed as dead matter for whatever tree grows in this compost.

At this point we need more techies who are willing to go into politics. Before, everything could be solved with technology and nobody really understood how to enforce things. Now everything is becoming centralized and the people in power (politicians and big companies) are dictating the rights we have on the internet.

Internet rights are important. The internet is a part of so many of the things that we do in real life that it is inexcusable to continue to treat it differently. Smart phones know where we are and who we talk to; the internet of things may someday take hold and keep track of everything we do and when we do it; AI will be regulating more and more systems.

The people who use Facebook and turn a blind eye for the sake of convenient services don't care, but many of us do.

You can be for the open Internet all you want. It's too late, that's the point. Our best chance has come and gone. People somehow still believe we have a say, we don't. Maybe we never had. I don't think this is like industrialization, were things got bad and then through much struggle got better. There's little to no indications that will happen. Partly because the open Internet was an anomaly. It's like how domains work isn't going to change, done is done. Many people wrongfully believed and believe that they have some sort of inherent influence over the Internet because it's "their thing". They don't. Maybe they should have, but they don't. The window for realistically doing something is gone, maybe some time ago. We have to live with what is now. Mostly with stories like these not even making the front page.

I'd like to end my rambling with a quote from, of all people, Winston Chuchill from before the second world war. "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

> Though I am all for an open internet, that doesn't mean that the internet should allow for the breaking of laws.

...

Laws should not exist when they are extremely easy to break (morally and technically) and extremely difficult to enforce. They degrade the general respect for the rule of law.

Bingo.

I recall that when the cassette tape came along, there was a contemplation of banning it. But it was decided to be "undemocratic" to do so, especially as to uphold such a ban one would have to basically police very home.

Given that this was while the cold war was still going, the nations of the west had a low water mark to compare themselves to.

So instead home copying of audio was given a pass, as long as it was done among family and friends.

These days however you may not have a cop but you have a potential snitch, the PC. And with the USSR gone, there is no longer a low water mark to avoid being compared to.

Thus politicians today are all too willing to entertain ideas that just a few decades ago was unthinkable.

Never mind that copyright as a concept came about when the printing press was something manually operated, and was a law about profit sharing between author and printer (the latter likely holding all the cards, being the owner of a press and all).

That press was big, expensive, and needed to be operated for profits basically.

And the same held true for early music records and movies, both needed heavy an potentially manual machines to produce.

Now however you can compress all those machines into something that fits on a desk, or perhaps even in a lap or pocket.

That shifts things around in a massive way, and the need to have a profit motive to own and operate a "press" is gone.

Our "capitalist rulers" really just aggregate the preference of... us. We are on no such journey to any sort of perfect world, because we're far from perfect.

But perhaps we're getting better.

That has not been true since Bernays and PR/advertising.

Preference manipulation is big.

We think it is.

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