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Comment by infodroid | Hacker News Reader

Berners-Lee said:

> "The web is already decentralized... We don't have a technology problem; we have a social problem."

I am not sure I follow. Surely censorship and mass surveillance are facilitated by the hierarchical topology of the internet and the reliance on central authorities like IANA for key resources. This does not look like a social problem to me. Maybe a political problem, yes.

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He also mentions the dominance of Google, Facebook and Twitter. Making a usable distributed alternative to these (or to Amazon, Airbnb, etc. etc. - even HN) is not an easy technical problem. It does not help that making money off such a distributed alternative is also not easy, but had it been easy enough to do, perhaps someone would have done it for free.

(Not to mention that for the average person, setting up a website and publishing something there is not an easy technical problem in 2016; most wouldn't know where to start. Personally, I'm not a web programmer but I am a working programmer and I can write a simple web app using a CGI Python script or Django or Rails, and for me setting up a website is fairly annoying in 2016. And anything involving non-static HTML is a PITA, and writing static HTML is no fun, either. The web is not the most pleasant thing, technologically, and this is one reason that a company amortizing the cost of dealing with the web over many users has an easier time than an individual trying to do something over the "bare" web without intermediaries.)

As a 'non-tech person' I can affirm that setting up a simple static website (to host my paintings) is far from a 'point and click' process unless I take the Squarespace/Weebly route, and they have annoying restrictions unless you pay a subscription. I investigated setting up a web server and serving from my ADSL connected desktop but in the end the downtime would be too much (power loss, regular maintenance etc.) plus configuring Apache seemed like something I shouldn't take on as a first task, so I took the Github Pages route, which still means I've to teach myself HTML/CSS3/Git. Fortunately I like tech, but what if a typical "grandma" wants to securely publish her site? Seems like the web is not quite at that level of intuitiveness yet.

Grandma can always ask for help, there's a high probability that she has nephews that can do it. IMHO this obsession with grandmas of the world has become our rationale for robbing users of control, privacy, freedom. But I ask you this: instead of worrying about our grandmas, shouldn't we worry more about our children?

Why should they be mutually incompatible? Abstracting some tasks to be easy enough for point-and-click use can definitely also co-exist with options that students, professionals and hobbyists can toggle to open up the underlying layers, at least with free software. With proprietary systems this whole discussion is IMO futile on the technical side. Vendors of proprietary systems can only be regulated by markets and laws, which has so far not worked except generally in their favour.

So I wasn't for an obsession with any one level of user but for catering to all levels of users, which seems to be technically possible now, so why isn't it happening? Instead we get closed-source systems with vendor lock on the one extreme or free systems which grandmas (which stands for any non-tech user) can't use as easily as their closed source counterparts. Why can't we have freedom (as in open development/transparency, not price) & ease-of-use together?

Children, grandmas and people of every other age cannot set up and maintain a website as you'd most certainly agree, and as a nephew or any other relative I would at this point refuse to help because of the maintenance part which they cannot do and which will never end.

People will use things which most of the time do not punish mistakes too harshly and don't present problems requiring actual thinking to solve. I think people are right in refusing to use the other kind of thing because the alternative burns too much of one's time and is too risky. Big web companies manage to build such artifacts over the infrastructure that is the Internet and the WWW; I'm not aware of alternatives.

It's already possible for everybody to host his own mail server. But we choose to let Google host all our conversations. So the problem is more social.

Sure, it's possible to host your own mail server, except that you need to host it in a place that isn't port-filtered (eg: not on most residential ISP connections), and if you want anyone to be able to receive your emails you need to make sure you're not blacklisted-by-default by the big spam filtering engines. (eg: DNS settings, but also monitoring successful delivery rates and working with spam filter operators to determine why your emails get flagged and trashed.)

You are still describing a social problem.

Social problems become technical problems. Spam, unauthorised access, malware, spoofing identities, dos etc. would not be problems if we all just acted cool but instead solutions become minimum technical requirements for the next version.

> Surely censorship and mass surveillance are facilitated by the hierarchical topology of the internet and the reliance on central authorities like IANA for key resources.

Are they? Censorship maybe sometimes (e.g. when the FBI takes over domains), but in general I'd say censorship and mass surveillance don't have much to do with that level of internet centralization. Right now the fact that people use centralized services, which are easier to monitor, and can be forced to help censor (or willingly self-censor), is the bigger issue.

So what you're saying is, a bigger issue than internet centralization is internet centralization?

Yes. The post I replied to mentioned a specific category of centralization, given by the "hierarchical topology of the internet". That everybody uses Facebook/Google/whatever is also a kind of centralization. Generally you can get a domain name, an IP address and freely send packets around, and that is comparatively unrestricted by censorship and surveillance.

Only because surveillance at a higher level works well. But if you do something that the powers-that-be can't accept (although it's within the laws), depending on the powers-that-be, you can have a tap placed on your ISP or your domain revoked or taken over. Again an instance of centralization being exploited. But other than illegal wireless broadcast I wonder if there is any remedy for censorship/control at this level.

My interpretation is as follows. Despite the distributed nature of the Internet, the society at large seems to promote centralized services on top of it. One gov't, one legal system, one language, one search engine etc. Something in the nature of people motivates this type of organization.

Some sort of social cost?

Something in the nature of people motivates this type of organization

Network effect.

There's a lot of money in ensuring you're the only guy on the block doing what you do.

I wouldn't confuse the effects of the profit motive with some nature people have for centralization.

My friends, myself and even my mother were content with the disparate isles of the net 20+ years ago.

This is definitely true. What would you rather do: buy everything from Amazon, or have a big list of distributors that you can shop and for individual categories like books, office supplies, electronics, etc.? Would you rather have to keep track of some of your friends on Google+, some on Facebook, some on Myspace, some on Diaspora, or just have them all in one place? There is a usability problem with distributed services in this way.

See: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality by Clay Shirky (February 8, 2003) http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...

"In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution."

For a much bigger look at similar effects, see Critical Mass by Philip Ball https://www.amazon.co.uk/Critical-Mass-Thing-Leads-Another/d...

> The web is already decentralized

Considering that we depend a lot on CAs and the DNS root the web is distributed, not decentralized.

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