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Which works great, until ISPs start offering subsidized plans for Facebook, Gmail, Spotify, Twitter, and expensive plans for everything else. When that happens, there is very little economic incentive to have smaller websites, smaller e-commerce websites end up being part of Amazon, and Google starts providing more and more of its own content.

I agree that could be an outcome, but could there not also be a reverse "Eternal September" where niche communities thrive? Since people would need to make a conscious, meaningful choice to join them?

The evidence thus far has seemed to suggest that when deprived of the oxygen of search & RSS traffic & the independent blogosphere and niche communities have withered on the vine. Less traffic and less commenting means less incentive to post, which means less posting. What seems to have happened is people have gathered around the last remaining campfires for warmth.

> until ISPs start offering subsidized plans for Facebook, Gmail, Spotify, Twitter, and expensive plans for everything else.

Is priced content worse than the current situation, where services are monetized exclusively by essentially running malware on the user's machine?

Those are two separate things. OP is talking about the pipe being monetized. That is an extra charge we will pay just to get to the sites that then monetize via ads or gathering our data.

My point is that there might be kickbacks from pipe operator to content mill.

> Is priced content worse than the current situation, where services are monetized exclusively by essentially running malware on the user's machine?

You're conflating two things: the revenue model for publishers and ISPs cutting off access to services which do not sign an agreement with them. The fee ISPs charge, you can take as read would not go towards subsidizing independent content.

But then you just choose an ISP that doesn't do such dastardly deals. It might cost more, but that's your choice.

In the US, one's choices are often (1) ISP A, (2) no internet.

Do you not have cable as well as the phone system? Do you not have sewers a competitor could run fibre through? Do you not have unlicensed p2p wireless?

EU is about to enforce GDPR. Net neutrality seems to be American problem, while rest of the world is moving to the opposite direction.

Which economy has better prospects in the long run? Currently internet is very U.S. centric because most of the big players are located there. That could change if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies to evolve.

Net neutrality is still a problem outside the USA. For example, a lot of network providers provide "Unlimited Streaming" where they pick popular music and video streaming providers and allow you to use them without using up your data allowance.

Example: http://www.three.co.uk/go-binge

> EU is about to enforce GDPR [...] if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies

Surely you see the contradiction there.

> Currently internet is very U.S. centric because most of the big players are located there. That could change if [...]

That's not just a coincidence and I don't believe it's any kind of first-mover advantage. It's about the environment in which you operate and passing more and more laws and rules, regardless of the intentions, is the opposite direction. One can lament the digital lawlessness, but we can't pretend it didn't have value or that tailored laws could have a similar effect.

Not necessarily a contradiction - GDPR could have many possible effects; it's too early to claim that these effects will disproportionately harm small companies.

One possibility, of course, is that larger companies will have more resources to tackle GDPR compliance, and thus be better able to respond effectively than small companies. However, it's also possible that, by taking privacy / security seriously from day one and storing the minimal set of user data needed to operate, a smaller company will have a distinct advantage over some BigCo that must now migrate sprawling, inter-tangled distributed systems never designed for GDPR compliance. After all, that small company now has a compelling legal reason to avoid feature / data warehousing bloat and save their limited engineering resources, whereas the larger company most certainly has that bloat baked deeply into their stack due to years and years of "Big Data" hype.

> it's too early to claim that these effects will disproportionately harm small companies.

It's not too early to claim that the risks are disproportionate. Those of us with small companies really just count on subjective enforcement. Sadly, it seems everyone says "do nothing wrong, nothing to worry about" with these kinds of laws and don't understand risk management or the cost of conformance.

It's not strictness being the problem, it's the uncertainty. GDPR seems like a framework to take out anybody at will, because nobody can really conform to the laws due to that uncertainty. If you do anything really disruptive/innovative, you're probably gonna get problems.

I really dislike this use of the term "disruptive / innovative" - it's almost a circular definition in this context, since it's effectively being used to mean "anything new that has a high chance of running afoul of the law". English has better words for this sort of thing: criminal, negligent, etc.

Launching a new product / service does not give a company carte blanche to do whatever they like, no matter what Uber et al. may prefer to believe. Suppose I want to create a "gun-share" app, because, you know, sharing economy and stuff. I should fully expect that, where laws exist that make this infeasible (e.g. background checks, transfer of ownership laws, etc.), those laws will be enforced. I should also fully expect that those laws might change.

If I've been paying attention to the broader world - something that Silicon Valley isn't historically that great at - I should probably have seen this coming for years, since that's how long it takes to build support for legislation. GDPR didn't come out of nowhere; data privacy, security, and ownership concerns have been building for a while now.

In the case of the GDPR: my personal position is that it gives EU citizens rights we should all have had from the start with respect to our data. Good on them for passing it, and for giving it teeth. If that tramples on some service that can't be bothered to respect those rights, I couldn't care less - and I say this as a small business owner who's fully aware that, yes, someday I too may face a GDPR compliance request. Maybe I'll be prepared, maybe I won't, maybe it'll never happen; that's part of doing business.

> That's not just a coincidence and I don't believe it's any kind of first-mover advantage. It's about the environment in which you operate and passing more and more laws and rules, regardless of the intentions, is the opposite direction

You're presenting the situation as a failure of the EU, but I think you've missed the point here. The big players are located in the US because the environment there rewards big players and has a general snowball effect. The EU system rewards small-player innovation and limits the creation of very large, dominant, monopolistic big players. This should be a net benefit to the overall system, if it weren't fot big players just coming in from elsewhere. Unfortunately, due to the global nature of the web, this leads to less-regulated US big players dominating the EU players. Solving that is tough, but the fact GDPR applies to US companies is an interesting start.

> The EU system rewards small-player innovation and limits the creation of very large, dominant, monopolistic big players.

I disagree. Do you believe this is the case today or is it the goal? From what I understand, the gap is quite large between number of small companies based on environment. Many of us with smaller companies stand on the shoulder of giants. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good, and that can mean the financial incentive to become large spurs those of us who are small. Artificial ceilings, however altruistic people tell themselves they are by limiting the big, bad, scary companies, often are just a low tide lowering all boats in a trickle-down way.

> Do you believe this is the case today or is it the goal? From what I understand, the gap is quite large between number of small companies based on environment.

You're right, but what I was saying is that I believe it is the case today in the EU to a far greater extent than in it is in the US. That's not saying in any way that the EU is close to an ideal situation, or that there aren't big, dominant EU players. Along with the case of the influence of big non-EU players skewing the environment to a large degree.

GDPR and Net neutrality are two different things. Net neutrality is very much a problem in Europe. It's not talked about as much as in the US unfortunately.

Also, GDPR applies to companies of all size - which can hurts small companies more than bigger ones.

Interesting how badly I was misunderstood.

My point was not that they would be about the same thing. My point is that GDPR is pretty clearly about the rights of the little guy. Lack of net neutrality is clearly about the rights of big businesses. Neither alone does not seem to do that much good or harm. But if those attitudes are permanent in the legislating systems, that will have an effect.

So do you believe companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are going hire the best people, make the best money and offer the best content? It could be. Or there could be something disruptive. Where is that disruptive going to happen?

GDPR is a bit heavy handed where it counts, and generally ends up as a net-loss.

The US definitely has its problems, but as long as there's still an ISP in the Valley who upholds Net Neutrality, development is still probably going to happen there.

Asia will replace it, if anything.

Yo, I live in the Valley, I'm not aware of any actual alternative to Comcast. Sonic isn't available in my neighborhood, I can't do the dish on the roof one because of landlord rules, and fiber options aren't available in my neighborhood.

As a EU citizen after watching all of Zuckerberg talking to Congress I was really amazed. I do not think any country in Europe would have such open discussions. Most articles I've seen have unfortunately picked soundbites to make a point, or claimed the Representatives were not tech-savvy. But for me it was really great democracy in action.

if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies to evolve

GDPR is great, but it seems to me many of the Congresswomen/men were questioning how would legislation impact the ability of US tech companies to remain agile. I do not think we have such pro-business forces in the EU. That's why we are so far behind US and China in tech. I fear more and more legislation will make us less likely to have small agile companies.

> As a EU citizen after watching all of Zuckerberg talking to Congress I was really amazed. I do not think any country in Europe would have such open discussions.

No need to get infected by American exceptionalism. The UK Parliament Select Committee asked Zuckerberg in for questioning over this, and he would have received a comparable grilling. Zuck refused to go.

Honestly I think Europes structure is mostly perfect for small agile companies. It is not very welcoming to big business however.

It's easy to found a company and pay a fair flat rate percentage tax rate as eu (or schengen for this topic) citizen. It's just not economical to stay here once you get big tho.

Of course net neutrality matters for the small guys to thrive. My point is that net neutrality is the only thing that matters. This is not about HTML or RSS or Facebook feeds.

A non-neutral internet would have impacted the 90s internet in the same way.

And in fact almost did. Things like ISPs blocking VOIP services, blocking VPNs, preventing more than one device being able to use a connection, are things that actually happened, though a couple of years too late in some cases to count as 'the 90s'.

It's a discoverability problem. All that great small community content isn't monetizable and gets de-incentivized over time by algorithmic changes in search engines and link aggregators.

Everyone is being nudged to where there's money to be made.

The pre-google internet also had a discovery problem. Remember webrings? I think OP is right that the decentralized internet is the same as in the "golden era".

> Everyone is being nudged to where there's money to be made.

This is an ass-backward way of looking at what actually happens. People (you, me, CEOs of large corporations) are the entire system. You and I want a thing, there is a demand, smart people notice that demand and fill it. Folk flock to the product that satisfies their demands.

I admit there is clever marketing that manipulates our ape brains in very effective ways, perhaps that nudges us toward one thing over another, but there is legitimate demand beyond the marketing.

Then there are communities and marketplaces. These products are largely successful because of a demand for an agreed meeting place to share ideas, sell things, exchange messages. You don't need to be 'nudged' toward these places, they just happen to be objectively very useful places because everyone else agrees they are.

Money being made is a byproduct of the success of these places. I am so tired of people looking at big successful corporations as somehow being existential to an otherwise utopian perfect system. Regular people give power to corporations by patronizing them, it's as simple as that. Most-always no one is forcing anyone to go to one place over another, we almost always have a choice. We need to recognize that as consumers we should take responsibility for the companies we promote to the forefront. If you don't like marketing or large corporations, reject them! Take responsibility for how you spend your money, we have the power.

It's more a question of culture. Theoretically, yes, nothing has been lost since the 90s. All those technologies still exist. But culturally, the norms of the web have shifted. The proposal is to create technologies that encourage/empower regular people (people who don't read hacker news) to make a cultural shift back to the web's original vision.

Culture shifts with awareness, education, and well-designed solutions being available. The next "Facebook" platform that isn't designed to control or have a strategy to collect or hoard data will exist.

The layman doesn't generally know what's good for them in any specialized area, that's quite clear when we saw the level of technical understanding shown during questions to Mark Zuckerberg; it's obvious career politicians will need to eventually evolve over to successful people with strong holistic standing of all systems, with the ability to learn in depth and have strong critical thinking.

We need to do a better job as a society of developing these people, and of capturing society's attention with genuine interest and excitement, and not merely with hype and paid-for reach.

There is some irony in painting the major content delivery platforms in the 90s as bad actors when in actuality much of 90s media (like BBC) had much higher standards than so much of what comes via the web today.

Today we don't "pay" for quality content. Today content simply has authority if a lot of people who think like "me" read it _else_ -1.

There is some irony in painting the major content delivery platforms in the 90s as bad actors when in actuality much of 90s media (like BBC) had much higher standards than so much of what comes via the web today.

I don't think that really means anything. There is so much junk, that anything that honestly attempts to be good is better than "so much of what comes via the web today."

The problem is that the average user is being nudged (pushed, coerced) to submit his content for free to a publisher who then forwards it to others with advertising or other monetization attached. Self-publishing is very rare.

> I would probably never have read this article if it had been published in the 90s. Since it's #1 on HN, perhaps 50k people have read it today! The way I use the web feels very much like the 90s: a few aggregation sites, a lot of excellent content written by independent guys, links between them...

Don't forget that you're on Hacker News, a relatively small site with a very aggressive name for "normies" :)

The little guy spreading ideas is not as easy as it was, though. If the search engines don't index your site, if Youtube removes the informative videos you made, if FB and Instagram are filtering you out, who is going to see it?

No, the Web has been weaponized by a collusion between corporations and government in order to press as hard as they can for censorship and thought control. Because at the end of the day, if people realized they didn't need big government or big corporations, where would that leave all these billionaires with their revolving doors in and out of publicly appointed power roles?

I honestly get depressed when I think about the dream of open government and more widespread knowledge that was supposed to come about with all this technology working for the little guy. Well, some of it came true, but as soon as it became a threat to the orthodoxy, they found a way to shut it down. And now the baseline model for all these companies is China. Google would be happy to censor Americans in the same way they censor content for the Chinese Communists. One policy for the whole world, and it's not a policy of freedom and openness, but one of oppression, as usual.