Comment by yason | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yason | Hacker News Reader

People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let Facebook host and own their data if they can comment and like friends' videos for that. That's basically fine. From what I can learn from the history the web has mostly been centralised and will continue to be so. To think, all business domains tend to converge into few large companies/services, and finally into duopolies and monopolies if left to their own devices.

What I'm worried about is actively preventing decentralized, small-scale or hackership services.

If some guy has to effectively stop hosting a forum because of GDPR, or I can't host my own email server, or serve HTTP out of my home box, or get decent bandwidth for a private virtual network, Tor, I2P or IPFS while Netflix works at full speed, or do about anything else than initiate HTTP/HTTPS connections to known big company grade services or be flagged as a malicious endpoint, then there will not be a decentralised network living within the same infrastructure as the centralised behemoths. And that is the death people are talking about.

A marginal decentralised segment of the current internet is still larger than the whole decentralised internet in its early years. As long as the old ways of networking can live, develop, and grow along with the FANG & co that's fine. But it might not be taken for granted, eventually.

"People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let the King and nobles be educated, decide, rule them and govern the country." could have said many 3 centuries ago.

Cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association.

"Because freedom of association necessarily recognizes pluralistic sources of power and organisation, aside from the government, it has been a primary target for repression by all dictatorial societies."

And that freedom is rather young (19th century).

Hosting/owning data and the processes on them is no different as an exercise of sovereignity.

At this point, today, it's more a matter of law (it must be recognized and guaranteed) than a matter of ability (it's possible) or market (it exists). That's where the battle is.

Well put. All the regulation and change Ralph Nader and co managed to make happen didn't take more than a few hundred motivated people - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWxc_kYmPTE

People are "lazy and don't care" is dialogue you hear from people who don't have the experience of getting things done.

People are lazy and don't care.

It's why we are now in a world where either Google or Apple have access to pretty much every piece of data that every person on the planet produces or consumes.

The Google Problem in particular is spawned by people wanting free or cheap stuff at any cost.

It will take more than a few hundred people to change this now. It's too entrenched.

Yes they/we are. And more over, they are unaware and/or uneducated.

So were they before when literacy and education was limited to nobility and clergy (probably not so much per design, but per means and imagination and interest). And so couldn't understand WHAT general people literacy and education could bring to society as a whole and for every one.

It's not a matter of guilt or lazyness. Things take time to enter the mind of one person, even more so the mind of societies.

An educational/technological advantage is not always but often a winning one.

And that is not an excuse.

People aren't lazy and don't care.

People are busy and have other priorities and don't see meaningful gains for investing time and effort in opposing the endless torrent of technofeudalism washing over them.

Trying to moralize a co-ordination issue is great way to shift the responsibility for bad things occurring from those doing it to those who failed to resist it.

>If some guy has to effectively stop hosting a forum because of GDPR

GDPR does not prevent people from hosting forums

The new Copyright Directive may have that effect though.

?

How would that have that effect?

I'm no expert, but from what I've heard, site owners can be held liable for hosting copyrighted material now. If you're running a site with lots of user generated content, it could be difficult to distinguish what is 100% user made vs copied from somewhere else.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

It's time to start copyright check startup.

You are absolutely correct. This law could have such effect.

More realistically, this is a problem that has no easy technical solution that originates from a law that still isn't adopted.

If I were an owner of such platform, I wouldn't worry too much about it now. In a year... maybe.

Even more realistically: is there any reason to assume any of this stuff will ever be enforced, let alone enforced against obscure forums?

Here in the UK, these sorts of laws have had, as far as I know, zero enforcement.

http://nocookielaw.com/ https://silktide.com/the-stupid-cookie-law-is-dead-at-last/ https://silktide.com/dear-ico-this-is-why-web-developers-hat...

GDPR is worse, actually. Both laws are making site owners liable for hosting certain types of content (personal information and copyrighted materials, respectively). However automatically detecting copyrighted materials is relatively straightforward compared but automatically detecting personal information is probably impossible.

> However automatically detecting copyrighted materials is relatively straightforward

Sure, that's easy: everything is copyrighted. The difficult part is determining whether the uploader can legally share the copyrighted material, which is just as likely to prove impossible to automate with accuracy and precision as the detection of personal information.

Explicitly no. Though practically that seems to be the effect.

How so? All you have to do is not collect personal data, which is easy.

I don’t run any forums at the moment, but when I did, the software I used gave users massive opportunity to provide information about themselves. Some users loved this and filled in every field, perhaps because they enjoyed that it made socialising easier.

The problem for anyone wanting to host a forum is that using off-the-shelf software is a sensible route, but the available software might still be leaning towards offering to collect data like this, might not yet have support for GDPR disclaimers, checkboxes, etc.

What I’m saying is let’s assume neither malice nor incompetence and instead that those wishing to host forums may be hamstrung by the available software.

Ive said the same thing before about not just facebook, but google/microsoft owning email, uber/lyft owning taxi, yelp/tripadvisor owning restaurant reviews.

Absolutely nobody actually seems to care about decentralized databases and networks feeding compatible clients info. Every user interface is made by the people holding the data in a walled garden.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17536381

Heard of the IndieWeb guys? https://indieweb.org/

>From what I can learn from the history the web has mostly been centralised and will continue to be so.

How do you define "web" and "centralized" here? The internet (not necessarily the world wide web) was created to be decentralized because the US military recognized that having a single point of communication failure was a bad design (http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf).

In my estimation, the most centralized thing about the internet as we currently know it is the physical infrastructure (which is still not really centralized, but there's a relatively small number of Tier 1 networks connecting everyone else). But the protocols can be implemented over radio if necessary (albeit much more slowly), so even that's not really centralized.

My estimation is that as governments increase regulation of the internet as we know it, more people will move to TOR or something like it (move to the "dark web" if you like) as a way to just do normal internet things without the need for a lawyer. The governments in turn may decide to outlaw that (as in China), but enforcement of that seems infeasible against determined and skilled citizens.

How do you define "web" and "centralized" here? The internet (not necessarily the world wide web) was created to be decentralized

Web as the world wide web of HTML pages served over the HTTP protocol. And centralised as served by the handful of biggest players in each market.

Even early on big centralised portals were attracting users. Internet started to attract common folks as soon as some services grew big enough to become "go to sites" at which point word of mouth was crushing smaller players. People didn't use Neighbour Joe's Web Crawler for searching, people used something like Alta Vista. The market for shopping on the internet increased directly as a function of big commerce sites gaining popularity. The small players never enjoyed more than a fraction of the number of users the big players had.

It seems to me that this suggests common people who do not have an interest in technology want to rely on a single (or at most few) brand(s) of service providers which basically leads to a winner-takes-all market and that just adds into centralised nature. If your mother wants to buy something on the internet isn't the only clue she has called "Amazon" ? (Or some applicable local market leader, depending on the country.)

Even if internet itself was completely decentralised and people were using RFC 1149 to reach the net I'm pretty sure they would still be connecting to Amazon, Ebay, Google, and other centralised hubs.

The leading metric to change all of this is to develop a person's self-awareness, to connect themselves with themselves more deeply, so they can feel the pull-distraction that ads cause - and understanding the manipulation and general shallow level of information used in ads - and thus feel repulsed by them, and then want to not have them be in their life unexpectedly. If you can't perceive or sense the impact or associate to the impact, then you can't care about it - and caring is what leads to impulse, and action vs. laziness.

It is definitely warrants to be concern and care to have, for safety and security purposes of society as a whole to counter the will of bad actors that perhaps will ebb and flow until the end of time; it's why I believe as a signal point (a canary) for government-citizen relationships, is a deeply embedded law that allows for mesh networks to be always allowed - and so the moment there is an organized crackdown on this, we can know something is up - whether that is capitalistic for-profit efforts of people thinking more selfishly or a bad actor who has malicious and hatred-based goals/impulses.

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