30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web [video]

Most nations are developing increasingly sophisticated regulatory approaches for how the Internet is allowed to operate within their borders. There can be no successor as nearly every nation will have their own requirements, guaranteeing no successor can ever be flexible enough to fit all of them. A successor will end stillborn of hundreds of different regulatory demands: death by committee of 195 nations. Had the Internet originally been conceived in today's environment, with input from dozens of nations, each with their own self-interest at stake, it would have never survived and spread. The sole reason the Internet worked, is because it was initially built by a very small group (compared to the hands touching it today).

Instead what will happen, is haphazard forced customization of the existing Internet. They will beat and punch it into the shape they want it to be domestically. That approach will continue for a minimum of the next 20 to 30 years. Nothing can stop it. The adoption is too high, the investment is too high. Instead of ditching that epic macro investment, nations will bastardize what's already in place and bend it to their own socio-cultural needs or demands. China has already demonstrated how well that can work, how far you can go in molding it to whatever your demands are. If China can do that, others can mostly do what they want with it and will.

The Internet will hyper balkanize, just as most systems from one border to the next tend to (with some exceptions for agreements between large pools like the US & EU). There will never be a replacement system that goes global as the Internet did. It's a one-off - like first discovering a new piece of land nobody had explored before - as nations build frameworks (off their experience with the Internet) to regulate how any digital network can operate, which will make it impossible to smoothly launch a new global network to challenge the Internet. Every aspect of operating socially and commercially on the Internet will get more expensive on average, and especially if your attempt is to operate globally (locally there will be exceptions, countries with low regulatory hurdles and annoyances, but those will be overwhelmingly small nations like an Estonia, New Zealand or Switzerland etc). Internet regulation and control will soar on average, it'll become the compliance nightmare that everything else is that governments get their hands on. That will benefit anybody that gets out of the gate before the barriers get too steep; it will stagnate innovation in most cases and punish anybody that arrives later to the party. Nearly all systems regulated by governments evolve and exist in that mode of suffering, with few exceptions.

Ha! At the risk of sounding self-promotional, I have been motivated to do it back in 2011. Started a company to do just that. Never took VC. I think it was ahead of its time, but there was A LOT to build. Now it’s more needed than ever.

https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...

Met Tim Berners-Lee up at MIT two years ago about their solid.mit.edu project and tried to join forces. But ultimately they got funded and are working on their own thing.

I would love to get feedback on the above link.

I'll take the d...

Less fun than it is today. So even more less fun than it was some time ago...

Today is your happy day: http://dmozlive.com/

>I want the early 90s Internet back.

Here, here! Save for the whole part where we could only connect via dial-up out in Feckall, Nowhere. Could you imagine trying to download the latest Ubuntu ISO, for example, over dial-up?

I blame phones. Without a desktop pc, people no longer run weird servers like Hotline. The internet is limited to whatever the cloud promotes. Reddit is not bad as usenet replacement, certainly better then the alternatives. We dont need to walk on eggshells if we re all a little less argumentative and stop attracting the wrong crowd - i think that point can be improved with our individual contributions. You re not going to get 90s back, no one will, but things aren’t too bad and the web is still more vibrant than all the walled garden asylums.

And then some things never change, like the group think of the tech community and its hype cycles

Webrings!

Surveillance everywhere, ads everywhere, automated armies of trolls/bots/astroturfers, censorship on the rise

I'm with you on this one. I don't think it's any more cordoned off than before (in general—not commenting on certain countries' practices here). Any use of those larger services is completely optional—though I do feel a tad let down when the only offering for some content is a FB page or video.

There is more high quality content online than there ever was—if you know how to look for it. There's also a lot more crap.

I gather the perspective on the internet/web might be very different for people who were introduced post-Google, post-Facebook, etc. For many people those are the introduction, unfortunately. I'm glad Google is featuring some bit of history there, but those large services seem to like to promote that you stay within their walls. In that way I can see the disappointment.

To quote Billy Bragg— "You've got to take the crunchy with the smooth, I suppose"

You can’t really blame anyone. A person doesn’t want to give away his/her information, and site doesn’t want to give away its information for free. They simply don’t see eye to eye.

> What? CERN can't upload a coherent video+audio stream?

I would actually like to see a good explanation of the validity/nonvalidity of this. If too many people watch this video, FB maybe has the best tech to handle the load.

In 1903, Andrew Carnegie dedicated a gorgeous public library to DC: https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x89b7b7928ca1dbd.... Today, it is being gutted and renovated as an Apple Store. That's basically what happened to the web. It's not so much that it's bad, it's just a disappointment.

True. Android is closer to the PC vs Apple's iPhone being closer to a Mac. Not quite a perfect analogy, but it will be interesting to see how those 2 architecture decisions affect both platforms in 10 or 30 years time.

Happy Birth-day little sub-domain... Happy Birthday to you!

Tell that to my grandma and she still wouldn't believe you.

Yes, precisely... rather disappointing that HN users -- the very people you'd expect to know the difference between one protocol and "a set of them" would make this mistake - what hope is there for Joe Public :/

Hahah. my bad.

Did you get the HTTP status code joke at the end? I was rather proud of that!