Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

I would also agree the internet has been a huge net positive.

On the other hand, let’s compare internet to nuclear fission. Clearly lot benefits can be drawn from the technology (assuming safety practices etc) but in our current world order it is primarily used as a deterrent.

So I don’t think OP is complaining unnecessarily. We must strive to ensure technology is used for beneficial purposes. And in that sense, the call to arms is justified.

Obviously, cars are essential. But here is short a list of completely unnecessary issues brought on by greed and industry:

* The health and societal cost of leaded gasoline and the industry resistance to transitioning to unleaded.

* The Automobile industry purchase and subsequent removal of train and light rail tracks in the United States.

* The Automobile industry resistance to requiring airbags.

* The oil industry and it's war against global warming science.

There are many more, these are just the ones off the top of my head.

Point is, it isn't the technology but the industry around the technology that is the issue. Cars are useful and essential just like the internet. But right now, we have a situation akin to the early automobile industry.

I hope that, with this technology, we can get some privacy laws/worker rights/better standards before we have another half-century before anything gets done about the Big Bad Corporate takeover of the Internet.

Again, these are poor examples. It's not terribly easy to learn a language for free using just the internet. Everything is freemium and it's only getting worse. It's arguably easier to go to your local library and use their resources.

Many people have this idea that some things would be impossible if not for the internet, but that definitely isn't the case.

I think focusing what it could be used for and what it has been used for isn’t the right way to approach thinking about it. The internet is by and large used for consuming content from a handful of corporations (disclaimer: I have no source to back up this claim), and a lot of negative consequences follow from that.

Cars kill more than 1 million people a year, and are actively cooking our planet. On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative.

The Internet is a lot more balanced, but both show how a lack of foresight and system design can lead to a lot of negative consequences. We could drastically cut down on the number of road deaths if we took it more seriously and made some big system design changes, but we haven't. We can also make the Internet a better place, but there will always be issue with all massive systems.

Kinda like the minitel. It didn’t “go wrong” but it also went nowhere.

Take the example you mentioned- cars. The Magnificent Ambersons garnered 4 Oscar nominations debating that very topic - should the automobile have replaced horses, and is it a net positive? Even at that time when the benefits of cars were clear, the audience found the film very compelling.

Similarly, Robert Redford starred as a barnstormer in Great Waldo Pepper, which made a strong case against the Air Commerce Act, the sole reason we even have airplanes carrying passengers & goods in the air. Redford’s character is like Linus, feels airplanes are a hobby for having fun doing stunts. But the government spots the potential for a quick buck, shuts him down for good & soon airplane “industry” becomes a real thing, with mail carriers & passenger planes. Redford has a line in that film where the commerce regulator asks him to stop the stunts & just take a job as a airplane mailman - I’m not a fucking courier, I’m a pilot! William Goldman, who studied that period & wrote the film, felt it was his best work & should have gotten the Oscar.

I am sure a decade down the line you will see a film about scientists harking back to the days when the internet was a curious lab experiment, not the giant teats of FAANGs from which the majority of this audience sucks it’s daily fill of milk while blissfully hawking knickknacks for the masses they would rather do without. Nigerian teaching himself Hindi, indeed.

It is the same as the DoD making interstate highways to allow troops to move across the country quickly. Everything else that sprung up along those routes was just a byproduct of the interstate highways. The good, the bad and everything in between.

I don't think that's a fair or apt analogy at all since, in most places around the world, there's still several barriers to entry for using a car - you have to be licensed, you have to be financially able, and you have to live somewhere where it's a benefit to have access to one.

I think the central complaint is not that the internet has been democratized but, conversely, that, much like the United States and several other nations, it's become commercialized rather than democratized which is exactly the opposite of what was the hope for the internet.

I think a more apt summary of the article is that, at the beginning, there was a barrier of entry to the internet that meant that the content was mostly educational, technical, informed, and a bit altruistic. The goal was to propagate knowledge. Now, literally anyone can put their thoughts online, no matter how banal, without any technical skill, education, or barriers and commercial entities have far more capability than the average person to control the flow of information. DMCA requests on YouTube can be abused by huge corporations to protect their profits but individual users have no such ability. This leads to a platform that, unlike its initial intent, is full of low-quality, low-effort information with the exception of content that is meant for sale and consumption.

Unchecked capitalism may have ruined the internet but, hopefully, not past the point of return.

Hell, without the internet I wouldn’t even have known it’s possible to get here. Both physically and in mindset.

qed

I'm not saying I disagree with it necessarily, I don't even understand what you're suggesting enough to disagree or agree with it. It's definitely not _obvious_ to me that the internet has somehow lifted so many people out of poverty, I just don't understand what you mean.

Just the tip of the iceberg, the security services facilitate the criminal underworld playing its part keep GDP up, lots of experiments being done on people individually right now, most of it messing with peoples belief systems which in extreme you see with muslim terrorists carrying out acts. I know I've had similar done to me.

Jimmy Saville was a state apparatus intelligence tool, nothing more nothing less and look at how the state labels him a pedo now!

Knowledge was much harder to ackuire and more valuable, and it was harder to compare prices.

That led to an environment where many, both business owners and employees could akuire some valuable competitive advantage, and make a decent living.

Now that's much harder. Significant competitive advantage(or significant bargaining power) rarely exists, for most.

Most have little economic power. And psychologically that's probably more important than relative wealth.

I can imagine that easily. I know others differ, but is all social media went away tomorrow, my life would be none the poorer for it.

Easy, that's my life right now

>I say this as someone who hardly uses it but knows that it is there if I want to communicate with someone I care about. Do you really want to send physical letters again ? Yes they have their charm and nostalgia but I am not willing to trade the convenience of internet for something worse or outdated.

That all fits in the original, "utopian" if you want, view of the internet espoused in the article. You can do that with email, IMs like IRC, personal webpages. Facebook-style social media, with its surveillance, addictiveness, toxic feedback loops, is irrelevant to this task.

I think that’s a debatable point. I don’t feel safer and I preferred simple tools like ftp, telnet, Usenet over Facebook, Dropbox, google cloud or whatever app is the focus of the current tech hype cycle.

“I'll take all the spam, fake news, trolls, ad stalking and attempt to capture my data than live through a war.”

That seems like an odd nonsequitur. Surely you don’t think there’s a dichotomy between war and Facebook? We have both now, and will have both in the future. Zuckerburg ain’t Jesus, apps are just widgets.

It is always about how we use technology, not the technology per se. For the good, for the bad, for making money. Whatever.

The technical issues are what went wrong, how to protect the net itself from those who would damage and abuse it. Those we seek to improve.

The people side will come with time. If anything perhaps it opens people eyes to just how many people who do not fit within the idealized society many expect or want to be part of. People will learn limits, learn about others, and eventually it will even out.

What it did right is free people from most every government out there and now those governments are fighting back. When you can now see for your self what conditions are elsewhere you are much harder to manipulate which means loss of control. It also shows that no matter how good you thought your government is/was there is room for improvement and their is a dark side. They will seek to divide us, make us fear others all with the promise that if we just let them take control of information again all will be right. Some do it at the point of a gun while others use a TV ad.

Simply put, mommy and daddy were wrong, that were no monsters, not real ones, but there are, they are us.

I essentially argue that we should not confuse the medium (internet, a "network of networks"; like air or water or space) with the usage and information passing by said medium (the "high level" stuff like "speech" or "websites"; like oral speech or stores and parks in the physical world).

I'm surprised that a researcher who contributed to building the medium, the infrastructure itself, would fail to recognize we're talking at very different levels, totally different scopes when we conflate 'internet' with any private company or citizen operating over the medium. It's romantic and doesn't help solving any kind of issue, whether low-level or high-level.

I will echo user `riazrizvi` in this thread:

> Simply the internet has always reflected the segment of society that used it. Now that everyone uses it it reflects society at large. So I don’t think this is an internet problem, but rather an opportunity to see the worlds social problems being translated into a more transparent codified form. I reject the author’s two solutions as being low effort addendums. Let us acknowledge we are not seeing new problems, but rather we are seeing old problems with a new lens.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21383074

Sorry, but no. Ask all the US banks that were DDoS'd between 2012-2013 by (presumably) Iranian nation state actors if "all that crap going over the net was annoying but nothing". Ask Sony if the property and PR damage done to their networks was nothing. Ask Saudi Aramco if the thousands of computer disks they lost were nothing. Ask the Bangladesh banks that lost $81 million to online theft if that loss was nothing. Ask all the businesses who had to pay out incident responders to fix their networks when they got hit by Wanna Cry if those costs were nothing. Large scale crimes happening over the Internet can be more than annoying, they can incur physical damage and costs.

I was rather relieved to read through this article and not hear anything about the 2016 election.

when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest.

now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct.

That's a non-starter for building a system that can serve all people on the planet, so it's not the right approach. There is no way back; the only way is forward, informed by the past, but recognizing the weaknesses of its origins as well as its strengths.

weren't they all working for the .mil?

Curiously, blocking the entire website outright due to incompatible privacy policies is a solution I never really even considered? It certainly changes the dynamic game theoretically speaking. I wonder what the internet would be like in a parallel timeline where that happened?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n...

I don't disagree with some of what the author is attempting to propose, but it's not thought out at all well or clearly, which is a let-down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

> "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

The Internet as image?

- - - -

I like it, but then there's the problem of too much, too little, and differential transparency, eh?

It'd be kinda cool if HN had reddit-like flairs for stories so you could tag them as "no-incognito" or "soft-paywall" so you knew what not to bother clicking on.

This is not limited to computer networks. We do it with relationships as well, how many does not know of Madonna and Justin Bieber, compared to random Joe? Our very ideas and thoughts are subject to it as well.

There already exist meshing technology that counter our human nature and does not produce power hierarchies. Decentralized hashtables for example.

Maybe if we hand over the control to the machines, we could solve this problem. Pretty much noone wants that though... It's limited to some fringes of our society. The darknets (i2p more than Tor) it, and BitTorrent swarms. It works here, because the programmers never gave the users a choice.

Facebook would probably be a net benefit for me if it weren't for the political manipulation it has enabled.

Isn't it easier to not use someone's PII?

On the early internet it was extremely cheap to host a webpage either on your own computer or something like geocities and thus an explosion of content was created in a decentralized manner. Then the internet grew in popularity and it began to cost a lot of money to maintain all of the servers and bandwidth needed which cut off all of the smaller groups and consolidated power to a few corporations who could fund such an enterprise.

With blockchains we are also currently in the amateur stage where anyone can build something and put it out there but the difference is that dapps cost nothing to run and anyone can publish one. The cost to the developer of Uniswap is the same for 10 people and 10 million. The cost is just the development of the initial dapp. A small group of open source developers could create the new Facebook without needing millions of dollars to pay for hardware and buildings.

This low barrier to entry and maintenance removes the centralization point that corporations rely on. This is to say nothing of DAOs like Moloch and other novel funding methods that allow non-corporate projects to compete on the same level as anyone else. It's quite possible that the blockchain space will have a much longer and possibly lifelong period of true decentralized content and network creation the likes of which we had on the early non-corporate internet.

It would be nice, if those properties, which can be applied globally, were already integrated in the browser as a preferences setting (and enforced by law). Meaning, privacy concerns must become part of the protocol. (What about some kind of 451 response by the browser?)

Reader mode works fine.

> Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

I don't know the solution. I'm not sure anyone does, or even that there is one. Maybe this is why the rest of the universe seems so empty.

Often overlooked in my opinion is the significance of the unseen barriers to true, high fidelity communication. The ability to translate a written message from one language to another is surely beneficial, but even when sent between two parties who speak the same language, how successful is the "communication" really? Might we be vastly overestimating the magnitude of fidelity (the degree to which something is an accurate copy or translation of something else), where "something else" is often an extremely nuanced idea, with (often unseen) inter-relations to many other nuanced ideas?

For the communication of any given idea, the sender must first attempt to get some reasonable conceptual handle on the idea themself (depending on the complexity of the topic, this is massively error prone right off the bat), pack it into a message in a relatively (compared to the complexity of reality itself) simplistic language (that they likely have a rather imperfect grasp of), put (using flawed communication/articulation skills) that message into some medium of transport (text, audio-only, verbal discussion via teleconference, in person verbal discussion, audio only presentation, audiovisual presentation, etc), each of which comes with it's own variety of shortcomings, and then the receiver must do all the same in reverse, subject to all the same problems, plus some additional issues like the human mind's tendency to subconsciously supplement received communications with additional information from mental storage, a process not detectable to the conscious mind. (This is what they said, but what did they really mean?).

It seems to me a big part of the problem is that we've invested so much brainpower into figuring out how the physical world works, resulting in incredible technical achievements and tools that now have extremely widespread use, but we've invested a relative pittance into understanding how human minds and societies work. Just as nuclear weapons are dangerous in the hands of those who lack sufficient wisdom, might there be something similar going on with mass communication technologies? How would one even know the answer to such a question?

Did you have some particular ability in mind here that countries don't already have? Countries sensor the web, turn off access to services (social media), and such, already.

I can imagine on-the-fly editing might help countries, but can't really see what else you might have in mind?

The Intenet is only one piece though. The other piece is how digital technology makes the production of media cheap and ubiquitous. This breaks the monopoly of media organizations on production, just as the internet and hosted web services break the monopoly on distribution.

This reminds me of Steven Pinker who goes around saying, please stop whining; some/many/most/all things are better than they used to be! while somehow neglecting the fact that to the degree things are better, they usually are because people didn't stop whining.

If you're one of the few privileged elites who benefited from the internet, congrats! You're a very small minority.