Comment by r1b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by r1b | Hacker News Reader

Urbit is a cool idea and I resonate with its motivation but I fundamentally disagree with its execution.

The fact that we have bad platforms does not imply that we have bad systems or bad protocols. I think the rotten core of the bad-ness of the internet is commercial infrastructure. It's prohibitively expensive for users to truly own the most basic commodities of internet infrastructure, i.e names (DNS), numbers (IP) and peers (BGP). These commodities would enable users to make the most of the protocols that we already have.

There are already many projects that try to combat the commercialization of the internet by adding new systems and protocols (Solid, IPFS and ActivityPub come to mind). Users shouldn't only be free within the confines of these systems - they should be first class nodes on THE network.

The spirit of Urbit is spot on but it's at the wrong layer of the OSI model. I have much more faith in people who are trying to operate public networks (i.e NYCMesh) and would like to see more projects that aim to de-centralize the basic commodities of the internet.

> It's prohibitively expensive for users to truly own the most basic commodities of internet infrastructure, i.e names (DNS), numbers (IP) and peers (BGP). These commodities would enable users to make the most of the protocols that we already have

If these costs are inherent to the operation of these systems and protocols, and arguably many of them are, then it sounds like Urbit is on the right track.

Is it economically viable to have all this infrastructure without commercial interests?

Much of the physical and logical infrastructure was heavily subsidized or outright paid for with public funds. One could argue that it was never economically viable, but forced to appear that way.

Internet infrastructure is not unique in this respect.

The idea that markets optimizing for profitability naturally tackle hard problems requiring immense up-front costs is an attractive lie.

And so is the idea that public or government can maintain a good quality infra (at scale, everything works in a small community). At least where I live the public company provides the worst possible services and all improvement has come from the private sector competition.

thats why usually the best approach is public owned and private leased..

One can look at existing mesh networks and see that it is indeed possible to have infrastructure running without commercial interests. Guifi is probably the biggest and most successful example of this. Guifi is mostly volunteer driven but also have commercial actors operating on it, helping people getting setup to Guifi for a fee. So the infrastructure is open but it does have for-profit actors helping maintain and create new nodes too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com