The Un-Internet | Hacker News Reader

The Un-Internet

scripting.com

70 pointsbergie6 comments

This article makes some great points, but the internet itself is not just a composition of the services on the net or the products that use the net. The net itself is very much NOT owned by its users. With China restricting what its population can see and hear, and U.S. threatening to do the same with SOPA, users should realize that the internet as it exists today needs work. Amateur radio is a much better model. That put the power to communicate almost solely into the hands of its users. For the net to get like that, people need to be less focused on new SAAS apps in startups and more focused on technologies that make us free to communicate.

I could be wrong, but I don't think that kind of technology (including physical infrastructure) can be developed and implemented by collections of individuals, not at Internet scale. The only groups that could create a technology that the world's people could use independent from corporate or government control are corporations and governments, and where's their motivation these days? Corporations want to corral us like whales in a krill feeding frenzy, and governments want to control us, not free us.

Even the internet that we have, developed by the US government and universities, only became the internet that we have by serendipity. I Can Haz Cheezburger was not anticipated by DARPA, BBN et al.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBN_Technologies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History

What about the various mesh nets around the world?

http://guifi.net/en/node/2413/view/map

There are quite a few already operating. All that's needed is to keep scaling them up by driving participation.

Scaling mesh is a very hard problem, though, it's hardly just a matter of plugging in more devices. Networks over the existing Internet - like Freenet or Tor - are much more viable, in my opinion.

Maybe?

People need to be less focused on new SAAS apps in startups and more focused on technologies that make us free to communicate.

I completely agree, but how can we make money from this? All ways of making money from software involve controlling users. Like it or not, the time we can afford to spend on unprofitable side-projects is fairly limited.

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