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Comment by Belopolye | Hacker News Reader

It looks like the direction we’re headed is a two-tiered Internet. The first layer will require your real world identity (more than simply your ISP knowing who you are because of billing) to access, post, download, upload, etc, which I suppose will first be required to access banking, social networks, etc, destroying anonymity.

The second will be more or less what we have now, but my fear is that access to this layer will be restricted further and further until it goes the way of Usenet and ISPs either willingly (or by regulation) turn off access to it.

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It will become more like how it already is: the ""open"" internet with a need for registration/real names everywhere, and the ""dark"" net with zero rules and the usual cat and mouse of police raids/honeypots vs technical advancements in obfuscation. And seeing how this repeated so many times in tech and other industries, I think that's the best we as humanity can do for the near future.

The first layer is unacceptable to me, so I guess I just wouldn't access that at all. If the second layer goes, then that's the whole game. The internet would be closed off to me entirely.

I always joked with my friend that if the internet was created today, it would be a walled garden. Jokes on me cause that's happening anyways.

Maybe the joke was always on us techies thinking that the wild west internet could survive in this world?

I mean the internet at first got away being what it was, because it was small, and because it didn't affect outside of the internet that much.

But now that the net is big, and connected to 'real things' that suddenly being a degree of separation from the "Genocide power hour forum" is actually quite unpleasant and has many risks. Businesses will gladly move to some walled garden to avoid this, they don't care about freedom, they care about profit. And while your aunt and uncle say they care about freedom, they mean "Freedom to be exactly like them and any other degenerates get nailed to a cross".

Your average voter will get tired of the crime and harassment online will vote in the next authoritarian that says they have an simple easy solution for the internet problem. Us techies will say "but the authoritarian is wrong, this isn't simple or easy". The authoritarian knowing how propaganda works will tell the lie twice as big and twice as often and win the next election.

> Businesses will gladly move to some walled garden to avoid this

I support this entirely. One of the largest reasons why the internet is getting much worse with time is that businesses want to use it. Getting them off the open internet would eliminate a fair amount of nastiness and might return some of what we've lost.

Possibly where we're headed is an expansion of the first layer, but it already exists. You currently need to use your real identity to do things like access banking and file taxes. You also need to provide your age to access services like porn and gambling.

The complaint here isn't the use of age and/or identity verification for anything at all. It's using it to access social media. There isn't much in the way of a good legal reason to do this and previous attempts have seemingly been shut down by courts. Children are currently allowed to enter and occupy congregation spaces also used by adults, i.e. churches, parks, community centers, libraries. Private clubs are allowed to ban children if they want to, but have never been legally required to unless they specifically provide adult services like strippers and booze.

This also, of course, seems way less workable than real-world versions. At least in person, if a child presents a fake ID, a bouncer can sanity check that they look like the photo and look like they might actually be an adult. 12 year-olds with pocket change to spare can pretty trivially pay a poor person who doesn't give a shit to scan their retinas in Sam Altman's world coin face reader and hand over their private keys and now they've got a fake ID that no website can call bullshit on. Even without that, a kid can easily get an older sibling or friend to share a login, just like my wife's younger sister used to borrow my wife's ID to get into clubs and bars or I used to buy cigarettes and liquor for my friends because I had the earliest birthday.

Policymakers don't want to admit it, but it is ultimately up to parents to police what their children do on the Internet. There is no automated system that can't be beaten until they figure out a way to hook up a blood prick to your computer and check telomere length to estimate your genetic age, assuming we don't figure out how to reverse that, and even that can't prevent a child from shoulder-surfing an adult.

Techies will post about how draconian that North Korean Ullim tablet is and then try to recreate it at home, for the children of course.

I think there are actually several reasons why this is a likely direction:

1. Children (duh, this article)

2. Misinformation (accountability, no astroturfing)

3. Misinformation Robots (age verifying robots is a difficult task)

4. Malicious Robots (do you need Cloudflare if you have an Age ID Firewall?)

5. Scraping Robots (nothing prevents scraping like knowing who to sue...)

6. Hackers (nothing prevents hacking like knowing who to sue, even if it's only 80% of the time...)

7. AI Use / Abuse (anonymity is a dangerous thing with AI)

Etc. To be honest, if I was an Age ID verification company, I'd be calling around to my competition to figure out how to develop some kind of interoperability standard; in the hopes that would make age-restricted services much more convenient and thus widespread. Now if they could get Billing integrated into the system as well, then we're cooking with gas.

8. Industry is desperate to destroy piracy.

On top of all of your reasons.

Tragically, it works both ways.

8. Destroy privacy of anonymous users.

9. Increase privacy by preventing reposting (by robots or trolls) of information that a court has ordered suppressed. (Example from the near future: AI-generated revenge porn.)

10. Increase privacy by preventing companies like Clearview AI from legally getting away with murder of privacy.

Edit for Belopolye's response below: Very good point; but that would require all websites to be in on it and not just a partial implementation. But the movie and video game industries would love that...

Autocorrect got me- I meant to type piracy. Updated my comment :)

Industry is desperate to destroy general purpose computing.

Honestly I think we're close to there already, with the Play Store and App Store leading the charge.

The giveaway is the amount of traffic generated by users in the second category is much lower than it used to be, while the first category grows. Just look at how much everyone here complains about their inability to find interesting things in this second tier today. Now that the VC money isn't going to prop up free stuff, or the ecosystem of dev tools to support free stuff, it's hard to see how the second lives on.

What will be left is P2P, torrents, and psyops masquerading as organic meme wars, everything else will evaporate or migrate to the first tier.

All of this hinges on the notion that moderation and curation must be done by a centralized party, not by the users themselves.

The foundation of this bullshit idea is intellectual property. Let's just go ahead and get rid of that, and let the people manage their network.

Agree with your sentiment, but I see the future I expect at the confluence of a lot of different parties/positions (domestic politics, geopolitics, advertising, anti-piracy, “save the children,” anti-terrorism, etc) who have the money, vested interest, and ideological motivation to accomplish this.

For myself, if this plays out as I’ve described it just means it’s time to…go read a book or something, I don’t know.

> I expect at the confluence of a lot of different parties/positions (domestic politics, geopolitics, advertising, anti-piracy, “save the children,” anti-terrorism, etc) who have the money, vested interest, and ideological motivation to accomplish this.

That is their leverage, yes, but the tool at hand is copyright.

This comment caught my eye more than all the others.

As I get older and live through this amazing ride, I am increasingly of the mind that the total abolition of "intellectual property" in all its manifest forms would not only be the saving move for humanity, but that it's more or less inevitable.

Climate change is going to put so much pressure on us to innovate very rapidly, and patents and copyright now form such obvious impediments, nobody except Disney is going to give a care about enforcing intellectual property within 20 years. These are the last desperate days of the old order trying to bury its spoils through centralisation and locking-down.

As an author, coder, inventor and creator I also see that generative "AI" - or rather the emergence of a portable semiotic/literary digital collective consciousness - will spell the end for ego-driven protection rackets that make us say "Think of the creators who need food!"

New tools will provide such abundance to creativity. We will still create of course, and enjoy it very much.

"The Internet" is such a fascinating story. Just at the point when we think all is lost, quite by surprise, and suddenly, we win. So in the 22nd century I imagine we will look back on the days when one couldn't freely share any digital artifact as we look back on slavery and witch hunting today.

And in that richness and abundance people will stop seeking out what is harmful to them to nurse their empty, depressive desperation and hopelessness. And those that profit from pushing misery at others will have no place the table.

I am only sad I won't get to live in that time - but watching the death of such rotten conceits as "intellectual property" and the "advertising industry" will be satisfaction enough.

No I have a better plan which guarantees full 100% safety for children but doesn't require verification or identification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37991197

The problem with your solution is laws/regulations are not really enforceable internationally.

Do not allow accessing foreign websites (from countries which did not join the convention) when "safe content" setting is active.

How do you define “foreign website”?

A website which is hosted (physically located) in a country not participating in Safe Content Marking Agreement or owner of which is anonymous or is from a foreign country.

Basically any site whose owner or operator you cannot put to jail.

How long before "safe content" becomes the default?

.. and then the requirement

.. and then the law?

I'll take my Internet unsafe, thank you very much.

The other problem with that solution is that it's impossible. Sounds great aside from that implementation detail, though!

What exactly is impossible?

You're assuming perfect authorization to flip the "safe mode" switch.

They are, see the international cooperations on CSAM. Literally every state with a barely functioning government agrees that this kind of conduct is inacceptable.

Oh, so there's no CSAM on the internet? Cool. It works!

I don’t agree with what I expect.

Instead of expecting every web service to present the appropriate headers, let's decentralize this work: Create a web of trust where users authoritatively declare content to be safe/unsafe/nsfw/etc. Then just restrict your browser to the curated web of your choice.

I half-agree in that I'd like to see the inverse: Devices support a parental-lock, and that setting ensures the device sends metadata outward.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37330234

This means that every site in the world must interpret the headers, while with my proposal sites need to opt-in (and pass certification) to be available on children's devices.

Questions I have to this proposal:

* A site must be certified by some board in order to be accessible. At what level is a site certified? Root level? Page level? Individual content item.

* A site hosts user generated content. This could be as small as comments on an article, or as large as YouTube. How is the site certified? If each piece of content must be certified, who assumes responsibility for certification?

* A site is certified as appropriate for all ages. The owner of the site then puts content that would have caused to to fail certification. At what interval is a site expected to recertify? What is the ramification for certification and then hosting of objectionable content?

* You have a process that is onerous for site administrators to comply with in order to host content for children. What incentive is for them to comply vs. not host a site that requires certification?

* As a parent, you install a compliant operating system that enforces this system. Sites comply with the program and it works without exception. Kids talk, as they do, and share how to get around this system by using a Linux live environment to boot into an OS that does not enforce the parental control header. How do you prevent this?

* As a parent, you install a compliant operating system that enforces this system. Your kid either does not know how, or is prevented from circumventing these access controls. They have one or more friends that have computers that are not blocked from accessing this content. How do you prevent them from accessing content in this system?

> A site must be certified by some board in order to be accessible. At what level is a site certified? Root level? Page level? Individual content item.

There could be an organization that verifies that the owner and operator of the site are not foreign (so they can be taken to court if needed), reviews the content policy and moderation policy to ensure that no unsafe content can be published, and issues a cryptographic signature to the website. The website displays a signature in HTTP headers.

> How is the site certified? If each piece of content must be certified, who assumes responsibility for certification?

There should be moderation policy guaranteering safety, for example, all comments must be reviewed by moderators.

> The owner of the site then puts content that would have caused to to fail certification

Then they can get into jail if they do it intentionally.

> What incentive is for them to comply vs. not host a site that requires certification?

They can have paid content or show ads.

> by using a Linux live environment to boot into an OS that does not enforce the parental control header.

Requirement to install Linux will stop majority of children.

Well TBH the open internet provided a ton of benefit, but has metastasized into a force of misery and evil.

The near collapse of democracy in the United States, the various nasty impacts of social media, the death of professional journalism, the emergence of automated propaganda bots, etc are all negative impacts of open internet that are destroying society.

This may not be the answer, but neither is that status quo. We can't go back to 2003 or 1993.

The older people here live like it's 2003. It's not. HN is a throwback to those days, but we live in a world shaped by anonymous actors performing in bad faith.

> The near collapse of democracy in the United States, the various nasty impacts of social media, the death of professional journalism, the emergence of automated propaganda bots, etc are all negative impacts of open internet that are destroying society.

So which of these is a walled-garden internet going to fix?

Actually which of these are even a consequence of the internet being open in the first place?

Pretty sure the answer to both is: none. These (perceived) issues are completely tangential and have absolutely nothing to do with the internet being open or closed.

This sounds a lot to me like: "People I don't like are using this thing, so let's ruin it for everyone."

You're still not going to like these people afterwards, nor are going to change them for the better by antagonizing everyone.

> The near collapse of democracy in the United States,

Banning anonymous speech would make it more dangerous to advocate against current policy, and speed up this collapse you're worried about.

Octogenarians saved democracy by mailing everybody ballots with their names on them. Controlling distribution channels is probably more important than anonymity, which is why the article points to things like “impact assessments” and other blockers to free distribution.

> The near collapse of democracy in the United States

So you propose a controlled demolition? That's what abolishing the right or opportunity to speak anonymously amounts to. Professional journalists don't need to be protected from anonymous jeers, if anything is killing their industry it's their failure to monetize and maybe you can blame adblockers for that, but not anonymous speech. And frankly, professional journalists have always predominantly been the mouthpieces of wealthy. Need I remind you that professional journalists working for the likes of William Randolph Hearst cynically provoked the Spanish-American War for profit? The glory days of journalism are an illusion that appears when you look back at the past through rose-tinted glasses. Whatever the answer is, it isn't to silence those who already have the least power, those who can only speak anonymously without corporate apparatuses to back them up.

The status quo is acceptable. Some of the younger people here alarmists. Not every problem needs to be solved. Negative impacts can be tolerated.

the death of journalism has nothing to do with the open internet; it mostly has to do with their complete failure to find a functional online business model outside advertising. I'm pretty sure propaganda bots are largely a result of the death of journalism -- given that the trusted sources of information have become largely and obviously untrustworthy, then your only option is to go to the "community", where conspiracy and propaganda can reign freely.

Social media is the only thing you could possibly blame on the open internet, but it has more to do with the same incentive problem as internet journalism -- advertising is money, and advertising needs "engagement". Social media, like journalism, needs propaganda and conspiracy and flamewars to thrive in order to exist. They have no real incentive to reduce it, except to make it sure it doesn't cross the point where it goes a little too far and they start getting accused of "causing the near collapse of democracy in the united states"

> Social media, like journalism, needs propaganda and conspiracy and flamewars to thrive

Absolutely not, you are perhaps caught in the 2023 notion of social media. Early social sites thrived without any ads and company or celeb profiles even, just like early FB. Social media is and should be about common user interactions, most importantly the inner circle of acquaintances and then interest groups. Everything else was just made up to drive clicks and ad revenue.

Depends what you describe as social media. Forums and boards are different than Twitter or TikTok. Usually social media is associated with wanting to present yourself while other platforms are focused around topics. One type might leak into the other, but usually the behavior and content is vastly different.

I keep my opinion that Instagram is for idiots for example. Yes, probably an ignorant perspective and it isn't exclusively the case, but an opinion I can very much live with.

> has metastasized into a force of misery and evil.

Has much is metastasizing, and how much is it just perceived to have done so because of failing media literacy about the internet? Basic late 90s/early 2000s internet safety was to assume untrustworthyness for everything. And regardless of how well a source proves itself, you keep giving it the side-eye.

But, where would people learn that media literacy today? The people and institutions that are branded as "serious" in our society don't have any financial incentive to want their audience to know critical reading/listening. Quite the opposite actually.

It's the other way around: Internet was a tool to share knowledge and now it's turning into a tool of oppression.

The open internet was fine, it's all the centralized orgs that done exactly that.

> a force of misery and evil.

My internet happy place is pretty dandy. Trust in media and democracy wasn't destroyed by the internet, on the contrary, it was destroyed by people that didn't want to accept different perspectives anymore, tried to silence others and consolidate the content on previously free internet platforms.

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