Taming the Web (2001) (opens in new tab)

(technologyreview.com)

18 pointsjessup7y ago4 comments

4 comments

17 years later, this is still true: the web is mostly controlled by profit-seeking entities.

> Myth #3: The Net Is Too Filled With Hackers To Control

True, very few development teams are able to resit for more then a few years. Then they break. [Plug] My university lab has been one of the few operating for 19 years now. Radical and academic purity of decentralisation: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki#current-items-under-... Goveranance of decentral system and stopping abuse collectively has proven the hardest scientific problem. Requires growing trust without any infrastructure.

sp3327y ago

In the future, moreover, the reach of national law will increase. The Hague Conference on Private International Law is developing an international treaty explicitly intended to make outfits like Swaptor more vulnerable to legal pressure-“a bold set of rules that will profoundly change the Internet,” in the phrase of James Love, director of the activist Consumer Project on Technology. (The draft treaty will be discussed at a diplomatic meeting next year.) By making it possible to apply the laws of any one country to any Internet site available in that country, the draft treaty will, Love warns, “lead to a great reduction in freedom, shrink the public domain, and diminish national sovereignty.”

How did this treaty attempt turn out?

aphextron7y ago

>"Falco and others like him are inadvertently making it far more likely that the rules of operation of the worldwide intellectual commons that is the Internet will be established not through the messy but open processes of democracy but by private negotiations among large corporations. To think this prospect dismaying, one doesn’t need to be a fan of BearShare."

narag7y ago

The article doesn't mention torrents. Was it a later development? Anyway it doesn't matter. Why bother? Every song ever recorded is in YouTube already.

A little thought. Internet is like Soylent Green. And the people now is: a) orders of magnitude more and b) from a much more diverse background. So the old Internet is still here, just hidden inside the new one.

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