I'm beginning to seriously think we need a new internet, another protocol, other browsers just to break up the insane monopolies that has been formed, because the way things are going soon all discourse will be censored, and competitors will be blocked soon.
We need something that's good for small and medium businesses again, local news and get an actual marketplace going - you know what the internet actually promised.
Anyone working on something like this?
We have a “new internet”. We have the indie web, VPNs, websites not behind Cloudflare, other browsers. You won’t have a large audience, but a new protocol won't fix that.
Also, plenty of small and medium businesses are doing fine on the internet. You only hear about ones with problems like this. And if these problems become more frequent and public, Google will put more effort into fixing them.
I think the most practical thing we can do is support people and companies who fall through the cracks, by giving them information to understand their situation and recover, and by promoting them.
"Google will put more effort into fixing them"
Why would they do that? Do they lose money from these people? Why would they care? they're a monopoly they don't need to care
Perhaps we need a different "type" of internet. I don't have the expertise to even explain what this would look like, but I know that if politics, religion, junk science and a hundred other influences have anything to do with it, it will eventually become too stupid to use.
Making a "smart person only" Internet is a social problem, not a technology problem.
We had a "smart person only internet". Then it became financially prudent to make it an "everyone internet", then we had the dot com boom, Apple, Google, etc bloom from that.
We _still_ have a "smart person only internet" really, it's just now used mostly for drug and weapon sales ( Tor )
Smart people want to dominate the stupids.
For some group of smart people, there will be a group of smarter people who want to dominate the The people they designate "the stupids".
The internet was a technological solution to a social problem. It introduced other social problems, although arguably these to your point are old social problems in a new arena.
But there may be yet another technological solution to the old social problems of monopolism, despotic centralized control, and fraud.
.... I did say "may".
Everybody wants to dominate others using their strongest ability: smart, rich, strong, popular, fast, etc.
The community around NOSTR are basically building a kind of semantic web, where users identities are verified via their public key, data is routed through content agnostic relays, and trustworthiness is verified by peer recommendation.
They are currently experimenting with replicating many types of services which are currently websites as protocols with data types, with the goal being that all of these services can share available data with eachother openly.
It's definitely more of a "bazaar" model over a "catherdral" model, with many open questions and it's also tough to get a good overview of what is really going on there. But at least it's an attempt.
Stop trying to look for technological answers to political problems. We already have a way to avoid excessive accumulation of power by private entities, it's called "anti-trust laws" (heck, "laws" in general).
Any new protocol not only has to overcome the huge incumbent that is the web, it has to do so grassroots against the power of global capital (trillions of dollars of it). Of course, it also has to work in the first place and not be captured and centralised like another certain open and decentralised protocol has (i.e., the Web).
Is that easier than the states doing their jobs and writing a couple pages of text?
States are made of people both at decision and at street level. Many anti-trust laws were made when the decision people that were not very tied with the actual interests - nowadays this seem to change. At no point I think people at street level ever understood the actual implications.
A structural solution is to educate and lift the whole population to better understand the implications of their choices.
A tactic solution is to try to limit the collusion of decision people and private entities, but this does not seem to go extremely well.
An "evolutionary" solution (that just happens) used to be to have a war - that would push a lot of people to look for efficiency rather than for some interests. But this is made more complex by nukes.
I don't really see how anti-trust would address something like Google Chrome's safe browsing infrastructure.
The problem is that the divide of alignment of interests there is between new, small companies and users. New companies want to put up a website without tripping over one of the thousand unwritten rules of "How to not look like a phishing site or malware depot" (many of which are unwritten because protecting users and exploiting users is a cat-and-mouse game)... And users don't want to get owned.
Shard Chrome off from Google and it still has incentives to protect users at the cost of new companies' ease of joining the global network as a peer citizen. It may have less signal as a result of a curtailed visibility on the state of millions of pages, but the consequence of that is that it would offer worse safe browsing protection and more users would get owned as a result.
Perhaps the real issue is that (not unlike email) joining the web as a peer citizen has just plain gotten harder in the era of bad actors exploiting the infrastructure to cause harm to people.
Like... You know what never has these problems? My blog. It's a static-site-generated collection of plain HTML that updates once in a blue moon via scp. I'm not worried about Google's safe browsing infrastructure, because I never look like a malware site. And if I did trip over one of the unwritten rules (or if attackers figured out how to weaponize something personal-blog-shaped)? The needs of the many justify Chrome warning people before going to my now-shady site.
> The problem is that the divide of alignment of interests there is between new, small companies and users. New companies want to put up a website without tripping over one of the thousand unwritten rules of "How to not look like a phishing site or malware depot" (many of which are unwritten because protecting users and exploiting users is a cat-and-mouse game)... And users don't want to get owned
Some candidate language:
- Monopolistic companies may not actively impose restrictions which harm others (includes businesses)
or
- Some restrictions are allowed, but the company must respond to an appeal of restrictions within X minutes; Appeals to the company can themselves be appealed to a governmental independent board which binds the company with no further review permitted; All delays and unreasonable responses incur punitive penalties as judged by the board; All penalties must be paid immediately
or
- If an action taken unilaterally by a company 1) harms someone AND 2) is automated: Then, that automation must be immediately, totally, and unconditionally reversed upon the unilateral request of the victim. The company may reinstate the action upon the sworn statement of an employee that they have made the decision as a human, and agree to be accountable for the decision. The decision must then follow the above appeals process.
or
- No monopolies allowed
> Monopolistic companies may not actively impose restrictions which harm others (includes businesses)
That's not generally how monopoly is interpreted in the US (although jurisprudence on this may be shifting). In general, the litmus test is consumer harm. A company is allowed to control 99% of the market if they do it by providing a better experience to consumers than other companies can; that's just "being successful." Microsoft ran afoul of antitrust because their browser sucked and embedding it in the OS made the OS suck too; if they hadn't tried to parlay one product into the other they would be unlikely to have run afoul of US antitrust law, and they haven't run afoul of it over the fact that 70-90% of x86 architecture PCs run Windows.
> Some restrictions are allowed, but the company must respond to an appeal of restrictions within X minutes; Appeals to the company can themselves be appealed to a governmental independent board which binds the company with no further review permitted; All delays and unreasonable responses incur punitive penalties as judged by the board; All penalties must be paid immediately
There may be meat on those bones (a general law restricting how browsers may operate in terms of rendering user content). Risky because it would codify into law a lot of ideas that are merely technical specifications (you can look to other industries to see the consequences of that, like how "five-over-ones" are cropping up in cities all over the US because they satisfy a pretty uniform fire and structural safety building code to the letter). But this could be done without invoking monopoly protection.
> If an action taken unilaterally by a company 1) harms someone AND 2) is automated: Then, that automation must be immediately, totally, and unconditionally reversed upon the unilateral request of the victim.
Too broad. It harms me when Google blocks my malware distribution service because I'm interested in getting malware on your machine; I really want your Bitcoin wallet passwords, you see. ;)
Most importantly: this whole topic is independent of monopolies. We could cut Chrome out of Google tomorrow and the exact same issues with safe browsing impeding new sites with malware-ish shapes would exist (with the only change probably being the false positive rate would go up, since a Chrome cut off from Google would have to build out its detection and reporting logic from scratch without relying on the search crawler DB). More importantly, a user can install another browser that doesn't have site protection today (or, if I understand correctly, switch it off). The reason this is an issue is that users like Chrome and are free to use it and tend to find site protection useful (or at least "not a burden to them") and that's not something Google imposed on the industry, it's a consequence of free user choice.
> Too broad. It harms me when Google blocks my malware distribution service because I'm interested in getting malware on your machine; I really want your Bitcoin wallet passwords, you see. ;)
That's okay, a random company failing to protect users from harm is still better than harming an innocent person by accident. They already fail in many cases, obviously we accept a failure rate above 0%. You also skipped over the rest of that paragraph.
> users like Chrome and are free to use it and tend to find site protection useful (or at least "not a burden to them")
That's okay, Google can abide by the proposal I set forth avoiding automated mistaken harms to people. If they want to build this system that can do great harms to people, they need to first and foremost build in safety nets to address those harms they cause, and only then focus on reducing false negatives.
I think there's an unevaluated tension in goals between keeping users safe from malware here and making it easy for new sites to reach people, regardless of whether those sites display patterns consistent with malware distributors.
I don't think we can easily discard the first in favor of the second. Not nearly as categorically as is done here. Those "false negatives" mean users lose things (bank accounts, privacy, access to their computer) through no fault of their own. We should pause and consider that before weeping and rending our garments that yet another hosting provider solution had a bad day.
You've stopped considering monopoly and correctly considered that the real issue is safe browsing, as a feature, is useful to users and disruptive to new business models. But that's independent of Google; that's the nature of sharing a network between actors that want to provide useful services to people and actors that want to cause harm. If I build a browser today, from scratch, that included safe browsing we'd be in the same place and there'd be no Google in the story.
It's very, very hard to overcome the gravitational forces which encourage centralization, and doing so requires rooting the different communities that you want to exist in their own different communities of people. It's a political governance problem, not a technical one.
This is the key idea.
Companies have economy of scale (Google, for instance, is running dozens to hundreds of web apps off of one well-maintained fabric) and the ability to force consolidation of labor behind a few ideas by controlling salaries so that the technically hard, detailed, or boring problems actually get solved. Open source volunteer projects rarely have either of those benefits.
In theory, you could compete with Google via
- Well-defined protocols
- That a handful of projects implement (because if it's too many, you split the available talent pool and end up with e.g. seven mediocre photo storage apps that are thin wrappers around a folder instead of one Google Photos with AI image search capability).
- Which solve very technically hard, detailed, or boring technical problems (AI image search is an actual game-changer feature; the difference between "Where is that one photo I took of my dog? I think it was Christmas. Which Christmas, hell I don't know" and "Show me every photo of my dog, no not that dog, the other dog").
I'd even risk putting up bullet point four: "And be willing to provide solutions for problems other people don't want solved without those other people working to torpedo your volunteer project" (there are lots of folks who think AI image detection is de-facto evil and nobody should be working on it, and any open source photo app they can control the fate of will fall short of Google's offering for end-users).
You make it seem like the problem is of technical nature (instead of regulatory or other). Would you mind explaining why?
Technical alternatives already exist, see for example GNUnet.
Problem is that as soon as some technology takes traction, it catches the attention of businesses, and there is where the slow but steady enshittification process begins. Not that business necessarily equals enshittification, but in a world dominated by capitalism without borders soon or later someone will break some unwritten rules and others will have to follow to remain competitive, until that new technology will become a new web, and we'll be back to square one. To me the problem isn't technical, as isn't its solution.
I'm interested to see how this will work with something like Mastodon.
Since Mastodon is, fundamentally, a protocol and reference implementation, people can come up with their own enshittified nodes or clients... And then the rest of the ecosystem can respond by just ignoring that work.
Yes, technically Truth Social is a Mastodon node. My Mastodon node doesn't have to care.
How about the Invisible Internet Project, https://geti2p.net?
IPFS has been doing some great work around decentralization that actually scales (Netflix uses it internally to speed up container delivery), but a) it's only good for static content, b) things still need friendly URLs, and c) once it becomes the mainstream, bad actors will find a way to ruin it anyway.
These apply to a lot of other decentralized systems too.
In no way does IPFS "actually scale" while it takes two minutes (120 seconds) to find an object.
It won't get anywhere unless it addresses the issue of spam, scammers, phishing etc. The whole purpose of Google Safe Browsing is to make life harder for scammers.
How does the Internet addresses that?
True, but google already censors their search results to push certain imperial agendas so i'm not trusting them in the long run.
This is not a technical problem. You will not solve it with purely technical solutions.
I'm not sure, but it's on my mind.
I own what I think are the key protocols for the future of browsers and the web, and nobody knows it yet. I'm not committed to forking the web by any means, but I do think I have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remake the system if I were determined to and knew how to remake it into something better.
If you want to talk more, reach out!
Intriguing comment, but your username does not inspire confidence.
Lol I get that from time to time, though I don't care much. I've always had the same username. I have the same username everywhere. I'm Conrad.
I do think I invite people to disrespect me a little though. It ensures that I have to work harder and succeed on the merit of my work.
I'm afraid this can't be built on the current net topology which is owned by the Stupid Money Govporation and inherently allows for roadblocks in the flow of information. Only a mesh could solve that.
But the Stupid Money Govporation must be dethroned first, and I honestly don't see how that could happen without the help of an ELE like a good asteroid impact.
It will take the same or less amount of time, to get where we are with current Web.
What we have is the best sim env to see how stuff shape up. So fixing it should be the aim, avoiding will get us on similar spirals. We'll just go on circles.
Having a decade of fresh air is also a good incentive regardless of how it ends
I don't know, it is a lot of effort for a decade fresh air. Then you will notice same policies implemented since they will take reference to how people solved it in the past.