The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

Really? It seems that many of the actual quotes from the Fathers of the Internet in the article apply to existing web client-server architecture:

“We hoped everyone would be making their own web sites—turns out people are afraid to.” - Tim Berners-Lee

“People have their friends on Facebook and some photos on Flickr and their colleagues on LinkedIn. All they want to do is share the photos with the colleagues and the friends—and they can’t. Which is really stupid. You either have to tell Flickr about your Facebook friends, or move your photos to Facebook and LinkedIn separately, or build and run a third application to build a bridge between the two.” - Tim Berners-Lee

(by the way, we address this explicitly in our platform)

"Don’t discount Wordpress, it has been embraced by large numbers of people, perhaps the new web should have a decentralized Wordpress type of service." - Brewster Kahle

That doesn't sound like a necessarily serverless architecture to me.

The number of people using the internet won't shrink, but grow steadily. Facebook, Google has enormous operating costs and if they want to offer an alternative, a better future, those costs (at least bandwidth) should be factored in. The infrastructure is not free, but Facebook and Google users are not paying for it now (well, not with money). But imagine if we say that hey, here's the new web, it's awesome: it's decentralized, privacy is baked in and works everywhere. You just have to pay 0.01€ to access the New York Times. Per page. Then it would be a different situation if costs are not baked in the beginning.

Then there's video. Gazillion of videos are created per day and it grows exponentially as devices get better and better at recording ultra high resolution. Now, again, YouTube pays the bills and users get it in exchange for watching advertising. How do you want to offer an at least as good service as YouTube, but decentralized, privacy concerned and universally accessible and free?

What I see here is a problem that really exists, but the proposed radical new solutions are a bit misguided. You won't convince people with a sub par (but technically better) alternative you have to propose a iPhone level of wow, because only then you can get people's attention.

> Change the naming system, and stop thinking of the URL as a location—it’s a name, a format he picked to look like a Unix file name simply because people were comfortable with that.

That's a problem again, most people use Windows. Don't assume that the end users will instantly "get it" because it's more Unix like. This leads my to the next point.

Another question I haven't seen raised is User Experience. UX. Today's web is rather good at it, at least the top players embrace it very well. Most company websites now pay attention to get it somewhat right. Startups also pay a lot of effort to get UX right.

How about baking in good UX too to the new web? Today I only need to buy a $500 phone and I'm ready to consume the web. How? I type in a string and the rest is magically handled for me. I can read, watch anything. Can yo do the same with the decentralized web? I don't want to install anything, nor download terabytes of blockchain data, no encrypted distributed filesystem of somebody else's cat videos, waiting for hours to sync in. I also don't want pay for hosting somebody else's cat videos. Torrents work well for TV shows, but what would it look like on YouTube scale?

That's they key part here. To have a radically new internet, getting technologies right doesn't stop at replacing HTTP, HTML, CSS, DNS... you need to replace ISP-s and infrastructure providers too or at lest factor them in so that the new system is not born dead.

He was mainly talking about how hard it is for individuals to capture value they create online. For example, it's very difficult to make money off of a viral video, popular Pinterest page, or a niche blog. Basically, only the biggest silos have reasonable monetization options, and the individual users who are creating value get screwed.

I agree there's a technology gap there, as would anyone watching the adblocker war. My biggest criticism is economic: there are so many people online that massive supply dwarfs demand, pushing prices to zero (Exhibit A: journalism). Conveniently, zero is the only price you can really charge online, and you get a feedback loop.

Patreon is my favorite answer to this problem so far.

Doesn't Adobe continue to charge big $$$ for Creative Cloud? I don't understand how these statements mesh..

For example my grandfather absolutely hated credit cards with a passion. He was convinced the credit card companies were an invasion of privacy as well as the antitrust acts (there are still only three credit bureaus). My parents and I despite his recommendations still use credit cards (he in fact later had to get a credit card later in life as it is fairly impossible shockingly to purchase/own a car with just check or cash).

Now I'm the old fart complaining to my younger peers about Facebook.