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Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#21

I find that the headline and the article mischaracterizes what is happening. The "Wild Web" was reigned in long ago by commercial interests. A distributed web with many small nodes would still be hard to control and police effectively. However as much the web has been centralized by the likes of Google, Facebook, and large media conglomerates effective government censorship is once again possible. This is like a wild…

This is par for the course for the NYT, the noble corporations are painted as heroes keeping us safe from the dirty wildlings who are about to topple the wall any day now. They do the same thing with many (large) companies, the State Department, all military/intelligence branches, etc. It's how you get access, and they seem more willing to play ball and churn out these puff pieces over doing real journalism than anyo…

Washington Post all the way. I still read it, but NYT often disappoints me when I already know something about the subject. New Yorker is good, but not science sections. The NYT Cassini coverage was good.

edit: I mistakenly put Wash Times. Yehowa.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#23

If we're going with the wild-west analogy, what's happening now is the transition from a Territory to a State. It was wild and ungoverned, then corporations moved in and created some order, and now governments see order and are moving in to take over management.

It is a terrible analogy all around.

What is happening is that Facebook is shifting from being AOL 2.0 to being a government contractor. They'll eventually be more entrenched and integrated (in the US) with the IRS, police, intelligence, etc.

The first step is to get them over a barrel, with public opinion against them. The rest is easy, and FB will embrace it.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#24
There is now a history of American tech companies operating in China. The lesson is pretty clear: play politics if you want, but know that if you do (i.e. Google), you are going to lose access to the market. Thus, it comes down to a business decision and it becomes increasingly hard to argue on principles if things look so binary.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#27

I find that the headline and the article mischaracterizes what is happening. The "Wild Web" was reigned in long ago by commercial interests. A distributed web with many small nodes would still be hard to control and police effectively. However as much the web has been centralized by the likes of Google, Facebook, and large media conglomerates effective government censorship is once again possible. This is like a wild…

> A distributed web with many small nodes would still be hard to control and police effectively. I would guess that today's distributed web (IPFS, etc.) has more content, and users, than the "wild web" of 1992 or whatever era you fondly recollect. Yes, centralized players created tools that produced exponentially more content (and control). But it's lazy to blame that peripheral phenomenon for a perceived "loss". The…

IPFS is stopped by its insistence on things that are considered anti-features by non-cryptopunks, like immutability.

There's a lot of promise behind the "distributed web" or "P2P web" prototypes, but they haven't been effectively commoditized, and their value proposition over the top-level "spyweb" isn't strong enough for normal users who don't understand the inner workings. In fact, they tend to offer less end-user benefit, since a P2P web is necessarily slower as peers negotiate connections, deal with vaporizing peers, etc.

Consumers care only about getting their desires fulfilled as quickly and easily as possible. If you want a new web to dominate, you must make something that gives the consumers and/or the companies upstream from them an incentive to exert the effort to change.

Personally, I believe the web is already sufficiently "decentralized" in the necessary sense. We just have legal restrictions that prevent true competition with the tech conglomerates, as they're allowed to effectively claim exclusive domain over all user-generated content.

There's no reason I shouldn't be able to go to NewGoog or NewFace and multiplex in the available data streams hosted by the web nodes at google.com and facebook.com, except that this violates the CFAA and the Copyright Act, and Google and Facebook can and will sue you to make you stop. This is the primary constraint that has led to the recentralization of the web.

What do you expect when you make it a crime to send any type of undesired communication to a server? The CFAA doesn't just prevent harmful or disruptive access, but all unauthorized access. In practice, this is almost always used to stymie small innovators who are putting the data from a data source like Facebook to better use.

This is fundamentally anti-competitive, and again, it's no wonder that the web is coalescing into the hands of a few central controllers. It has never been more apparent that the user is the product being sold and peddled.

We need to reorient our perspective of the internet with users, not services, as the central entity, and give them full control over the data that they generate. Then, the user will be free again, without the need for complex P2P solutions.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#29
Facebook is most likely a net negative in this world. I don't know if it's always been true, but I think it is now. I personally didn't realize how strong my feelings were until one of their recruiters contacted me. I'm far from a 'values' driven employee, but this was by far the easiest refusal of my career.
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