The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

But I took a lot of auto-tech, three years of it. And the funny thing is I have never gotten my license. I'm nearly 45 years old and have never been able to legally drive a car.

But I was living with my sister at the time who was 18 and our landlord had a weird crush on her. Our landlord also owned a ton of properties in Eugene. And he would have me mow as many lawns as I wanted for 8 bucks a hour. Most of his rentals were to elderly people. I was making double the minimum wage and had no shortage of work. But I also had a girlfriend and skateboarding and bowling league to attend to. I did the minimum to maintain to healthy balance. If I needed new shoes I would mow a extra lawn. Skateboarding is hard on shoes. I would go through a pair a month.

But eventually I found myself doing auto stuff for people after mowing their lawns. I would get scheduled for oil changes, filters, plugs, brakes.. Eventually I was mostly doing auto maintenance for people and I charged significantly more. I had a lot of cash for a kid in high school with a Operation Ivy T-shirt.

Enter the internet.

My buddy Billy went to the University and could get me a cheap computer. This was back when Apple had serious discounts for students. I got a Performa 6214, Stylewriter 1200, and 14" Multisync monitor for about $900. A significant discount.

And Bill gave me his dial-up info into his university account. He gave it out to a lot of people. They didn't check if multiple people were using it. Back then we mostly looked up stuff about how to make LSD and mortal kombat fatality codes. It was Amazing. And a lot of very slow loading scans from porno mags.

But a person that was exploring this new thing that was non-commercial with me had a forward-thinking father. He was a real-estate agent and thought the internet was cool. So he wanted to put his listings on the internet that nobody would ever possibly use for looking at houses. Images were brutal since dial-up was the norm. And we used tables since css wasn't a thing back then.

But we made a commercial site. A site for a real-estate agent. And we hosted it on the university's of Oregon's site since we didn't really know how to get a domain name or find hosting. But it was pure HTML.

He paid us well to update the site with new listings. But then the dot.com thing happened and I got a job at a movie theater and wouldn't touch the internet until 2002.

edit :: I forgot to add that I think I might have been responsible for making the internet worse.

Being good is many things, but a key part of that is restraining the self from acting improperly. Corporations can't do that, they will sooner or later do whatever makes money. Or they get replaced sooner or later by a corporation that will. At best, there are stylistic differences around the edges that are simultaneously important but minor in the grand scheme of things. Sooner or later a corporation will be thinking primarily in terms of 'profitable' and 'not profitable'.

Calling Google 'evil' is trying to articulate something else - Google are powerful and dangerous. Any entity harvesting and directing the flow of information at that scale is. They have an unprecedented capability to cause harm; and sooner or later it will get used by someone to do exactly that.

So, the CAB is maybe a useful contrasting example. The CA/Browser Forum (CA/B or CAB for short) was a meeting that happened as a mixture of conference calls and email lists back in 2011 or so. This is where Extended Validation (the green bar) comes from, but ultimately CA/B metamorphosed into a standing (in the sense of ongoing, not you can't sit down) meeting, still going on today, for the Certificate Authorities and the Browsers (today in practice the Operating System vendors, but with Mozilla standing in for the Free Unixes) to get together to figure out what the rules are.

Because of what Smith notes, the CA/B's rules are explicit that discussion about prices, product offerings and so on is prohibited, if you want to conspire to raise prices you'll have to do it somewhere else.

But plenty of _good_ things can be agreed this way. Contrast the many years it took to get rid of MD5 from certificates (which happened before CA/B existed) despite collisions being known - against SHA-1 where CA/B was able to co-ordinate industry wide discontinuation of SHA-1 with only a handful of minor defections before even a single proven collision of the hash was published.

More broadly I'd argue that the IETF, and certainly the thrice annual IETF physical meetings (the most recent was in Singapore last week) are exactly "people of the same trade... meet together" and you could characterise plenty of the work done at many Working Groups (obviously DPRIVE and QUIC but I don't see any reason you couldn't make this claim for KITTEN for example) as a conspiracy, just that it's only "against the public" if you think global surveillance was what "the public" wanted...

Compare it with say whatsapp traffic - that has a crazy high amount of attention crammed into each gigabyte.

Doesn't really change the message/conclusion but the metric used here seem flawed.