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Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
51–60 of 80 posts
Re: Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's a good outcome. I would be very scared if the electrical utility company started looking at what i'm using the electrons for, and start disallowing certain types of uses for their electrons.
> I would be very scared if the electrical utility company started looking at what i'm using the electrons for, and start disallowing certain types of uses for their electrons. The energy companies already do disallow certain types of use for "their electrons" (check your contract, seriously - domestic users are forbidden from certain uses) and with the advent of accurate monitoring thanks to 'smart meters' are able…
What uses are you talking about?
As far as I understand it suppliers are generally more than happy for you to use more of their electrons and don't particularly care what you use them for.
One thing that I do think will change over the next few years, helped by smart meters is that we'll see more time of use based pricing, and that with renewables on the rise (and their associated intermittency) at some point we'll see the traditional night rate cheaper than day rate equation flip.
By being able to measure consumption at a higher resolution it's possible to offer pricing that is reflective of the "true cost" of the energy, eg: agile tariffs that we see emerging from companies like octopus in the UK
Personally I think this is good for consumers, and good for the environment as it allows for incentivising consumption when the energy is greener/cheaper.
There is certainly an element of concern over privacy (eg detecting activity in a home), however I would posit that internet usage patterns probably already provide the same data and of course with far worse privacy implications.
Re: Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
#53It's unclear to me if the person who wrote "who controls the Internet" has ever interacted with core internet infrastructure at the router, BGP, major transit and transport service provider ISP level. I find it very hard to take seriously prognostication from persons who've never been responsible for even a small sized ASN. Persons I do take seriously when they prognosticate on the future of the Internet: The individ…
You know Andreessen wrote the first browser, right?
Re: Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it possible to keep tracing things back to a more base layer beyond what you've described though? It's kind of arbitrary to draw the line any particular place. Like I could write "it's unclear to me if the person who wrote 'interacted with core internet infrastructure at the router, BGP, major transit and transport service provider ISP level' has ever interacted with electrical grid management, power plant oper…
No, TCP/IP and the ability to exchange routes between different networks is what makes the Internet. All of the value is in these interconnected networks and being able to send traffic to arbitrary endpoints regardless of your provider. There is no “base layer” beneath TCP/IP. That’s the beauty of the Internet. The underlying ISPs connecting together will have different lower level protocols, different internal routi…
> There is no “base layer” beneath TCP/IP.
Actually, there usually are. Physical transport layers run their own protocols and the physical media themselves (in case we are not talking OTA) also count as layers in the stack. And while these have been mostly commoditized whoever controls them does have a lot of power.
Re: Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I worked at one of the biggest ISP's in the world we got extremely despondent when https and other end-2-end encryptions became the standard because we were then unable to understand what traffic was on the wires. For ISPs and network providers now everything is just bits, and it's all commodity. The service layer is now implemented by clients.
I 'grew up' on networking in the late 90's when next to nothing was encrypted on the wire. The amount of understanding I was able to develop about how protocols work by just sniffing the packets was immense. I see folks coming out of school these days and while they far surpass my skills with software development they don't really have any intuition about how the protocols work at the network level, and as a result t…
Another big change was the move to switched networks. Coming from a shared lan that felt like being blind.
Re: Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
#56Are investors usually this clueless about how things work?
Not all of the. But quite a few will invest in areas that they have no expertise in. They usually have the smarts to not start writing about those subjects as though they suddenly do have that expertise.
Re: Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
#57We desperately need a decent desktop operating system. After that basic need is satisfied, fixing the problems in the upper layers will be easier in comparison. To develop any kind of software, you need to do so in a desktop operating system, so it's important for it to be reliable and usable. I think the only viable way to achieve this is to create a Linux-based OS. Not another Linux distribution, but something cons…
Ubuntu will do just fine.
Re: Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
#58“There has been a lot of talk in the past few years about blockchains, which are heavily hyped but poorly understood. Blockchains are networks of physical computers that work together in concert to form a single virtual computer.” I mean, how could anyone be confused when you yourself are actively fudging the meaning in the immediate next sentence? The rest of the paragraph is worse. Embarrassingly bad, but par for t…
It's cringeworthy.
Re: Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
#59It's unclear to me if the person who wrote "who controls the Internet" has ever interacted with core internet infrastructure at the router, BGP, major transit and transport service provider ISP level. I find it very hard to take seriously prognostication from persons who've never been responsible for even a small sized ASN. Persons I do take seriously when they prognosticate on the future of the Internet: The individ…
I think he's talking about a layer up. He has a bit of a point. In practical terms, if you want to purchase something on the internet or get an email address you'll interact with companies/platforms he alludes to. Thankfully email is open enough so you have a lot of choices up to installing your own server. But purchasing something is all tied up.
> But purchasing something is all tied up.
Not entirely:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WooCommerce
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_shopping_cart_so...
What's really tied up is payments: Visa and Mastercard specifically.
Re: Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
#60Cloudflare.
This deserves more visibility. Cloudflare is one of the parties with immense power.