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The Public Interest Internet

berjon.com

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Re: The Public Interest Internet

#61

Post by roenxi »

Hasu wrote: post #60
roenxi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would I ever agree to that? You're already looking at the ad. $0.02 > $0.00, so the situation is a strict improvement.

No, it isn't. I use AdBlock and generally when I allow ads it's because I have no other way to pay someone who made something I appreciate. I am happy to pay money to remove ads, but it would take a lot more money paid to me to add them in! Certainly not an amount that would be worth advertisers to pay me.

Well, ok then this feature isn't for you. But you have an extra option if you want to make $0.02.

But in practice we know there is large group of people working to fund the internet, and I reckon the fair split might turn out to be that all of them (ad viewer, ad placer and content provider) get a slice instead of just the last 2. Think of it as the ad viewer's subsidy for supporting people who use ad blockers.

Re: The Public Interest Internet

#62

Post by Gormo »

digging wrote: post #27
cheeseomlit wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Compromise' paints an idealistic picture, its often just a euphemism for 'the more powerful/entrenched party gets what they want by default, but they'll let the other side vocally express their frustration to maintain the veneer of an actual conversation.' What you're describing sounds like a top-down restructuring of the internet at large, which is a golden opportunity for any interested party to restructure it in…

Honestly, I can't even finish reading through this comment. This is the opposite of idealism - is there a word for it? You seem to be complaining that something is impossible because it can't be implemented in a perfect utopian way. Well, guess what, we already have an implementation of the internet that imperfectly respects "the public good", and it sucks. Let's imagine something better.

> This is the opposite of idealism - is there a word for it?

Far from being the opposite of idealism, this approach is in fact the only one by which high ideals can be approximated in reality.

> You seem to be complaining that something is impossible because it can't be implemented in a perfect utopian way.

Quite to the contrary, the complaint is not merely that the pursuit of these goals would fall short of perfection, but rather that the consequences would largely be the inverse of the intentions.

In essence, idealism is its own opposite -- if you're looking for a single word to describe this critique, some good options might be "correctness", "efficacy", and "reasonableness".

Re: The Public Interest Internet

#63

Post by Gormo »

digging wrote: post #51
jujube3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly, I can't even finish reading through this comment. This is the opposite of idealism - is there a word for it? realism

No, it's more like defeatism.

Nah, idealism is itself defeatism -- nothing sustains the status quo greater than people wallowing in speculation unmoored from reality instead of taking practical measures to address the problems before them.

Re: The Public Interest Internet

#64

Post by Gormo »

mistermann wrote: post #18
Gormo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment you try to define a singular "common good", you wind up with a variety of competing factions all putting forth their own wildly divergent and often contradictory notions of what that common good consists of. Most people have an unfortunate tendency to project their own values and preferences onto the world at large, and fail to recognize when they cross the boundary out of their own spaces and into other p…

This (the last 2 paragraphs) certainly seems correct, but what if the fact of the matter is you have it ~backwards?

Then I supposed I'd have to re-evaluate my priors. Are there any 'facts of the matter' that might substantiate an alternate conclusion?

Re: The Public Interest Internet

#65

Post by Gormo »

hobs wrote: post #29
Gormo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty sure that tabs were introduced by a software developer without any prior request from any user. I'm sure many, many features were introduced by software developers without any prior request from users. Users then selected what software to use based on which of those features they like the best. This is how most product design works -- features are developed prior to being marketed, and users subsequently val…

The monopoly of Chrome over the marketplace suggests you are wrong, with enough money to move around you can implement AMP for instance, nobody wanted it but everyone wanted the money, so they played along.

> The monopoly of Chrome over the marketplace suggests you are wrong

It would seem to suggest the exact opposite, since the "monopoly" (sic; actually dominance in a competitive space) you are referring to is the product entirely of user adoption at scale.

Re: The Public Interest Internet

#66

Post by Gormo »

hobs wrote: post #31
Gormo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure how much consumer self direction was involved. It was entirely consumer self-direction, as neither browser was preinstalled by default on any platform, and all usage of either was initiated by a deliberate end-user choice. "Aggressive marketing" indeed only has its effect through "consumer self-direction" as its whole purpose is to persuade end users to make a purposeful decision.

There were huge campaigns where google was paying per install, many of these installs were surreptitious. When you create standards that only play well in your garden then the only people making decisions are you and the devs writing them, the users either play along or cant use CORPORATE_WEB_APP - hence why IE is STILL around today.

And yet the current dominance of Chrome, having decisively displaced IE in all use cases except entrenched legacy ones with high switching costs, conclusively disproves the very point you are making: nearly everyone did switch away from IE despite Microsoft doing the exact things you are describing.

Re: The Public Interest Internet

#67

Post by Gormo »

digging wrote: post #22
Gormo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment you try to define a singular "common good", you wind up with a variety of competing factions all putting forth their own wildly divergent and often contradictory notions of what that common good consists of. Most people have an unfortunate tendency to project their own values and preferences onto the world at large, and fail to recognize when they cross the boundary out of their own spaces and into other p…

> The moment you try to define a singular "common good", you wind up with a variety of competing factions all putting forth their own wildly divergent and often contradictory notions of what that common good consists of. Yes, that's called compromise. It's basically one of the foundations of society and civilization. It's not a blocker for public-interest projects.

No, compromise is when a variety of people with different interests and values try to find a middle-ground solution that's sufficiently acceptable to everyone involved, each according to their own particular criteria. Proposing solutions that can only be pursued if everyone adopts a single set of criteria does not encourage compromise, it encourages conflict.

Societies are not monolithic blobs with a singular "common good" -- they're complex networks of relations among different people with fundamentally varying worldviews and value systems. Making public-interests projects work entails respecting pluralism and individual autonomy. There's no alternative: projects that depend on conformity will inevitably fail.

Re: The Public Interest Internet

#68

Post by troyvit »

ETH_start wrote: post #57

I would much prefer the state compete with market actors, not commandeer their operations. The state has significant advantages when competing against private market actors because it can sustainably fund public goods, due to the fact that its vast tax collection apparatus can capture a much higher proportion of the value generated by public goods than private actors can. An adequately funded public good has several…

It took me like 12 days to read the whole article, so, this comment is super late but someday maybe you'll run across it. All I want to say is that's a great idea. Back when email started entering wide use I was flummoxed as to why the post office didn't offer its own email options.

Re: The Public Interest Internet

#69

Post by ETH_start »

troyvit wrote: post #68
ETH_start wrote: post #57

I would much prefer the state compete with market actors, not commandeer their operations. The state has significant advantages when competing against private market actors because it can sustainably fund public goods, due to the fact that its vast tax collection apparatus can capture a much higher proportion of the value generated by public goods than private actors can. An adequately funded public good has several…

It took me like 12 days to read the whole article, so, this comment is super late but someday maybe you'll run across it. All I want to say is that's a great idea. Back when email started entering wide use I was flummoxed as to why the post office didn't offer its own email options.

Thanks for engaging with the discussion. With respect to the thought that came to you back in the early email days, I don't mean to be pedantic when I say this, and it may have had definite merit — like ensuring services that are naturally monopolistic due to network effects, are provided by an entity collectively controlled by the public — but an email service wouldn't fit the economic definition of a public good.

An open source codebase allowing anyone to set up their own mail server would be the public good in that domain.

A table that gives examples of private vs public goods:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods#Goods_classified_by_excl...

Public goods:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

For more complex goods, involving management of platforms, I think the only type of public good that could compete with proprietary offerings is the software that allows people to form a decentralized consensus and run applications on top of it, e.g. blockchain node software and smart contract code, respectively.

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