Comment by formula1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by formula1 | Hacker News Reader

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You are an ISP provider

A social network "connect me" offers voip and is backed by billions in venture funding, including your own modest investment of a million. Its ok.

A new social network arises and people are really into the bohemian feel. It also is a voip except its meant to be extremely high bitrate so that music doesnt lose as much qualify. Its nane is "Life Vibrations".

What have insentive do you have to keep competition fair when you are invested in a competitor? When ventures explicitely pay you to be unfair, what insentive do you have to be fair?

How much can you charge an individual to allow your ip to be publicly available? $100 a month? $400 a month? Forget the days of homegrown websites. The new economy is rising the barrier to entry.

Another example is censorship

Open web is as much about ensuring monopolies and centrelazion of power dont corrupt a very vibrant ecosystem. The web is as American as capitalism. Free and full of opportunity. The second you give a company the ability to say "no", you are now bound to the limitations of each ISP since some may provide your content only if you guve them a reason. And theres cases like the timewarner/comcast merger where they are effectively the same company but the law prevents them having the same name.

If I understand correctly, you're saying open web is necessary because otherwise the world would be a worse place. And I agree with that, I even mentioned that in the original comment.

My point was, at the end of the day you are building something for actual people to use (and not for a few philosophers), so you need to build something that's actually useful enough for people to switch from existing solutions.

The open web people don't have that, they are philosophers who want an ideal world, and there's nothing wrong with pondering about and advocating idealism, but you know what's cooler? A philosopher who can actually change the world by building something people will actually use.

Hard not to get angry about a comment like yours. The WWW did have a founding philosophy, one that was as close as you can get to "open web" without having lived through the ad industry takeover.

Edit: Does someone actually need to point out what Tim Berners-Lee has been talking about for some years now? Or where the original "stack" comes from? Are we all either SV fodder or Stallmans now?

I think you're getting angry at your own interpretation of my comment.

Im saying that competition will be stifled to the point of crony capitalism. You need a freind to gain entry rather than a superior product or even a solution to a problem.

The only way to create things that "people actually use" is for those products to be available for use. If people cannot even access your products what you end up with is a handicapped communication form similar to what facebook offered india.

Show me your vision. One where the only way to make a product available is to pay an absurd rent or sell to an ISP super company. Did we really go so far just to create a new form of feudalism?

> you are building something

Did it ever occur to you that "not building something" is an option?

You are framing the situation as if "open web" and "easy to use" are (currently) mutually exclusive; that because of the market, "easy to use" trumps all other options... even at the cost of user agency and control over their own data. Designs that are hostile to the user are not legitimate solutions. You should be rejecting designs that e.g. leak user data without informed consent. The user's data and activities need to be protected.

Leaving out seatbelts would make a car easier to use, and there was resistance when they were introduced. We had to use legislation to overcome that ease of use. Do you want to design safe software, or do you want to wait for the inevitable legislation that will happen when enough people finally get pissed off about not having control over their data and introduce legislative duct-tape?

I'm not framing anything in any way. I'm just stating the fact--The people who build "open web" products are all coming at it from philosophical point of view and with the exception of the few I mentioned (Bitcoin and Bittorrent) they have no immediate benefit that will trump all the inconvenience that's inherently built into the decentralized architecture.

Also, decentralized architecture is inherently inconvenient. I'm not pulling it out of nowhere, it's physics and network theory. That's why there's always constant pendulum swing between decentralized and centralized platforms. If you disagree, tell me an example of a purely decentralized platform with great traction that doesn't have a centralized counterpart or complement.

Some decentralized platform launches with a unique benefit, people adopt it, then people find out it's more convenient to have a "central directory" (Like piratebay or napster), but then centralized platforms are easy to kill, so this fight between decentralization and centralization keeps going on and on, but this is only because the initial decentralized technology introduced a clear, unique, and immediately useful feature that trumped all the inconvenience.

You are framing your argument, even if you don't recognize you're doing it. You response is evidence of the framing and your blindness to it.

I agree completely with most of what you have said. It's obvious that it's harder to make a decentralized solution as convenient as a centralized platform. Yes, it would be great if decentralized solution could also offer a new feature that made them able to compete on the market on their own merits. This is yet another example of a situation that becomes pathological in an unregulated market.

What you seem to be missing is that the centralized solution is not safe for the user, and therefor shouldn't be an option. There are many products that could be made much easier to use if we removed their safety features. When profit motive conflicts with user safety is when regulations are added to the market to correct that imbalance. I'm suggesting that the makers of networked software might want to add their own regulations - such as preserving an open web - before governments decide to get involved with poorly designed legislation.

There are pros and cons to both centralization and decentralization and it is never that one is better than the other, therefore your statement "Centralized solution is not safe for the user, and therefor(sic) shouldn't be an option" is not correct. There are tons of cases where decentralized systems are unsafer for the user than centralized systems.

Safeness is not just about whether something is technically sound, it's also about how it works in practice. Banks are extremely centralized and for a good reason. You may say it's very unsafe since it's a "single point of failure" and one robber can break in and take everyone's money. But what makes banks appealing is the single point of failure functions also as a "single point of responsibility", so by centralizing responsibility it makes it much more efficient to manage risks. If we didn't have banks, every family probably will be spending tons of money just for securing their money--they will probably need to buy super secure vaults, secure their household from intruders, etc. Again it's not whether one is better than the other. There are pros and cons.

Try owning a Bitcoin in as secure way you can, and you'll understand how cumbersome AND unsafe it is to not have a single point of responsibility. A lot of people on HN seem to think the reason people "don't give a shit about security and privacy" is because they don't know enough. But that's not correct, they have better things to do and they're simply delegating some things to a centralized authority because it makes financial sense. People are not stupid.

Anyway, all these comments don't really matter because this was not at all my point, you keep saying I'm missing the point, but I think you are the one who's missing my point. I didn't say what is better or not. I didn't say open web is not necessary, I didn't say it shouldn't happen. I just said the approaches these people are taking is far from ideal, it's not even about centralized/decentralized argument. It's about "if you're gonna do something, do it smart, instead of thinking something will magically happen if you keep doing something the same way even though you keep failing". How can you succeed at something when you don't even understand why your enemy is winning?

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