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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

This article basically describes how the current internet was created.... why would this new internet end up any different?

You can't expect every person to be skilled enough (and with the time and desire) to be their own network administrator, so someone will have to run the network for those people... and they will need to be compensated for that work... and some people will be really good at running that network, and will have lots of clients and get very efficient at running networks, so more people will hire them.... and they will get big enough to hire people and pay for laying cables between networks... and suddenly we have the exact same system we have now.

What would be different this time around if we started from scratch?

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>why would this new internet end up any different?

I think the main advantage we have today is the hindsight of the past 25+ years.

>What would be different this time around if we started from scratch?

I think instead of one big Internet we'd build a bunch of smaller, trusted intranets, and provide controlled access via something like a web-of-trust system.

>You can't expect every person to be skilled enough (and with the time and desire) to be their own network administrator

It's up to your tribe/family/community to have its own networking person, and you can compensate any way that's agreeable to you.

Just like it's smart to have your own doctor and mechanic in the family, you should also have your own networking and computers person you can trust.

Many people complain about family coming to them for computer help and suggest that they should go to a "professional". I think this is an insensitve and unempathetic point of view. Where else would they go? Who else can be trusted to help them except you?

No, it's up to us to take care of all whom we care about, because no one else out there will do it for us. And if you shy away from this responsibility, your punishment will be watching family members get taken advantage of.

I essentially agree with you but there is a missing piece to this.

There are food reasons people get tired of supporting their tribe or family’s IT infrastructure:

1. What we are supporting is often badly designed for individuals and so we’re doing mindless make work to overcome problems cause by corporations. I.e. we are experiencing an externality that a corporation is profiting from.

2. It’s often not reciprocated. Many people have no problem letting someone spend hours fixing a messed up computer, but won’t think to do anything in return. This isn’t universal, I have family members who are very appreciative and will make me dinner, or otherwise value what I’m doing for them, but ‘tribe members’ often just take it for granted that it’s ok for them to just lean on people helplessly for support.

3. Similar to 2. A lot of people keep doing stuff that causes them problems and won’t follow advice that would prevent this. My experience is that it’s the same people who take the help for granted.

I agree that it’s our responsibility to help, but it’s not our responsibility to be enablers.

Thank you for replying so thoughtfully.

These are real problems that need to be addressed in order to make tribe technology sustainable.

I couldn't have put this better. I feel more empowered to run my own infra for my tribe

It doesn't mean anything to "start from scratch" anyway. The Network is a meme, knowing what it is has the effect of creating it.

The last time it could have been possible, with tremendous effort, to divert things such that the Internet didn't become the Network and something else did, would have been around 1990.

That's the point where JIPS happens. Up until then, the US has a lot of IP networking, but some other rich industrialised countries have the ITU's X.25 networking. The ITU in some sense are a logical place to look for the beginning of this Network because they oversaw technological development for its predecessor, the Public Switched Telephone Network.

Anyway in the UK they have some X.25 but people are interested in this American IP stuff, so they agree to offer establishments with X.25 access to IP as well starting January 1991, in a programme called JIPS (the JaNET IP Service). JIPS is an enormous success, everybody loves IP and soon it is apparent that the future is IP not X.25. Game over, the Internet becomes inevitable at that point.

Now, I care also about the last mile, "phase I delivery of the Network" meaning that ordinary citizens in most of the world have access to the Network. No iterations of the Network have been truly universally accessible. Even for the oldest (the global postal network agreed in Bern in 1874) you need at least literacy, a taught skill not truly accessible to every person. But we can get very close, and it took several more years for the Internet to do that.

Well, the novelty of course. Everything has it's way. Radio, TV, telephony, the internet; all have gone through different phases of commercialization and exploitations.

It takes time for bureaucracy to take over. Think of the natural cycle of a startup becoming an enterprise, a niche shop becoming a large chain.

"You can't expect every person to be skilled enough (and witht the time and desire) to be their own network administrator, so someone will have to run the network for those people..."

Why would this new internetwork have to be made available to "those people". This comment seems to reframe the article's implicit "call to action" to a new set of constraints. It presupposes that an internetwork can only be created when it exists for commercial exploitation of its users, despite the author's example of a popular peer-to-peer network that generally has never been used as such, not to mention the "Internet" we are now using was not created for that purpose. (commercial exploitation)

It is curious this fascination with the definition of an internetwork as one that must mirror the present one and include amongst its users unskilled persons with no time or desire to learn how to use it but with money and a willingness (maybe even a forced necessity) to pay others to help them.

I wonder if there has ever existed a internetwork used only by skilled persons with time and desire to learn to use it, and not seeking to be compensated for the time they spent learning and the skills they developed as a result. If not, perhaps there will be.

If your definition includes networks only used by a few technical hobbyists, then a lot of those networks already exist.

This article seems to be a call to action, and it doesn't make sense to ask for something if it already exists.

What I am wondering is why you would question such a (seemingly harmless) call to action. Particulary the last paragraph which simply suggests going forward people might spend less time focusing on learning programming and more time focusing on learning networking. If this "call to action" were to garner any traction, would it impact you personally, or anyone you care about, in a negative way?

No, my point is I think the article is actually arguing for more than just hobbyist networks. I think they ARE trying to reach non-technical users with this plan.

I did not get that impression as the author assumes some readers will be familiar with the "technical" history he describes. Granted, the blog as a whole does not have a necessarily technical focus. Even so, what is the harm if non-technical readers encounter this article.

Regarding creation of new networks, it seems your issue with this article applies more to this internet we are using right now. The one that you imply may have non-technical users reading about creating new networks for "technical" ones.

I don't think this article causes any harm... I am not sure where you are getting that from.

Yes, this article is not addressed to non-technical readers, but my interpretation is that they are wanting technical people to create this "new internet" for the masses.

It is the "for the masses" part of your reasoning I do not understand how you read that into the article.

I think the issue you have is more with the internet ("Internet", capital "I") we are using right now, which is dominated by a www "for the masses" and "content" like this blog. The Internet allows and encourages the type of senseless "content" you are criticising. New networks do not have to be "for the masses", or dominated by a www, their creation and administration does not have to itself be a commercial enterprise, nor do these networks have to be open for commercial use.

IMO, it is the "for the masses" and "open for commercial use" characteristics of this Internet that lead to blog articles like this one. The blog entry is arguably just a means of steering readers to a website, mentioned at the end of the article, that purports to offer training courses to aspiring "revolutionaries".

And as soon as there is the slightest bit of traction, the same companies would own it!

The centralization of core Internet governance functions are a key thing to do better.

decentralized PKI, decentralized DNS are part of the ticket.

The other aspect is a monetization scheme at the transport layer to enable ideas like "Web Monetization" https://webmonetization.org/

Diode has implemented both - it has a full deployed decentralized PKI and DNS, has mapped Web2 domains to dDNS (BNS), monetizes infrastructure at the bandwidth level, and is making other strides on the application front.

Check out the Diode dDNS / BNS: https://diode.io/prenet/#/dns

the safe network is going to be autonomous so it won't even need anyone to act as an admin. all you will need to do is log in to access your files

https://safenetwork.tech

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