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Comment by Gentil | Hacker News Reader

OK. This is a good article. But the title of the blog post is misleading. The author is talking about the privatized internet as in the infrastructure of the internet that is privatized. Not individual business privatization.

Remember the Internet Society planning to sell .org? - https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_sha.... ICANN and Internet Society has been under the spotlight for shitty behavior since a very long time.

W3C is also heavily lobbied by companies like Google for instance is abusing it's browser market share against to make the internet less private. Then there is Manifest v3 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3Nzz....

This article is about things like that. The infrastructure privatization and lobbying. Not individual business privatization.

While I didn't like the author's website's patterns, that shouldn't change the fact about what the author is trying to convey.

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Jacobin is a very well established, multi-author publication. The author of this piece is, as far as I understand it, not actually able to control the presentation. Even in a traditional newspaper, a subeditor would have laid out the piece.

> Manifest v3

At one point, I had exactly the same browser add-on running under both Firefox and Chrome. Then Google wanted changes. I dropped Chrome support, because nobody runs add-ons under Chrome much anyway.

> nobody runs add-ons under Chrome much anyway

Beg to differ. Every non-developer where I work has at least one add-on for Chrome, usually Grammarly or a screenshot/screen capture tool (because there's really no default tool in Chrome to do this).

Was that before or after Mozilla decided to stop let you load proper add-ons, and make you settle for the crippled WebExtensions API?

Nah, it’s about Tarnoff’s brand of internet Marxism and how commercialization has driven a subsumption of “labor” (basically internet users) at all levels, shaping the internet we use today. At the application layer, he’s talking about how user-generated content arose as an internet-native thing to be profited from—in the early days, storefronts weren’t as profitable as eBay. Website authors compete for placement in Google’s search results, feeding Google’s ad empire. At the infra layer, he’s talking about how backbones are designed around delivering commercial content ubiquitously rather than connecting communities.

Tarnoff thinks there’s an alternative where you connect to your local library’s social network through your local ISP coop to see what your neighbors are up to.

>Tarnoff thinks there’s an alternative where you connect to your local library’s social network through your local ISP coop to see what your neighbors are up to.

Sign me up

welcome! http://scuttlebutt.nz (or http://manyver.se mobile app version)

Manverse as I remember has been slowing down in development for a while. Or has that changed?

You’re being sarcastic but actually libraries being the public alternative to ISPs is a great fit; they are the providers of free knowledge and information after all. I don’t see why using a local library would mean you could no longer communicate with the larger internet any more than using your ISP’s local gateway would. Local networks communicating with other networks is literally what the internet means.

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