Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

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I don't see any good options at this point. The situation profoundly sucks for everyone involved. We're stuck between the almost absurdly adversarial open web, or bargaining with the devil at Cloudflare, and now Google's remote attestation which is basically Google taking a stab at the problem.

To be clear I don't think remote attestation is a good solution, but it's at least a solution. Any credible argument against Cloudflare or remote attestation needs to address state of the open web and have some sort of plan how to fix it. Or at least acknowledge that's what Google and CF are trying to solve. Dismissing the problem as a bunch of mindless corporate greed just doesn't fly. It affects anyone trying to host anything on the Internet, and is only getting worse. The status quo and where it's heading is completely untenable.

It's easy to say well just host static content, but that's ceding all of Internet discovery and navigation and discussion and interactivity to big tech, irreversibly pulling up the ladder on any sort of free and independent competition in these areas. That's, in my opinion, a far greater problem.

Yes, I agree with you. It sucks having to make these choices and compromises. The adversarial nature of the web is difficult for service providers but it's actually ideal for users. We all benefit from being able to connect to servers using any browser, any HTTP client. This is especially true when the service providers don't like it. Software like yt-dlp is an example of software that interoperates adversarially with websites, empowering us.

I apologize if I came off as aggressive during my argument. It was not my intention. I think we reached the same conclusion though.

Maybe the true problem is bandwidth is too expensive to begin with. Would the problem still exist if the costs were negligible?

Network bandwidth cost is negligible, it's hardware and processing power that's expensive. Each query I process is up to a 100 Mb disk read. I only have so much I/O bandwidth.

As far as I see it, there are two bad solutions to this problem.

The first bad solution is to have a central authority inspect most of the web's traffic and try to deduce who is human. This is the approach taken by Cloudflare, but essentially the same as Remote Attestation. It gives the chosen authority a private inspection hatch for most of the web's traffic, as well as unfettered authority to censor and deny service as they see fit.

The other bad option is a sort of 'free as in free enterprise' Ferengi Internet where each connection handshake involves haggling over the rate and then each request costs a fraction of a cent. This would remove the need to de-anonymize users, likely kill the ads business and virtually eliminate DDoS/sybil attacks. It would also be an enormous vector for money laundering, and as a cherry on top make running a search and discovery services much more expensive. I do think the crypto grifters pretty solidly killed the credibility of this option.

> The other bad option is a sort of 'free as in free enterprise' Ferengi Internet where each connection handshake involves haggling over the rate and then each request costs a fraction of a cent.

> This would remove the need to de-anonymize users, likely kill the ads business and virtually eliminate DDoS/sybil attacks.

Sounds like a massive win to me on all fronts. I agree with you.

> It would also be an enormous vector for money laundering

I don't mind. If that's the price, I pay it gladly.

Xanadu comes close to this "ferengi Internet" mindset with some of the tactics it chooses for monetization of content, albeit from an entirely different angle (enabling remix culture more or less indiscriminately while preserving the sanctity of the existing copyright system and enabling royalties to flow to authors proportional to how their works are used and reused).

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