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Of course we can!

It looked like Internet Explorer was a permanent browser monopoly just over a decade ago.

The Spread Firefox campaign - a crowd marketing campaign - fixed that. Combined, of course with a well made browser.

The result was that Apple and Google could later compete on another level with Microsoft (without Spread Firefox, websites wouldn't have worked on iPhones or Chrome).

Something similar can absolutely be done again.

> The Spread Firefox campaign - a crowd marketing campaign - fixed that. Combined, of course with a well made browser.

Thanks, almost entirely, to Google's money.

Thanks, almost entirely, to Mozilla's efforts.

Yes, Mozilla gets most of its income from Google right now, but saying that Spread Firefox's success was almost entirely attributable to Google's money is tantamount to saying that Mozilla would've been unable to secure any other source of funding.

Google paid Mozilla for a service the latter rendered. It wasn't a donation.

It looked like Internet Explorer was a permanent browser monopoly just over a decade ago.

I remember noting it was odd in the late 90s that IE was free on computers (because they were all Windows...) yet half the people I knew paid money for this Netscape thing.

Am I crazy? I remember using Netscape myself and I'm sure I never paid for it.

"Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998" - wikipedia

No, you're not crazy. Netscape Navigator was not free as such, but if I recall correctly, was free for individual users, schools, non-commercial entities, etc. (Am I mis-remembering this? The Wikipedia page doesn't have much detail.)

As others have mentioned, Netscape Navigator was free to individual users. Corporations using it were supposed to have site licenses, but in my experience this was mostly ignored en masse. I certainly worked at a couple of companies in that timeframe where everyone used Navigator at work but the company didn't have a corporate license and the situation was constantly joked about, the way people joke about WinZIP/WinRAR nag screens saying you are on day 1099 of your 30 day trial or whatever.

No, you're not crazy. It certainly became free. I just remember that there was a period when people were forking over actual money for a browser that wasn't IE.

The archive.org provides the answer. For not even $50, Netscape Navigator is yours!

https://web.archive.org/web/19961115062838/http://merchant.n...

I agree with most of what you say, but this is a bit pessimistic:

> Building an alternative to Gmail? Nope. We can’t do that. We don’t have the resources.

When you think about it, most of the internet depends on open source software built by "us". Programming languages, databases, web servers, content management systems, statistical analysis, image manipulation, and yes, email clients/servers. Given all that, a self-hosted email application should be possible.

I suspect the reason we don't do it is not because we don't have the resources, but because... actually I don't know why we don't. Perhaps all the investment slush funds have made us lazy and selfish. Perhaps the social networks and mobile games have made us less creative. Perhaps some of the fanatical open source software wars have put us off doing the same thing.

The actual answer relates to the email protocol. Sure, you can setup your private messing system and there are plenty of them out there, but if you want to receive email from someones gmail account you need to hook into DNS which is under a government's control you also need a few dedicated machines to handle the load. Granted you may trust .TV or wherever, but as the pirate bay found out when the US and it's allies really want something it's surprisingly hard to find someone that's really willing to stand up to them.

I think the solutions are coming, and we're beginning to see the seeds of that with stuff like DarkMail protocol, TPB's upcoming anti-censorship browser, the P2P Twitter alternative, Twister.

However, I think the big problem with these will be adoption. I that first off before the masses move to such services, the current status quo needs to become quite bad. Bittorent adoption grew because the MPAA kept killing stuff like Napster and Kazaa, and then they got the government to seize all streaming website domains, to the point where nobody had an alternative except using Bittorent. If TPB can't be accessed anymore, it will push millions to use TPB's upcoming browser.

There's another problem with some of these. They are stand-alone apps. I think what will get us the "encrypted by default Internet" and much better privacy and anonymity will emerge out of the Bitcoin community.

Something like http://www.ethereum.org which plans to build an Internet-like platform might give us that. The reason this might become more popular is that it's not just an app. It's a platform on which you'll see all sorts of very secure and private apps appear, to the point where most of your "Internet usage" is done on that platform, whether it's for visiting your most important websites, or chatting with friends or e-mailing them. I think that's how we'll get that secure by default Internet.

I'm skeptical of IETF and the like fixing the current Internet, because I think there are too many stakeholders in the current Internet that will fight against any serious changes to how the Internet works. I fully expect Google, for example, to fight against any proposal for anonymity. So the real changes will have to happen bottom-up, rather than top-down, and grow naturally. Hopefully this won't take too long, though.

> Bittorent adoption grew because the MPAA kept killing stuff like Napster and Kazaa, and then they got the government to seize all streaming website domains, to the point where nobody had an alternative except using Bittorent.

Personally, I ended up using Bittorrent because it was superior to the alternative that's popular in my country (DC++). Because it is peer to peer and because the client can download from multiple seeds at the same time, Bittorent makes it easy to saturate my download bandwidth.

From a publisher's perspective for legal torrents (e.g. think of Ubuntu.com) it's better to distribute a torrent link on your website, than it is to provide a direct download link or to upload your stuff on Kazza, or Napster, or Dropbox, or Megaupload, or whatever. Notice how bandwidth and finding a host for popular stuff is a problem, being the reason for why people still use SourceForge.

I cannot agree with you - people don't switch because of government-related actions. People switch when the alternative is superior. Let me give you another success story waiting to happen - Bittorent Sync makes it easy to synchronize stuff in your network. It's still rough, but if I were Dropbox, that's the competition I would fear.

Anyway, peer2peer when implemented right works better than the server-client model, at least on broadband connections that can afford the upload (sadly, doesn't work so well on mobile phones, either because of battery life or bandwidth limits, but these are limitations that are not going to exist in the future). If you implement something that works and is friendly to users, then it can win in the marketplace.

That's nice and all, but what I always miss on those projects is thinking of how the NSA and others will react?

Taking Ethereum or any other "new internet" technology as an example:

Suppose this thing is actually sucessful, grows a critical mass and becomes a threat to the survivellance activities.

If nothing else helps, someone could just introduce a law that mandates all ISPs to allow incoming connections only to machines on a "national server list" - market the bill as "War against botnets" or something.

Getting put on the list is easy for every legitimate business owner - for a moderate fee of $2000/month, subject to renewal every three months.

The reactions to this would be mild. Apple/Google/Facebook etc would actually lose competition, so don't expect any protest from them. There'd be no public outcry either since you could still perfectly well watch cat videos, post photos of your dinner on Twitter or buy the latest flappy bird clone on the app store. But oops, no more file sharing, no more Bitcoin, no more Ethereum, no more peer-to-peer networks at all.

What I want to say with this is that this is not a problem that can be solved technologically - the NSA or whatever other services take their place have by far the stronger position here.

> When you think about it, most of the internet depends on open source software built by "us".

I wonder whether that could be a possible "fix" to get companies to push back harder against the government. If the various OSS licenses were amended to include a clause that forbade the use of the software to aid government surveillance, it would force providers to choose between continuing to leverage open source software and continuing to cooperate with the government.

> Building an alternative to Gmail? Nope. We can’t do that. We don’t have the resources.

Agreed. We don't have the resources.

> Basically what we need is a new Internet. We have to change everything.

But that would need even more resources!

Let’s get realistic here shall we? Building an alternative to Gmail? Nope. We can’t do that.

The protocol is called IMAP and the client is called <insert-random-email-client-here>. Email is old and just about every email client does its job sufficiently good to achieve what it was made for: writing and sending emails.

With IMAP, everything is even synced across all devices. Gmail is actually the LEAST important thing to use in my opinion. If people are unwilling to sacrifice a relatively unnecessary software like Gmail, I don't see any chance in boycotting products/companies at all.

You do realize that IMAP and email client are just a small part of Gmail?

So, what's the indispensable feature of Gmail you absolutely need?

Ridiculously smart spam filtering.

Spamassassin.

Spamassassin is not as good as Gmail but I still don't want Gmail. I don't mind giving up a bit of confort for political reasons. The same way I don't mind using DuckDuckGo with ixquick (!ix) and startpage (!sp) fallbacks instead of Google. It's a bit less confortable, but I can still find what I need.

Their filtering really isn't that smart. It's just so much better than what people were used to with hotmail or yahoo mail. But it's no better than other well setup systems, and in some ways it is worse.

Considering your background, that's encouraging news.

What we need is a new way to communicate where spam is inherently not possible.

What does our primary electronic communication system look like in 10 years? A slightly improved gmail?

Yeah, probably not.

Still plenty of room for innovation out there.

> Basically what we need is a new Internet. We have to change everything. I don’t know if that’s even feasible but my guess is that even if it was it will take a lot of time.

Problem of creating new Internet lies in the infrastructure. We can't just build it upon current network to which NSA (and other agencies) already has an access. It maybe encrypted, but as you pointed yourself, encryption can be broken.

So, personally, i can see this new Internet only if there was a new way to send and receive data with less infrastructure overhead as there is now. And that might be possible in the future with stuff like quantum teleportation.

Basically what we need is a new Internet.

Anybody else remember the Internet2 push from the late 90's?

Whatever happened to that? I thought it was still around by still very niche.

It's limited to educational institutions.