Death of Internet Predicted: Film at 11 559
Remik writes "The Register has a piece analyzing several threads of Lawrence Lessig's blog, and concluding that the Internet as we know it is dying. For anyone who reads the majority of YRO posts, Lessig's blog is one of the most important sites on the net." Another submitter summed it up well: 'Lessig is predicting that the days of the Commons of the Internet are over, and that as a result of FCC deregulation, the concentration of digital rights in the hands of just a few large media companies will kill the internet for good. Even former FOX and Vivendi executive Barry Diller has criticised the move.' We joke, but there are large elements of truth to Lessig's dour predictions.
Hah (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe Al Gore can hurry up and finish Internet2?
Re:Hah (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully "people" will be victorious over "government sanctioned actions".
Re:Hah (Score:3, Insightful)
Corporations only have power because the government hands it to them. Without the DMCA and other unbalanced laws, the **AAs wouldn't be a danger.
On the Al Gore thing.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:On the Al Gore thing.... (Score:3, Insightful)
"I took the initiative in creating the Internet" is what he said. He deserves to be made fun of for that. Yes he was rambling. Yes he later made it clear that he didn't create the internet.
The stupid coffee thing is still stupid. Don't dump coffe on yourself. Was it too hot? Most definitely. Was McDonalds an asshole about it? Yes. I read it, she still didn't deserv
Re:What Gore actually said (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hah (Score:2)
Market share percent != death (Score:3, Insightful)
However, market share percentage has nothing to do with something "dying".
In an expanding computer market, you can have something lose market share while still selling more and more units and being installed on more and more desktops (or being a desktop, as with Apple), while the "other guys" are expanding faster (hence a shrinking market share).
However, you certainly can't say that something that is growing in real terms is "dying". Are *BSD
SPAM is more enemy to net. (Score:5, Interesting)
What about cable TV? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like living under a flightpath: at first, you can't deal with all the jet planes, but after a while you don't even realize they're there.
flight path analogue (Score:5, Interesting)
Good analogy but to extend it: you probably wouldn't choose to live under a flight path without good reason in the first place.
If your first experience of the web was a deluge of deafening popups/unders/overs/whatever, as is common with some sites these days, then you mightn't bother with it after that. Which is especially true of the people that are offended by the porn.
Those that have been around for a while have learned to adapt and deal with these "jets" and other annoyances but there's a certain amount of skill to getting a good SNR from the internet nowadays.
Re:SPAM is more enemy to net. (Score:2, Insightful)
We are constantly assaulted by advertising anyway, we just learned to live with it or tune it out. Radio, TV, billboards, magazines, clothing etc. are all advertising delivery materials these days but we don't notice it as much because we are familiar with it.
If anything I think that on the net it is easier to avoid ads. I still cannot prevent the supermarket from sending me coupon booklets. I cannot block ads on the radio and if I want to watch
Re:SPAM is more enemy to net. (Score:2, Interesting)
Irony (Score:2)
Re:Irony (Score:2)
There is "dead", where something ceases to exist, and "dead" where it becomes irrelevant. There is no longer innovation or growth in Minitel.
Predicted death of the net is on a blog? (Score:5, Funny)
Movie-house trailer on why home DVDs will mean the end of film
"The End Of The Book Printing Industry" as seen at Border's
Puuuuhhhleeeeze! This is nonsense. It's buzzword fishing, it's -1 Flamebait
Michael, YHBT, YHL, HAND
--
Re:Predicted death of the net is on a blog? (Score:4, Funny)
The internets not dying, its evolving into a new and improved state where nobody will have to make decisions anymore, and all the voices will be trustworthy. This is great news! Think of all the oppourtunity the future holds for trustworthy news of fantastic new products!
Trust me. I know. I'm onto this internet thing, and its gonna be big!
Re:Predicted death of the net is on a blog? (Score:2)
Hmm, sounds familiar [amazon.com]...
Re:Predicted death of the net is on a blog? (Score:3, Funny)
As someone who remembers when platform shoes, leisure suits, and polyester pantsuits were in-style, declarations of "End of Fashion as we know it," were not always bad. To this day, I cringe at anything plaid.
It will be regretable that some good stuff about the Internet will be the victim of "improvements." Let's hope that some things make a comeback.
That's Life. C'est la Vie. Es la Vida.
Re:Predicted death of the net is on a blog? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is funny. You take your nick from a band that is popular because of self-controlled destiny, popularization through the internet, and the ability to produce their own media.
Marillion would not be where they are today without the open, free internet. Media companies would have kept them in Europe; here in the states, nobody would have heard of them, except the few die-hard fans that discovered them accidently overseas.
They certainly would not have had the artistic freedom to produce and publish their own albums based entirely on support from fans.
"C'est la Vie" has nothing to do with it. Getting hit with a car: that's life. Watching the car coming and not doing anything about it: that's stupidity.
Re:Predicted death of the net is on a blog? (Score:5, Interesting)
Main Street v. Wall Street. (Score:3, Interesting)
From my perspective, the dot com bust was the failure of the large sites that wanted to dominate the market. Small Main Street sites grew during the stock market crash. For example Moab, Utah [imoab.com] is a town of 5000 and has about 150 ind
As long as there are opponents to DRM ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, once the equipment gets cheaper, we can set up another 'internet'
a few questions: (Score:2, Insightful)
Hell, once the equipment gets cheaper, we can set up another 'internet'
Ok, sounds great, let's see:
How? (without violating FCC regulations, among others)
What about privacy and encryption?
What is to keep the corporations from snuffing the second one too?
Who is going to come up with the technical methodology and how do you believe this will be implemented?
Hell, I'm just an end user, and even I can see the futility of just wishing for a second internet. We had the one shot, and for a mixture of differe
Re:a few questions: (Score:2)
Also, to think the issue is simply a matter of "feeling elitist" is to completely miss the point. It's not about being 31337; it's about taking back our privacy, and taking control over our *own* net experience, instead of being passively spoon-fed by the major corporations.
Re:As long as there are opponents to DRM ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not opposed to DRM. I think it's a perfectly reasonable tool that can be used to promote good things. For example, signing an applications source and allowing free distribution. It's what media companies want to do with DRM that's horrible. DRM can be PGP signatures or md5sums on source, to prevent trojans and "evil code" on the kernel level. DRM can also kill your rights. Until DRM is extensively used to excercise fair use, I will avoid ever supporting it. I see it as a tool.
Commercialization is fine on the internet. Just stick to your
I hope that with IPv6, it is possible to setup an alternate internet. Managing our own DNS systems, that hold strict rules for what exactly can be under each domain and get an automated script to find possible offenses.
The internet isn't dying, innovation on the internet is. People stopped doing innovative things with the internet since TCP/IP gaming and Flash became "cool"
There are a few projects that make it different, like FreeNet and P2P applications, but those are going to become endangered. If the geeks unite, we can contribute to lobbyists (EFF, et al) and "campaign contributions" and hopefully keep these projects alive and promote proper innovation and the next step in networking.
Re:As long as there are opponents to DRM ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I honestly think we need to go the other way. Everyone ought to be able to run their own server, we don't need gatekeepers, and there isn't a shortage of bandwidth (just IP space.. Which IPv6 should take care of). I see no fundimental reason that we can't have a situation where everyone is on the same level with T1-speed service up and down. Yes, lawyers from greedy corporations will still sue, threaten, harass, and bankrupt a few unlucky people. Always has been that way... But it's a better vision than entire blocks of addresses disappearing.
^^^^That has already happened in some states.
1 Lost Supreme Court Case and this guy... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:1 Lost Supreme Court Case and this guy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Technology will save the day (Score:5, Interesting)
Wireless networks are what we need. Whatever problems exist are at least partially because we don't own the wires. But citizens can have more control of a section of the spectrum, and we can build little networks with that.
But who really said that the Internet has to be a bunch of commercial sites and spam-laden e-mail? If individual servers get too cumbersome to use, then they will be replaced with something else. When http and port 80 become nothing but a vast marketing wasteland, we can make something new. We've got our own publishing rights, so we don't have to eat what's shoveled to us.
Re:Technology will save the day (Score:4, Insightful)
You have to get this into your head: technology is not a tool for authority, it allows you to exercise some power, but at the end of the day, if you're falling foul of the laws set down by legitimate authorities, your technology is about as useful as a lump of cheese (though arguably the cheese is [i]more[/i] useful).
Nerds [b]must[/b] understand and act upon that maxim soon, or we're just going to lose something incredibly special. The hacker culture will amount to little more than Slashdot, and no offence to Taco et. al. but it's hardly a very important web site in the scheme of things.
Re:Technology will save the day (Score:2, Interesting)
There's a lot of good stuff out there, in a sea of dross. The hard part is finding what you want. Instead of getting 10e666 popup ads for stuff nobody every buys.
Re:Technology will save the day (Score:3, Informative)
If you combind multiple technologies with multiple channels spanning multiple sites you would be surprised the number of users that can be supported in any given area.
Why they have to kill the Internet. (Score:5, Interesting)
Corporations need to ensure bad press and negative experiences with their products are buried.
The media must present the "correct" view of the world. Dissenters must be kept quiet.
"Your 15 minutes" must be in the form of a controlled "reality" show instead of a blog where you get people to boycott a company that screwed you over.
Even though movie grade cameras and editing equipment are priced within the reach of middle class citizens, they must not be permitted to make movies that threaten the Hollywood mainstream, or at the very least they must be prevented from distributing them.
There are more reasons, but I don't have time to type them now.
Isn't happening (Score:5, Interesting)
We have more choices in music and easier access to it than ever before in history. We have more books to read. People in the wilds of Montana now have a greater selection available than residents of Manhattan had twenty years ago.
When I started using email, it was literally a tool of the military industrial complex. Now even children regularly use it and there's so much "power to the people" that it's as if everyone in the movie theater were given his own megaphone.
And I just love the endless blather about dissenters being kept quiet in this age of personal megaphones. Sure, if the world isn't paying rapt attention to me, then it must be the fault of some vast right-wing conspiracy silencing dissent. Yeah, what else could it be?
Re:Isn't happening (Score:4, Interesting)
I should have spent more time writing up my original post.
I don't think the Internet is doomed or will become the marketing morass many want to make it. There are too many people paying for access and too many "subversive" communication technologies out there for the predicted doom and gloom to actually happen.
However, my post does reflect my view of the motivations of those who are scared by the change and want to maintain the status quo. Just look at the RIAA and Hillary Rosen for a real life example.
The dinosaurs are trying to stomp out all these upstart mammals, but we'll win in the end.
Am I paranoid? I don't think so. There are plenty of people who stand to lose their power an influence due to the Internet. They want to kill it for the reasons I listed and many others. I don't think they'll succeed though. The had their chance to kill it years ago, but their technological ignorance and lack of imagination stopped them for seeing the threat the Internet posed until it was too late to stop it.
Sorta like Microsoft failing to stomp out Linux back in 1991.
(Come on, you can't post to slashdot without bashing Microsoft)
The other usual villians. (Score:4, Interesting)
Telecomunication companies, of course, want to extend their pay per minute rape.
Software companies have proved themselves unable to compete with free software which depends on a free internet.
Who else? You mentioned government?
Oh well, there you have it. If we give into these forces we will be slaves. Remember that you own the land the wires run on and should demand your right to lay more if the incumbents fail you. The incumbents will fail us, of course, as they seek to impose limits of obsolete technology to and make us pay for their existance.
So what's the plan? (Score:2)
Of course, a webcam will be mandatory so the computer can count how many people are in the room with you and charge you for the appropriate number of licences.
At least as we know it.. (Score:2, Interesting)
How's Winston's poem go in 1984? (Score:2, Insightful)
The corps may want to own the (digital) means of communication for their various reasons. But that's not going to stop individuals with common interests from gathering together to discuss and share information.
Information's like water. You can try to control it, but get enough of it togehter and its erosive force will break down any barriers.
Sad News: the Internet is dead at 28 (Score:4, Funny)
I don't think so... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't think so... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't think so... (Score:2)
So, where's this irrefutable evidence about mobile phones == brain cancer then?
Disclaimer: I work for a mobile telco :)
Deja vu all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
And to illustrate this with a recent development: iTunes. Conventional wisdom is that Apple seriously fucked up, the RIAA is going to sue Apple's pants off, and Apple's new iTunes Music Store will be shut down by the some seriously pissed off record companies.
Kottke [kottke.org] would like to believe an alternative theory. Apple had to know what they were doing with iTunes. Their engineers aren't stupid. They left the whole thing wide open and had to know how trivial it would be for developers to figure out the protocol and write apps to download the music directly.
Things will be not develop in the way we are thinking now. Nevertheless, Lessig will remain a good read for quite a while!
-John
Correction.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Correction.. (Score:3, Troll)
There'd be Nigerian bankers, Taiwanese spam relays, Korean battle.net servers, the Chinese firewall, and what else?
Once The Internet Dies... (Score:3, Funny)
Dying? It's Dead Already... (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider the DMCA, which seems to serve no other purpose than to harass "the little guy", when a big corporation would like to roll over on him.
Mind you, corporations would do it anyhow, but now they've made it legal, and are using your taxes to harass him -- they no longer need to spend their own money.
Consider that half the people I know are now afraid to put up websites for fear that if they link to somone or say the wrong thing online, they will get sued.
Thanks to spam, email has become near-useless, nobody uses usenet, and the web is controlled by the big boys.
The internet died a while ago.
You see that every time an AOL ad comes on TV.
Only the media conglomerates have control. We're just hanging on to the fringes, like sailors clinging to the wooden remains of a destroyed ship. But the ship has indeed sunk, and we're just treading water until we too, sink below the waves of internet-trash.
Settle down (Score:2)
Such as? DeCSS? Warez? Mp3s? There aren't a whole lot of things that are potentially illegal to link to, and the few that are, are well known by everyone (and no one has all that much of an urge to link to them).
Kinda funny. First off, it's easy to protect against spam. Second, just because you h
Re:Settle down (Score:5, Interesting)
Email is nearly worthless for most people - I'm at about 1:50::real email:spam. We're to the point that people are running software to filter mail for them, software which can tag non-spam as spam - a worse problem than getting the spam itself. But, people are desperate enough to restore email's worth that they'll put up with that sort of thing.
You don't get any spam - I hope you realize that you're a part of a very small minority (you may also want to contact your MX admin, the mail server could just be down
Re:Dying? It's Dead Already... (Score:3, Insightful)
Show me one form of "mass media" that isn't "owned by the big-boys", for that matter! Is the entire magazine publishing industry "dead", just because a few conglomerates own most of it? It seems to be alive and well to me. Almost everyone I
Powell has conflict of interest (Score:2)
There is an interesting bit of information on this in the first chapter of Michael Moore's book, "Stupid White Men." Ignore the irony of the title considering Powell is not white.
Who cares... (Score:2)
It not like he has anything better to do...
Anyone who thinks it is dying needs to see this (Score:2, Informative)
This website talks about hype on the Internet and the worst of the fear mongers.
The internet is just changing (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet, as stateless entity, is dying, and being replaced by the internet as a paid-for, regulated utility.
For example, if the U.S bans spam, the spammers can move offshore. All that's happened is that the spammers have moved to a place where the same regulations don't apply. What'll happen? Probably somthing like the ITU, where nations get together and agree on standards for sending information, and then establish tarrifs.
Basically, the day is rapidly approaching when the internet will be like the current telephone or snail mail networks. Actually, it'll probably subsume them, and adopt most of their regulations. Then you'll have a collection of national intranets, with the internet being the scheme which negotiates communication among them.
Re:The internet is just changing (Score:3, Insightful)
I love to be picky
Anyway, yes, your vision of what will become of the network is pr
Re:The internet is just changing (Score:2)
Thank god!
(I don't even know where my irony ends anymore... sad.)
Do the Ancient Astronauts Know? (Score:2)
Iraqi Information Minister Sez.... (Score:5, Funny)
"Go home and pray to your collective saviors. There will be much gnashing of teeth. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria."
"There will be more beautiful news tomorrow. Out of my press conference!"
Re:dude... (Score:5, Funny)
Code (Score:2)
Re:Code (Score:2)
Sure, it will compile, but code made exclusively of comments doesn't do much.
Re:Code (Score:2)
I like Lessig and his views. (Score:2)
scared me there for a second (Score:2, Funny)
404.04: page not approved by microsoft. your ip address has been logged. you have 5 more unapproved website attempts left before we audit your internet priveledges. thank you.
Predictions vs. Possibilities. (Score:5, Interesting)
The average voter (or non-voter for that matter) doesn't really give half a hairy shit about the DMCA, fair use, divestiture of communications service, spectrum allocation, and so on. They probably never will. Outside of a few key issues (abortion, gun control), people just don't care about politics. Lots of people have their 'pet issue' (ie.
Taking that into account, when you realize all the money being fed [opensecrets.org] into our representatives, it seems that the laws will be written the way that the corporations want them. Maybe the technology companies will stand up to the media industry, maybe they won't. Let's, for now, assume that they won't. What this means is that consumers will lose all rights, with respect to media.
Even if that does happen, I don't see it being enforced. What will happen is the media companies will push for prosecution of all the new "crimes". That's when people will start to care, because they don't want to be criminals (in general). Plenty of people who don't care about the RIAA/MPAA campaign against P2P found it pretty ridiculous to sue for billions of dollars.
The only way said media conglomerates will be able to heavily prosecute these "crimes" is by convicing the public that they are indeed crimes. So far, they're doing a very poor job of that. Most people feel that they have a right to "steal" content using P2P networks. All the lobbying in the world isn't going to change that feeling. Maybe some clever marketing will help them, but trying to convince someone that they're obtaining 'free stuff' is not an easy task.
Society, and almost any natural system, tends to settle into an equilibrium. There's a certain inertia that needs to be overcome in order to push out into some other stable region. The media industry is pushing really hard, but I just don't think they have the muscle to really pull this off. They can shake things up, but in the end, it'll probably settle back down again. Let's just hope they trow their collective back out in the process...
<Disclamer>
- I do, in fact, support the "criminalization" of certain things (ie. drug addicts are criminals).
- I do have my own "pet" issues (ie. affirmative action is discrimination against whites).
</Disclaimer>the internet won't die (Score:2)
why are both lessig and the register wrong? because we will never want to limit how we
That doesn't rule out coma, does it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine that Earthlink, AOL and MSN are the only ISPs available to you. They block port 25 to force you to use their SMTP servers. (so much for that domain name you bought... random.coolzip@policestreet.com is useless now) They transproxy ports 80 and 443, so they can record all your web surfing and "share" the information with their "marketing partners". (Funny, though... goatse.cx won't load anymore, and neither will nra.org) Port 22 is blocked to "prevent hackers breaking into vulnerable machines with a SSH exploit". 23 blocked because telnet is insecure. Your TOS requires you to keep 137-139 open (and to run a machine to which those ports are meaningful) to monitor the quality of service. Oh, and everything above 1024 is blocked because there are no legitimate services running on those ports.
Beginning to get the (rather bleak) picture? It may sound corny, but maintaining the World of Ends we've come to know and love does not advance the cause of controlling the general populace. The Prime Directive Of Business is to Make Money. Individuals matter only insofar as they can be persuaded to spend. Big Business wants the net to be Television II: a model they understand and can exploit as an advertising medium to promote the consumerist culture. Geeks want everything to be free, and unlike Big Business, are willing to contribute to the effort without necessarily turning a monetary profit. ("Don't want money... Want admiration" [triumf.ca]) Reality, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle... but not exactly centered.
Thankfully, this cannot happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me explain: Large ISPs are going to start to clue in that they can shape the Net by imposing restrictions on their users. As long as most people can surt the Web (through a proxy) and send/read mail (through approved servers), then this will work for said ISPs.
Thankfully, while such things (and the later changes that will doubtless be made such as proprieterizing the protocols) will break the Internet as we've known it for the last few years, the Internet as we've known it for the last 20 years will continue on. MIT isn't going to roll over and play ball with AOL, ripping up the IP infrastructure that they've maintained for 20 years. You will still be able to run a Linux or BSD or Darwin box and connect to anyone who wants to talk IP with you.
A few major revolutions like de-centralizing the DNS root might be required, but that's actually not much of a challenge, and there's no reason at all that universities world-wide could not get together and start Internet-prime and once again be the seed from which net Net grows.
IP is your friend. Open standards are your friend.
Email is Not a Disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Using this same logic you could conclude that snail mail (normal postal mail) is a failure. But yet it continues to thrive in various forms. Just because it doesn't meet utopian standards doesn't mean it's a failure.
Re:Email is Not a Disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
When's the last time someone sent you a check, but it didn't get to you because the post office mistakenly classified it as junk mail, and threw it in a dumpster?
To all complaining about junk snail mail (Score:3, Informative)
1. Go here [dmaconsumers.org] and have them remove your name. Don't give them money -- get out an index card, slap a 23 cent stamp on it, and mail it in. Same results, they get less money. It ain't perfect, but it will help.
2. Call your credit card companies. Ask them to be placed on their highest level of privacy list. Nearly all have one; you just gotta ask.
3. Do the same for your utilities, especially phone service.
4. Wait 3 months, and hten begin send back shredded crap in the postage paid envelopes.
anonymity, abuse, reputation, community (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the ultimate problem here is that not only does the internet allow anonymity, it virtually requires it. If we had a real working public-key infrastructure, then it would be easy to get rid of spam with forged headers, and block repeated spams from the same spammer. The lack of any such widely-accepted infrastructure means that spammers can spawn as many fake identities as they want.
It's a well known fact about online communities that anonymity encourages abuse. If in doubt, try reading the comments on this story with your moderation threshold set at -1. Why do people post AC on Slashdot? Well, most of the time it's because they want to act like jerks, and don't want anyone to know who they are. The only way to get people to behave well is to make sure their actions will affect their reputation within some community, or at least affect the opinion of the one person they're trying to communicate with.
The danger is that if the bearded-hacker set doesn't get a public-key infrastructure off the ground, we'll end up with .NET instead as a de facto standard. How would you like an internet where you couldn't send e-mail without having a .NET account? It's also important to make sure that anonymity is never forbidden, just discouraged -- but that distinction is probably not an obvious one to most corporations and governments.
The problem is that the open-source community is better at copying than inventing, and better at creating tools than at making them easy to use. Tools like GPG are just much much much too hard to use. They're written by people who have read Cryptonomicon one too many times. The average user just needs a little guidance in how to pick a passphrase that's resistant to dictionary attacks -- they do not need to be warned that GPG is running in insecure memory. There have also been some good proposals for sender-risks-paying systems for getting rid of spam. (Here's mine [lightandmatter.com].) But now we run into the problem that the open-source community doesn't do a good job at innovation. It's relatively easy to organize hackers to build software that's supposed to use known, defined, public protocols to do things that everyone knows they want to do. It's much harder to build something novel from scratch.
Some Truth, Some Hope (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the internet as we know it is dying. Namely, being overrun by advertising and being taken over by large corporations. Spam is choking email. I think my spam to intentional email ratio is 20 to 1. Pop up ads are killing websurfing. And lastly, more and more information is being monopolized by Yahoo, MSN, AOL, or some other big corporation. It's harder and harder to get to the smaller, independent sites.
None of the above should be a big surprise to anyone. But I think there are always ways out. I see glimmers of hope in programs that completely bypass the browser model, for example Watson ... why bother logging into MSN when you can get everything you need via a simpler user interface? Or RSS news feed browsers. Or the Apple music store. By having a specific program you get what you want, instead of having a generic browser looking at everything and leaving you to sort through it. Second, it's another layer above individual websites that the big companies can't compete with (yet). So I have hope.
The web need not be limited to a web browser (as we know it) or web sites. Maybe it's time we break these metaphors. The web site can just serve up the info, formatting left to the user, programs interchangeable. Go XML.
Re:Some Truth, Some Hope (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it harder to get independent news sources? Judging from slashdot's sources, it seems rather the opposite. Most of the stuff I read here would have been impossible to report/know/learn without the internet. I realize you are not talking about tech news, so why isn't there a successful general interest news site using the
Earliest "Imminent Death of the Net" sighting? (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple of comments on the article (Score:5, Interesting)
An architect friend tells me that email has become the biggest productivity drain in his organization: not just the quantity of attachments, but the mindless round-robin communications, requesting comments that get ignored. Email has become a corporate displacement activity
Psh... this is hardly an Internet issue. It's more of a corporate-mail mentality. Spam is *the* internet-email problem.
Basic web surfing means navigating through web sites whose inspiration for their baroque overdesign seems to have been Donald Trump's wedding cake, all the while requiring the user to close down dozens of unrequested pop-up advertisements.
I believe this is only the case when you want to visit the page of the Smith Family from Anytown, USA, so you can see pics of their kids playing with the family dog.
Self-Respecting sites that want to keep their audience/customers will have a sensible interface or lose to the competition.
Users are not stupid.
This is where I agree. See comment above.
The end of the world as we know it... (Score:2)
Bummer (Score:2)
A very bad article (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, the article goes on an on with self-referencing quotes (most from the register) complaining about spam, google bombers and whatnot, all of which are not evidence and will not cause the death of the internet, and none of which were connected by Lessig to the death of the internet.
Most people get flamed on
Important? Why? (Score:2)
Why is it important for those interested in online rights?
The Internet works just great (Score:5, Interesting)
All this works fine. Where's the problem?
The Internet isn't about shopping.
Not sold. (Score:5, Insightful)
Email is being destroyed by SPAM: So.. people are just turning off their computers? No! There's forums, there's instant messaging, and there's chat. If that's not enough reason to calm down, then consider that SPAM will force email to evolve to be more secure. Heck, just the other day I had to fill out a challenge in order to get a message to somebody. Sorry, I don't see this as reason for people to leave the net.
Google's getting flooded with crap: And Google's not going to work to fix that?
Tasteless web design and pop-ups make people leave: Cable TV has 70 channels and people have trouble finding stuff to watch. Yet, the few things they do like make it all worth it. Why is the net different?
The Internet means sitting at noisy and unreliable machines that would land any self-respecting consumer manufacturer with a class action suit: Uh okay. First off, computers aren't that unreliable. As a matter of fact, I think most people would agree they've improved considerably since 95. Remember the days when you'd get randomly disconnected from the net and you'd have to dial up again? Thanks to broadband, that's no biggie. Remember the Windows 95/98 days where you had to reboot at least once/twice a day to be productive? 2000, XP, and Linux have killed that problem. The standards on the internet have improved, so there's not so much in terms of "Oh you have to have this browser, or that plugin, etc". Fewer hiccups. It's even becoming hard to find broken links on the web. They're there, but in the olden days you used to cross your fingers and pray this link works.
So yeah, some annoyances about the net have been brought to light. However, predicting the death of the internet is ridiculous. Humans have a way of overweighing negatives and underweighing positives. "Hmm this new job pays more money, but I like the people at my current job and I'd probably die from missing them so much!" With all the problems he's listed, he's skipped over a few things:
- People have friends/communities on line.
- The internet has useful information and files available. Great for pursuing hobbies.
- There's still plenty to explore.
- The world is full of news (like the war in Iraq) that people want to be up to date on.
None of the problems he's listed will nullify any of the above points which are critically important to a LOT of people.
*CLINK* (Score:5, Funny)
I paid off my car with the proceeds from the non-death of USENET. I'll probably pay off my mortgage before the Internet truly dies.
Death, or Fragmentation? (Score:3)
This is the most likely way I see it. We might splinter into a controlled "internet" and a Free "internet."
The controlled internet will likely run using Microsoft owned protocols, have DRM enabled at every point to try to prevent people from swapping MP3s, warez, etc., etc. Most main stream ISPs will allow access to only this net (though might offere access to the other with an additional charge). This net will be deemed "safe" for children. In reality, this internet will be just as insecure as the first, but corporations will have much greater control of who can say what.
Of course, things could be worse. The controlled net might split further, into various networks controlled by different media conglomerates. So you'll have AOL/Time Warner's net, Disney's Net, etc.
The free internet would be operated in a similar fasion to the current internet, altough many corporations will probably no longer support it, and move their sites to the corporate net. Educational institutes will probably be the core fo this network. As a result, there will be far fewer people on it.
Depending on how things are structured, there might be points where the different networks intersect. Really, there might be one "internet" still, but ISPs will merely maintain huge blacklists of servers that they don't allow (servers that run a free OS rather than a DRM os, for example).
The problem with the "free" internet, as I see it, is that it might be labeled as a network safe for terrorists, and/or be considered a "pirate internet."
where am i? (Score:3, Funny)
*blinks*
point by point answer to the article (Score:5, Insightful)
1 - "email unusable because of spammers"
A point which ignores the simple possibility of creating filters in any modern mailer to move your "trusted" sources to a specific directory, and ignore the rest. Of course, if you keep your modem connection your downloads will be slow. Time to upgrade.
2 - Google has problems with crap content
Time to stop clicking the "I'm feeling lucky" button and browse through results. Also, it would help to use advanced tools to refine your search. Site is bad? Click back on your 4th mouse button and keep looking.
3 - Popup blocking:the vast majority of IE users don't have that luxury, and their patience has already been tested to the limit
So, they are saying that because users don't have a clue, they will stop using the Internet? Suddenly this reminds me of the survey made in the US some weeks ago...
4 - Internet means sitting at noisy and unreliable machines
Mini-ITX 500Mhz fanless motherboards, customized linux distro (locked) for reliability. Voila, safe, noiseless, reliable netbox!
And finally:
5 - What's dying is the idea that the Internet would be a tool of universal liberation
Freedom requires a minimum of effort and knowledge. You have to program that VCR to be free to see the show at a specific time.
So, in short, this article is predicting the death of the Internet for people who doesn't have a clue on how to turn on a computer and have no intention to learn it (reference to the US survey done a while back, obviously)... I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
Bonus: map of the internet [lumeta.com]
an undead Internet is the real scare (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the stories whine that computers are noisy.. speak for your own. My computer can't even be heard unless I've really got the hdd's busy and even then it's just a whisper. It's small, energy effecient, and stable.
Spam remains something of a problem but the solution is easy - use a new mail protocol that fixes the problems that allow relay hijacking and that requires digital signatures with all mail. Sure then people will have to first whitelist friends for email but it'll still ellimate 99% of the problem. Even now it's not THAT bad. I get 100's of spam's a day but only 2-3 make it through my filters and each of those are used to improve my filters.
Can someone point out to me (Score:4, Interesting)
And, the register included a bit about spam in emails in that story. I still don't get it. Why are people so upset about spam? Maybe I"m sheltered, but I don't have any problems with spam; I get maybe one a week, but I quickly add that domain to my block list on the server. Are they talking about AOL people?
AOL is kind of like a crutch for people. It allows them to use the internet without actually really knowing what they're doing. If AOL never existed, I wonder if we would still have the problem of spam that we have now?
Of course there's also hotmail...I don't know what to say about that, I've never wanted to use Hotmail after it crashed my friend's browsers repeatedly because of the amount of spam in their inbox...
where did our horse go? (Score:4, Insightful)
This brought ads, banners, tracking of personal information, privacy invasion, email/macro viruses, monoculture, and the big Race To Be The Next Microsoft.
It's been widely recognized that the killer app was email, and that nobody ever really figured out how to profit from providing it as a service (as opposed to simply profitting from using it).
And the spammers have gone quite far to attempt to ruin it.
The other killer app is the blog - or really collaborative discussions - originally NNTP. And guess what? That was effectively killed by spam too.
The really neat thing was how everyone and their brother, back in 1996, could suddenly create a web page detailing their hobbies, their cars, their dogs, etc. And while that grew tiresome, the web, as a whole, was an incredible source for information.
Then the search engines were commercialized so that you couldn't find these sites anymore, only the big commercial ones.
And services were consolidated so that not everyone could afford their own web page or connection anymore, and simple, basic HTML was eschewed for "flashy FrontPage garbage" - this effectively has eliminated the democratization of the web.
And finally, the lawyers moved in. The whole point of the Internet was the free sharing of ideas and information. Until they figured out that theoretically, they should be making money off of this. And it was all shut down.
So now that the Internet is just one big commercial - what's the point? I can drive to Las Vegas, look at billboards, and see REAL naked chicks. Who needs the Internet?
More Scary than Lessig... (Score:4, Interesting)
* The Web
* Email & Messaging - Under attack by spammers, and even under worse attack by anti-spammers. The trend is towards central control of email to eliminate spam. The antispam camp should take note of the failure of the Instant Messenging networks to stop spam on their centrally controlled services.
* Peer to Peer Services - Tools that allow the exchange of information between two nodes like NFS, Gnutella, Windows File Sharing, Telnet, etc... These tools are under attack at the fringe, but how different is getting a file off Gnutella than an anonymous FTP or a windows share? Not very.
* Usenet - The surprising survivor. I can't believe that Usenet is still kicking and popular after all these years.
The key to the Internet's success has and will be:
* Easy and inexpensive access to information and easy and inexpensive publication of information. (web, usenet, file sharing, etc...)
* Easy,inexpensive and fast communication. (email, usenet, IRC, IM, etc...
The good news is that the market is too powerful to be co-opted. People don't want the internet to turn the clock back to the days of Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe.
Mosaic Killed the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
I say that with tongue only partially in cheek. Consider that the Internet had been around for some years prior to Mosiac and, more importantly, Netscape, opening the net to a profliferating number of Windows users. Prior to that, the net was a relatively small community with high barriers to entry. Those barriers -- essentially, the skills necessary to use Unix --blocked the net's development into a populist medium with enormous financial potential.
The browser, of course, changed all that. Browsers drastically lowered the barriers of entry, allowing people wiht little of no computer skills to move files across the net, send and receive email, chat online, search archives, etc., while avoiding Unix tools like ftp, mail, gopher, and the rest.
Whatever the net was before the browser, it wasn't considered a medium. People actively participated in the pre-browser net, as tool users and community members. They did not passively view content via a device that has more in common with television than anything else. The browser made the net a medium. A medium with billions of potential consumers.
The shifting of the popular frame of reference from "community" and "users" to "viewers" and "consumers" marks the awareness that money could be made by creating net content and controlling access to it. Once that happened, the net became subject to the same economic forces that, absent government regulation, have fostered the increasing concentration of media ownership across the spectrum. Without countervailing action by the government, media ownership will concentrate in inverse relation to the size of a given medium's audience. I.e., the larger the potential market, the greater the tendency for an ownership oligarchy to develop and control that market.
A Little Late, Aren't We? (Score:3, Insightful)
Many of us old-timers would say that happened the day AOL connected to the internet.
Wireless can save the Internet!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'll tell you what's over (Score:2)
Not yet [sourceforge.net]. (If we get our shit together.)
Re:I'll tell you what's over (Score:3, Insightful)
If a few companies control access, then it means that the ISPs are not free as well.
So you can go and write anything you want, because the ISP may pull it because they may be "legally liable" or "against their terms of service".
Let's say you are against the war, and you set up a web site about that. What if the big media corporation shuts it down because it was "bad for their business" or whatever. So you host your own web site on your home computer via DSL, and then the phone compan
Re:Stop (Score:2)
Well, your cogent, well articulated argument has convinced me. I guess I won't bother reading the rest of Lessig's book.
Re:Proof that the Internet is dying (Score:3, Informative)
P
If P then Q
Therefore Q.
Your argument did not contain a conditional (an "If P the Q" statement) so it cannot be an instance of Modus Ponens.
In fact your argument is an instance of the fallacy of composition (mistakenly transfering a property of a part to the whole).