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From: meff <email@example.com>
Subject: Re: Web considered harmful
Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2022 23:24:15 -0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <stn0uv$b71$1@dont-email.me>
On 2022-02-05, Doc O'Leary <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> wrote:
I would argue somewhat the opposite. We *are* definitely running out of
Internet that is free and open for people.
I agree with your sentiment but not your diagnosis. Getting people to
care about a free and open Web is the fight that's being lost
here. The Internet is as it always was. Tier 1s are peering and asking
for transit, as are Tier 2 and Tier 3. While IPv4s have become
expensive due to exhaustion, IPv6 /64s cost peanuts. You can get an IP
address and send a packet to another IP address any day (well,
depending on if the ISPs have put the recepient behind CGNAT or not.)
Unfortunately _people_ don't care about the freedom and openness
anymore.
It's up to us to _educate_ folks about what's lacking. I
don't find this complaining-behind-closed-doors behavior particularly
conducive to this though. We need to remind people about
why free and open communication is important, no matter whether the
captor is a corporation or a government. You can't achieve that by
calling names, in fact people are even less likely to listen to you if
you call them names.
That especially applies to
the web, where large corporations have exercised vast power to manipulate
people to act against their own best interest. Complaints of
“gatekeeping” on Usenet ring hollow; if the “space” provided by Facebook
and Twitter are more to your liking, go there and try to have this kind
of discussion.
I don't find it gatekeeping as much as complaining. My father loves to
lament times gone by but his memories conveniently edits away all the
downsides. Again I find this behavior unproductive and closed
minded. You'll never get people to care about freedom if you start out
by insulting them or complaining about them. My father remains
unpopular at dinner parties.
HTTP/3 is so different from HTTP/2 that they shouldn’t even be discussed
as being related protocol. It leaves me stepping back even further from
the request semantics and question what people are even looking to
accomplish. Too many things (e.g., microservice APIs) are jammed through
HTTP simply because web stacks are so common, not because they’re a good
way to get the job done.
The authors of QUIC (the standard that eventually became HTTP/3) had
started by trying to create a non-Web protocol from the ground up. The
trouble was middleboxes. Middleboxes would throw away anything that
wasn't on a few set of explicitly allowed ports (HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP) or
wasn't just TCP traffic. I fully admit IMO that Google used their
influence to jam their vision of the future of network transit into
the IETF which is why QUIC was chosen as HTTP/3, but HTTP/3 did start
out trying to be a different way of transiting packets over the
net. Unfortunately, ISPs do not want to upgrade or evolve their
middleboxes in any way.
So, if anything, I’m lamenting the past where the web was *just* the web.
It was a particular kind of information system, exchanging mainly HTML
documents, that people could easily read and link to. Then it lost sight
of the Unix Philosophy and tried to become everything to everybody. So
(again, in full acknowledgement of the irony of discussing this on Usenet
when so many people have had their attention absorbed by web forums
controlled by social media companies) I ask you: what do you think the
WWW *shouldn’t* do?
I don't think it should or should not do anything. I am not an
architect of humanity. I am not God. I'm fine with humans doing what
they will. The Web is only as useful as the entities that produce
content for it and the entities that consume content on it. I would
like to see a world where humans once again understand why early
Internet pioneers fought so hard for neutral networks, but at the end
of the day I recognize that my views are minority ideas and that all I
can do is try to sway hearts and minds, not tell others what to
do. Most importantly I may be _wrong_ and the others may be right. I
respect the will of other free humans.
I'd like to try to meet others in the middle. That might mean offering
Web interfaces for Usenet, writing about the forgotten parts of the
Net that still have posters like you and I. One "carrot" I like to
offer folks is censorship; unmoderated newsgroups have nobody telling
you what is and is not verboten. Nobody can systematically silence
you. Others may killfile you, but nobody has power over your voice on
Usenet the way Reddit can just ban people and entire
communities. The same goes for other net technologies like email.
But it's also important to understand why the status quo exists
(instead of just getting angry at it.) CGNAT makes P2P technology
nearly impossible on the web. Email is overrun with spam. Mobile
phones consume too much battery to keep persistent connections
open. Most middleboxes block UDP packets. ISPs prioritize downlinks
over uplinks and offer terrible QoS on uplinks. Most non-Web traffic
is unencrypted and leaks personal information to middleboxes. The web
has succeeded because it was relatively simple for ISPs to operate, so
most of the complexity was pushed up to the application protocol (with
stateful cludges like cookies.)
I'm hoping that if HTTP/3 can actually become a net standard that
middleboxes respect, that we can _finally_ start sending UDP packets,
which would be more convenient for mobile devices and for many
protocols. Wireguard tunnels (or Zerotier) and services built atop
them, like Tailscale, have brought E2EE IP tunnels to people in an
accessible way. Meshnets like CJDNS and Yggdrassil are out there which
can tunnel over regular IPv4 connections. I use my energy to educate
my friends and family about the importance of a free and open Internet
and encourage more tinkering-happy friends of mine to play around with
the "real" Internet, the one with IP packets flowing freely between
hosts.
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