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Re: Web considered harmful

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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>

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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.

Related

Parent:

Re: Web considered harmful (by Doc O'Leary <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> on Sat, 5 Feb 2022 18:42:12 -0000 (UTC))

Children:

Re: Web considered harmful (by Doc O'Leary <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> on Sun, 6 Feb 2022 19:21:53 -0000 (UTC))