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Today, a group of technical experts involved in the development and maintenance of the Internet and the Web, including Vint Cerf (Internet pioneer) and Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web), published an open letter calling on the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General and the Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology to "uphold the bottom-up, collaborative and inclusive model of Internet governance that has served the world for the past half century" as part of the upcoming Global Digital Compact (GDC).
Today it is far too late.
I think it's questionable whether they really have.
Especially the openness and bottom-up character of the W3C. They wanted closed source DRM running on people's computers despite presumably strong opposition from the bulk of the ordinary members, and then it got pushed through, and who knows what's in that software.
It's better than Chat Control I suppose, but it's the same sort of thing, i.e. foreign software doing who-knows-what running on a user device.
can i say "the internet is dead" anyway? sorry, it just seems like there are so many problems with the internet of today - top down authoritarian management may just be what we deserve for a while anyway.
Why would the internet be dead? Like, you are using it to read about it right now?
The internet is more alive than ever which also means nefarious actors of different plumage are more active than ever there. It used to be a quiet country village where people had their front doors unlocked and everyone knew each other, where the unwritten etiquette was known and abided by by everyone, where the local police constable was mostly busy finding lost dogs and cats. Since then it has grown into a bustling metropolis which never sleeps, never rests, always thrives but also which is jam-packed with petty thieves, robbers, muggers, gang warfare, corrupt politicians, corrupt police, corrupt everything. People lock their doors or they get burgled, they keep their hands on their pockets or they get picked, they know they can not just blindly trust the authorities because those have been taken over by the corrupt politicians. Some people long back to the quiet times of yore and write long stories about it, others realise the potential technology gives them to recreate something resembling the old 'net. They are the ones hosting their own services, running their free software servers and mobiles and laptops.
The internet is not dead, it is thriving.
E's passed on! This internet is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the FAANG 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-internet!!
tl,dr
Gone tits up!
If it's thriving in ways that puts the majority of us at a disadvantage, then its sort of like the kind of thriving that you might see a tumor do.
I'm not sure that I'm ready to argue that it's worth excising... just that "thriving" and "dead [to me, to us]" are not that dissimilar.
This is easily in the top 5 of my favourite HN comments of all time. What a beautiful way to express how things were and have changed. I know I hearken back to the days where trust was the default and I felt in control, rather than fighting for it, with every service and device I engaged with.
I have idealistic reasons for being so insistent on running linux, etc. and never connected them with a romantic feeling for the internet of yesteryear.