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Death of Internet Predicted: Film at 11
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.
Actually, come to think of it, we're spawning a Neuromancer-style situation, where people have to be hackers to circumvent regulations.
Hopefully "people" will be victorious over "government sanctioned actions".
and commercialization, the internet will never die.
Hell, once the equipment gets cheaper, we can set up another 'internet'
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
hmm. The internet "like we know it" is never going to die. Even if mass media/television dominated the internet, the relatively low bandwidth things we have done for years would still be around, ie irc, usenet, boards, text, &ct. It may change, but the old stuff will be the same. Besides, the great hope is when people start entertaining themselves instead of going to some top500 corporation to do it. Bring back the home bands and the church and school plays.
pope is the antichrist. catholic pedophile priest scandal: http://home.fuse.net/gospel
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.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Maybe the internet experience isn't living up for BabyBoomers, but find me a GenXer or GenYer who doesn't use the net. Hmmm...for the price of an ISP (POTS, wireless, or cable/DSL), you can talk to your friends through instant messaging for free (so to speak); you can download purchased or *creatively acquired* software, music, and motion pictures; and you always have the most up-to-date news vs. from television. Spam? You just delete it. At least you don't have to physically shred it like junk mail because you don't want credit card account numbers getting into the hands of prisoners sorting the trash before it arrives at the landfill. So how is this internet do-hicky dying? And sitting in front of a noisy computer hasn't proven to cause you brain cancer, unlike a cell phone... I'd rather have my computer and broadband access than television, wired or wireless phone access, and cable television...or radio...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I think what he's painting is a "worst case" scenario. Reality will be different, and I cannot predict what it will be like, but it will not be as bad as he thinks. Most really innovative work still has to be done. Did anybody here predict the social influence Google would have? I think not.
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 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
The "Web" died the moment companies started suing private individuals because those people got to the proper domain names first. Those corporations had zero foresight and should have had to do without. But nooooo, they sick'ed lawyers on everyone and everything until they got what they wanted, and then realising that they had this kind of power, started to "lobby" Congress into changing law to suit their needs.
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.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Although it's always risky to argue from analogy, think of the current internet as the world prior to the arrival of the nation state. No borders, as such, freedom to go wherever, little control.
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.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
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 different reasons, we blew it.
It's my opinion that there won't be a second chance, though I would desperately love to be proven wrong.
We pay $20-$45 as it is for cable/satellite T.V. in order to watch a bunch of ads mixed in with the content.
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.
Woefully, it's likely to happen.
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.
Even if our Bayesian filters win the arms race against the spammers, in terms of quantity as well as quality of communications, email has been a disaster.
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.
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.
I can't believe what I have just read. An article supposedly reporting the death of internet coming from the words of Lawrence Lessing that cites Lessing's words only once (not even linking to it), in reference to his worries about media concentration not stopped by the net.
/. for not reading the article. In this case do yourself a favor, skip it and for future reference, and especially skip Orlowski's (the author) articles
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
You have to be a [i]real[/i] hardcore technophile to think that technology will save the day here. I mean, come on, we're talking about the death of the most pervasive and potentially revolutionary technology in a century, because quite simply technology is not above the law.
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.
I don't see how this is different from any other medium.
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 a sporting event I will see roughly 478 different logos in 3 hours...
I think Spam, banner ads and pop-ups are much earier to igore than regular advertising (especially when it is disguised as content in movies, TV shows etc.)
Marillion wrote: "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."
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.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Problem is any such format will quickly be reverse engineered, and a less expensive network will be available without having to buy that crap from cupertino. Besides, were the Internet to die, the revolution would come in the form of old and new sysops dusting off their copies of RA, SBBS, DLX, FrontDoor and the like, and starting back up their bbses, at least until they could arrange with the phone company to hook up the T1s, and rig up the pringle cans to get long range connects. The end result will be rebuilding the internet little by little without big media controlling; it'll be small at first, but gradually people will begin to migrate over to the new system. Of course, inevitably said interests will take notice and begin to try to control things, thus the cycle is continued.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
It's easy to say "there's this problem and that problem and this other problem here, man the whole thing's just totally fucked!", reality is never that oversimplified.
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.
"Derp de derp."
Considering that the Internet has been designed to withstand atomic holocaust, it would be ludicrous to predict its death just because of some media control on the ISPs. The points made to support the claim fall down under scrutiny. They seem to apply only to a a very limited range of ignorant users (I'm not being elitist, I'm talking the "I broke my cup holder" kind):
:-) The Internet could live without the US. And at worst, some underground ISPs will still remain. It would be slow maybe, but it would work.
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
The ENIAC Demo Competition
If we follow the trajectory of Spam, DMCA, Super DMCA, Eldred, PATRIOT I&II etc. we won't see the death of the internet, just the death of the United States as a technological superpower. Between the near impossibility of programming new apps, hardware or media that don't infringe and the lack of support for education the US may lose any hope of keeping up with less litigated societies.
I just hope I'm very wrong...
The fact is, the Internet, as we know it, hasn't been "as we know it" for quite some time. Ever since it was opened to commercial exploitation.
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?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
..and Netscape, too.
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.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
In a way I agree, I simply dont surf around like when I first got on the internet years ago.
I look something if I am interested, or come to slashdot and follow some articals, or maybe go to my favorit gameing website etc... Anyone looking just to browse around is asking for it anyway, and yes sometimes I have to deal with some popups also, and sometimes even sign up for a site to get a download or something (that is always irritating).
But most people think of the Internet as HTTP/HTML web browsing etc... I use the Internet for a whole lot more than that. Just the Idea that the Internet connects everyones computer/servers on one big network were we can share information and files is a big help and still very very usefull for me, and I think it will always be that way, no matter what this guy says. Email while full of SPAM yes is still a good way to say Hello send a picture etc to a budd, and I use it for work and would still rather handle requests via email than have someone pickup the phone interrupting me, I handle my email like a que of work I need to finish and work through them. I still like my email, even though I get alot of spam.
Offtopic, but maybe the reason it is distorted is because you need almost 4 printed pages (for each of the above issues) to explain the issues.
"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 deserve the secret amount she got. I'm sorry she got burned, I'm happy she got money. I'll still use the incident it to prove a point when appropriate.
--
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.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
It's not just that.
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 company shuts you down, because they could be legally liable for whatever is on their networks or you had broken their terms of service. Where do you go next? Probably no where.
Without competition, without choice, we are all controlled. The Internet will be the watered-down reflection of what the media companies want it to be, not what we want it to be.
It's the difference between pirate radio and regular radio, or someone with their own printing press.
Someone who just sets up a pirate radio station can transmit whatever they feel like saying (despite the legalities of this). Someone who has their own printing press can write whatever they want and distribute it.
But if we don't control the actual physical layer, or if the physical layer is owned by a oligopoly of media companies, they can squish us like an insignificant bug.
This is what Lessig is talking about.
The "death" that he describes is not the fact that the Internet will get disconnected. This death is the death of the virtual freedom we have enjoyed for almost 10 years in terms of the nerds and techies doing whatever we wanted because we were one step ahead of everyone.
We could build our own web sites and make billions of dollars. We could write our own blogs telling whoever wanted to read it if we wanted. We could set up a web site that blasted a corporation that we hated or warning people of the problems with certain products. We were able to help the little guys such as the protesters organize against government oppressions by having centralized web sites that the government couldn't hack into.
The death that Lessig fears is this death. I'm quite confident that we will always have an Internet that will give us the latest stock quotes, the movie times, tv schedules, weather, etc. Losing the new freedom we have acquired over the past 10 years is something far more precious.
"In terms of market share, BSD and Apple are indeed "dying"."
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 and Apple dying in real terms: do fewer and fewer actual numbers of users use them?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Strawman argument. I know no one reads the articles on Slashdot, but this time it might have helped. In each of your examples you picked, the "herald of doom" was the introduction of a new technology which threatened the established controls of the previous norm. Lessig is not suggesting that a new technology will render the internet obsolete, grandstanding within his bastion of the old. On the contrary - he is suggesting that the control of the Internet as it stands is falling into the hands of a very small oligopoly of interests. to Quote from his blog (and the article) "When the content layer, the logical layer, and the physical layer are all effectively owned by a handful of companies, free of any requirements of neutrality or openness, what will you ask then? " Or in other words : Who you gonna call ?
Andrew Orlowski (of The Register) has lost his mind of late, so if he's preaching the word of Lessig, I'm inclined to get suspicious of Lessig, too. Especially when he's bandying about such nonsensical notions as "email is a failure" just because of spam.
This hysteria about spam is so laughable. It's like saying the postal system is a failure because of junk mail, like saying television is a failure because so much of it consists of commercials; might as well call American society a failure because of the degree to which we are constantly deluged with advertising.
Obligatory smart-aleck responses aside, it's all we've got to work with and most of us seem to manage. I don't see why we should go into hysterics just because the internet is no longer the Garden of Eden which it was in some imaginary golden era.
Nothing to see here, folks, move along and have a good weekend.
"Lessig is predicting that the days of the Commons of the Internet are over,"
Many of us old-timers would say that happened the day AOL connected to the internet.
To survive as a free exchange of information, the Internet must move off of wires in this country! The problem with cable companies and phone companies is that they own the wires on the poles, and the FCC seems hell bent on keeping them from sharing them! WIRELESS can eliminate this problem. What I envision is a fiber node to serve each community that feeds a wireless network providing the 'last mile' to the home and office and completely bypassing the telcos and cable companies. And no, I would not feel guilty one bit doing this...it's their own greed that would have done them in!!