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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".
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
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
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.
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
The internet moves data from point A to point B, mostly without gatekeepers. What Lessig is talking about is that cable companies have been redefined as "information services" and soon so will telco's ISP service. Once that happens, it's no longer an issue of the "internet moves data from point A to point B" .. It's the "internet moves data that the gatekeepers approved from point A to point B".
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.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
..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"