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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.
And they say *BSD is dying ... geez ... :)
Maybe Al Gore can hurry up and finish Internet2?
I think spam is more a danger to internet. I think folks will say hey I hear the Internet as full of spam I don't want to go online if it's just a big ad space. I don't know if that makes any sense or not but some people may say why the hell do I want to pay 20-45 bucks a month to get ads.
Newspaper editorial on the death of print
Movie-house trailer on why home DVDs will mean the end of film
"The End Of The Book Printing Industry" as seen at Border's
Puuuuhhhleeeeze! This is nonsense. It's buzzword fishing, it's -1 Flamebait
Michael, YHBT, YHL, HAND
--
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!
Or, at least I hope it will...
Wireless networks are what we need. Whatever problems exist are at least partially because we don't own the wires. But citizens can have more control of a section of the spectrum, and we can build little networks with that.
But who really said that the Internet has to be a bunch of commercial sites and spam-laden e-mail? If individual servers get too cumbersome to use, then they will be replaced with something else. When http and port 80 become nothing but a vast marketing wasteland, we can make something new. We've got our own publishing rights, so we don't have to eat what's shoveled to us.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Media companies must make sure no artists gain popularity without their approval and control.
Corporations need to ensure bad press and negative experiences with their products are buried.
The media must present the "correct" view of the world. Dissenters must be kept quiet.
"Your 15 minutes" must be in the form of a controlled "reality" show instead of a blog where you get people to boycott a company that screwed you over.
Even though movie grade cameras and editing equipment are priced within the reach of middle class citizens, they must not be permitted to make movies that threaten the Hollywood mainstream, or at the very least they must be prevented from distributing them.
There are more reasons, but I don't have time to type them now.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Truly an American icon ...
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
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
Once the Internet dies, perhaps there will be a new life for us Mac users. Perhaps we'll be able to set up another Internet, only accessible via Macs. Macs will quickly become in demand again--higher priced at first, then competitive once supply meets demand--and the Internet will return to its former glory! I'm serious, folks.
Harold
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
"The inter-net is being taken from the infidels! They will be boiling in their own blood! Our corporations, bless Allah, are overcoming them right now. As a matter of fact, you are not even on the inter-net now because it has indeed been shot down."
"Go home and pray to your collective saviors. There will be much gnashing of teeth. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria."
"There will be more beautiful news tomorrow. Out of my press conference!"
This space for rent.
The average voter (or non-voter for that matter) doesn't really give half a hairy shit about the DMCA, fair use, divestiture of communications service, spectrum allocation, and so on. They probably never will. Outside of a few key issues (abortion, gun control), people just don't care about politics. Lots of people have their 'pet issue' (ie.
Taking that into account, when you realize all the money being fed into our representatives, it seems that the laws will be written the way that the corporations want them. Maybe the technology companies will stand up to the media industry, maybe they won't. Let's, for now, assume that they won't. What this means is that consumers will lose all rights, with respect to media.
Even if that does happen, I don't see it being enforced. What will happen is the media companies will push for prosecution of all the new "crimes". That's when people will start to care, because they don't want to be criminals (in general). Plenty of people who don't care about the RIAA/MPAA campaign against P2P found it pretty ridiculous to sue for billions of dollars.
The only way said media conglomerates will be able to heavily prosecute these "crimes" is by convicing the public that they are indeed crimes. So far, they're doing a very poor job of that. Most people feel that they have a right to "steal" content using P2P networks. All the lobbying in the world isn't going to change that feeling. Maybe some clever marketing will help them, but trying to convince someone that they're obtaining 'free stuff' is not an easy task.
Society, and almost any natural system, tends to settle into an equilibrium. There's a certain inertia that needs to be overcome in order to push out into some other stable region. The media industry is pushing really hard, but I just don't think they have the muscle to really pull this off. They can shake things up, but in the end, it'll probably settle back down again. Let's just hope they trow their collective back out in the process...
<Disclamer>
- I do, in fact, support the "criminalization" of certain things (ie. drug addicts are criminals).
- I do have my own "pet" issues (ie. affirmative action is discrimination against whites).
</Disclaimer>Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
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.
Okay, the earliest sightings of smileys were found. How long will it take us to agree on when the earliest reference to Imminent Death of the Net Predicted was? I found one dating to April 11, 1991. Does anyone know of an earlier one?
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
From the article:
An architect friend tells me that email has become the biggest productivity drain in his organization: not just the quantity of attachments, but the mindless round-robin communications, requesting comments that get ignored. Email has become a corporate displacement activity
Psh... this is hardly an Internet issue. It's more of a corporate-mail mentality. Spam is *the* internet-email problem.
Basic web surfing means navigating through web sites whose inspiration for their baroque overdesign seems to have been Donald Trump's wedding cake, all the while requiring the user to close down dozens of unrequested pop-up advertisements.
I believe this is only the case when you want to visit the page of the Smith Family from Anytown, USA, so you can see pics of their kids playing with the family dog.
Self-Respecting sites that want to keep their audience/customers will have a sensible interface or lose to the competition.
Users are not stupid.
This is where I agree. See comment above.
No sig
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
This has really become as distorted as the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit. Please read this for the lowdown behind the wisecracks.
All this works fine. Where's the problem?
The Internet isn't about shopping.
I think you miss the point. People are getting sued for putting up websites that say bad things about other companies. They're getting sued for writing search engine software. They're getting sued for, as he pointed out, registering domains for their own personal family names.
;) ).
Email is nearly worthless for most people - I'm at about 1:50::real email:spam. We're to the point that people are running software to filter mail for them, software which can tag non-spam as spam - a worse problem than getting the spam itself. But, people are desperate enough to restore email's worth that they'll put up with that sort of thing.
You don't get any spam - I hope you realize that you're a part of a very small minority (you may also want to contact your MX admin, the mail server could just be down
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."
That's the sound of the nickel I get every time someone predicts the death of the net.
I paid off my car with the proceeds from the non-death of USENET. I'll probably pay off my mortgage before the Internet truly dies.
Dude...this is slashdot we're talking about...they still think First Post is funny.
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
Those with the historical perspective of a mayfly combined with "progressive" political indoctrination (nobody hates progress more than progressives) see every local downtick or potential for problems as signs that the world is falling apart.
We have more choices in music and easier access to it than ever before in history. We have more books to read. People in the wilds of Montana now have a greater selection available than residents of Manhattan had twenty years ago.
When I started using email, it was literally a tool of the military industrial complex. Now even children regularly use it and there's so much "power to the people" that it's as if everyone in the movie theater were given his own megaphone.
And I just love the endless blather about dissenters being kept quiet in this age of personal megaphones. Sure, if the world isn't paying rapt attention to me, then it must be the fault of some vast right-wing conspiracy silencing dissent. Yeah, what else could it be?
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
And, the register included a bit about spam in emails in that story. I still don't get it. Why are people so upset about spam? Maybe I"m sheltered, but I don't have any problems with spam; I get maybe one a week, but I quickly add that domain to my block list on the server. Are they talking about AOL people?
AOL is kind of like a crutch for people. It allows them to use the internet without actually really knowing what they're doing. If AOL never existed, I wonder if we would still have the problem of spam that we have now?
Of course there's also hotmail...I don't know what to say about that, I've never wanted to use Hotmail after it crashed my friend's browsers repeatedly because of the amount of spam in their inbox...
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.
The popularity of the internet is built on four major components. Two of the four are most definately at risk:
* The Web
* Email & Messaging - Under attack by spammers, and even under worse attack by anti-spammers. The trend is towards central control of email to eliminate spam. The antispam camp should take note of the failure of the Instant Messenging networks to stop spam on their centrally controlled services.
* Peer to Peer Services - Tools that allow the exchange of information between two nodes like NFS, Gnutella, Windows File Sharing, Telnet, etc... These tools are under attack at the fringe, but how different is getting a file off Gnutella than an anonymous FTP or a windows share? Not very.
* Usenet - The surprising survivor. I can't believe that Usenet is still kicking and popular after all these years.
The key to the Internet's success has and will be:
* Easy and inexpensive access to information and easy and inexpensive publication of information. (web, usenet, file sharing, etc...)
* Easy,inexpensive and fast communication. (email, usenet, IRC, IM, etc...
The good news is that the market is too powerful to be co-opted. People don't want the internet to turn the clock back to the days of Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe.
-- $G
..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"
To make it even worse, the legislation he was involved in was the legislation that led to the commercialization of the internet and hence the popups we all loath. Not something I would be bragging about.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Telecomunication companies, of course, want to extend their pay per minute rape.
Software companies have proved themselves unable to compete with free software which depends on a free internet.
Who else? You mentioned government?
Oh well, there you have it. If we give into these forces we will be slaves. Remember that you own the land the wires run on and should demand your right to lay more if the incumbents fail you. The incumbents will fail us, of course, as they seek to impose limits of obsolete technology to and make us pay for their existance.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Good analogy but to extend it: you probably wouldn't choose to live under a flight path without good reason in the first place.
If your first experience of the web was a deluge of deafening popups/unders/overs/whatever, as is common with some sites these days, then you mightn't bother with it after that. Which is especially true of the people that are offended by the porn.
Those that have been around for a while have learned to adapt and deal with these "jets" and other annoyances but there's a certain amount of skill to getting a good SNR from the internet nowadays.
Imagine that Earthlink, AOL and MSN are the only ISPs available to you. They block port 25 to force you to use their SMTP servers. (so much for that domain name you bought... random.coolzip@policestreet.com is useless now) They transproxy ports 80 and 443, so they can record all your web surfing and "share" the information with their "marketing partners". (Funny, though... goatse.cx won't load anymore, and neither will nra.org) Port 22 is blocked to "prevent hackers breaking into vulnerable machines with a SSH exploit". 23 blocked because telnet is insecure. Your TOS requires you to keep 137-139 open (and to run a machine to which those ports are meaningful) to monitor the quality of service. Oh, and everything above 1024 is blocked because there are no legitimate services running on those ports.
Beginning to get the (rather bleak) picture? It may sound corny, but maintaining the World of Ends we've come to know and love does not advance the cause of controlling the general populace. The Prime Directive Of Business is to Make Money. Individuals matter only insofar as they can be persuaded to spend. Big Business wants the net to be Television II: a model they understand and can exploit as an advertising medium to promote the consumerist culture. Geeks want everything to be free, and unlike Big Business, are willing to contribute to the effort without necessarily turning a monetary profit. ("Don't want money... Want admiration") Reality, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle... but not exactly centered.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.