What The Internet Isn't

looseBits writes "Doc Searls and David Weinberger, co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, have put together a 10-part guide for how to stop mistaking the Internet for something it isn't. It contains some painfully obvious and often overlooked characteristics of the 'world of ends' we call the Internet."

Comments

opinions versus facts...

[segment]

The Nutshell

Opinion: 1. The Internet isn't complicated
That's an opinion. Considering more and more people are logging on, and I just read an article about older people turning to the Internet, consider the following... Just because to the author, the Internet, and using it is easy, does not mean it is not complicated for a new user

Opinion 3. The Internet is stupid.
No people are stupid. Personally (this is my opinion) I believe the next generation is going to be hellishly smarter than the one I grew up (growing up) with (in). Where else can you learn so many things from without leaving your home. Encyclopedia? They're limited.

Opinion: 4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
There is no true 'value' per se as one cannot grasp anything physical. But where else can you find mega bargains, mega information...

Re:opinions versus facts...

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as your first two comments: If one defines the internet as "a protocal for moving bits from one computer to another" (as the authors of this article do), then the internet is simple and stupid: it's simple, because it's just a protocal; and it's stupid, because it doesn't know or care what kind of bits it's moving. Of course, in practice the internet means more than just "a protocal for moving bits from one computer to another." So your real disagreement with this article is their definition of the internet.

Another worthwhile analysis

[emo boy]

http://www.internetisshit.org/
Thanks for listening.

The Cluetrain Manifesto sucked, and now this...

[Anonymous Coward]

So these two screwed up pretty much 80% of their predictions in the Cluetrain Manifesto, and still expect people to take them serious.

I read the article in question about a year ago, and it was ripe smelling of "high on themselves" then.

Course I get tired of people telling me what the Internet is all about, yet they haven't been using it as long as I have.

Re:Political, not descriptive

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not incorrect as much as simplistic. The author refers to "the internet" like "the government". What is the government? Its not congress or the president or even the dmv. Thats "A government". "The government" is simply an agreement between 2 people. I agree to give up some of my freedoms and in return you give up some of yours (or none of yours depending on what type of government we are talking about). Now that does not describe in any way what "A government" is or how it works but it is the meaning of "the government". In the same way "The internet" is just an agreement between two people where one agrees to send data to the other. This doesnt tell you what "an internet" does or how it works or what yopu can do with it but it is still accurate.
"But wait!" you say.
"What do you mean AN internet? Isnt there only one internet?"

No there are many internets just like there are many governments. A LAN is a type of internet. It simply uses a different agreement just like in China you give up different rights then you do in the US.

Simple stuff, but right on the money

[big-magic]

These 10 points may sound obvious to the slashdot crowd, but to many people they are not. Unfortunately, the content owners are trying their best to turn the Internet into another channel on your television set. And the national governments do not have a reason to prevent it. And since many people are blissful in their ignorance of this issue, they will not even complain if the underlying freedom of the Internet is slowly taken away.

The part about the Internet "routing around damage" is an important feature that will be central to the battle over the future of the Net. It has taken the content owners and the government awhile to realize this property of the Net. That's the reason for the increased push for DRM and tightening copyright laws. I believe it is also the reason for the increased push for governments to directly "govern" the Internet. The fact is that the Internet makes many governments uneasy. It's a very large, uncontrolled system.

But the most important thing for us to fight to protect is the end to end connectivity. As long as I can connect to the person to which I want to communicate without going through an "approved" centralized server, the basic features of the Net will stay intact. It will be hard for the government to change this without completely destroying the value of the Internet. But I don't think that will prevent them from trying.

My prediction is that we will see increasing talk about changing the Internet to "protect the children" and "stop the terrorist from using the Net" as entry points for stricter authentication, auditing, and control, as well as increased centralization of the structure of the Internet. As much as I hate the thought, I think it's inevitable. Now that I've depressed myself, I'll take off my tin foiled hat.

Re:Simple stuff, but right on the money

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that is just going to happen to the US . The rest or the world will use its own routers and keep it free. The internet will slowly seperate into two distinct networks: The USnet, and the International Network (internet). The US government will set up a huge firewall around its border too stop the internet. It will justify this as a counter terrorism necesity. The USnet will be available around the world so that business can ineract but not very popular. But only the US citizen (and maybe china since they are doing it now) will be stupid enough to let their government control the main media under the pretext of terrorism an porn cencorship. Mainwhile the record industry will be glad they can now charge monitor and charge for every song transfer. The other countries will just laugh at all of this.

Re:Simple stuff, but right on the money

[ducomputergeek]

I find this article to be accurate from a technical standpoint, but I think that it falls far short on many areas. This is more of a technical arguement rather than one that tries to approach the Internet from a social or political aspect.

However, what the authors failed to either realize or mention is the dark side of net. Crackers, virus writers, SPAM kings, information pollution, etc. are all issues. Outside of the few webpages I still maintain for a few clients.

What the internet really is is an innovation. There were many flawed models in the dotcom era. I run an online classified site where local hockey players can go and place used equipment for sale for $1.50 per listing. Does it make me rich? Hell no, but it bring in enough to jusify the time and effort to maintain it.

I know many businesses that added a catalog or changed from a print catalog to an online store over the years and have grown quite large making millions per year. Its nothing more than mail order business that uses the internet to "print" their catalog instead of presses.

The other thing that I have to laugh is, "No one owns the Internet". Someone owns something somewhere. Econ: 101 there is no free lunch. Someone owns the DNS servers, someone owns the fiberoptics that the datapackets travels, someone owns the DSL/Cable/Dial in connection you use to get online. Granted, its impossible for any single enity to control the entire Internet.

And the "Free Market for innovation" thingy...I cannot agree entirely. What it has done is speed up the communication of ideas, which has led to many innovations, but still...someone has to pay the bandwidth bills some how. There is not zero barriers to entry here, but very low.

Now I agree, we are going to see increased regulations. The days of the geeks regulating the Internet is over. This is because of issues like SPAM and these quick spreading viruses. The chance for geekdom to develop its own solution is quickly closing. Either the solution will be made by industry, at which point different "standards" may emerge that breaks the internet into smaller sub-net (ie Yahoo! mail won't talk to AOL or MSN, etc.) or one will see more carnivore like devices installed at a hardware level to monitor activities. Will total censorship be an option? No, but I think the homesteading days of the internet are over.

Internet connectivity maybe come a commodity, but the connection without content is pretty lame. Now those with the conent are the ones providing a value added feature that they can charge for, such as subscription sites. Google indexes, stores, and brings massive amounts of data and those with the data are the ones with the edge. Why do you think their revenue as gone from almost nothing to something like a Billon dollars in the last 3 years? The control a means of accessing the information.

RIAA Vs. Napster - I sum this up easily. The RIAA got blind sided by a new method of content distribution. So they responded like many respond with an unknown or strange new thing: they attacked it. Most people I knew would have never pirated a song if the RIAA had attempted to work with Napster to develop a win-win senerio. Well, we have today, its called iTunes et al. I think that proves that people are willing to pay for songs if priced correctly.

And telecoms aren't going anywhere. We still have our analog phone lines into our business. I use a cell only and no home phone because I travel on business a lot. On a personal level, what happens when the power at your house goes out including taking the DSL/Cable modem with it and you have VoIP phone? This goes back to the 10 technologies that won't die.

Anyway, I will go through tomorrow and write a more detailed arguement from a social/geopolicital standpoint on why on a technical level, they are write, but a social/political level are probably off the mark a bit.

Re:Ironic?

[evn]

You confusing the web with the internet.

The internet itself is made up of many parts: email, usenet, IRC, world wide web, ftp, telnet the only thing they really have in common is that all of those work on top of IP (internet protocol).

The internet itself works fine on just about every platform. The services provided on top of that may be hit or miss depending on how and who impliments them.

Of course, you knew that, but a surprising number of people think that the web is all there is to the internet. I've met CS majors who still don't quiet get that AIM is part of the internet. They'll send me a message and say "my internet is down".
"...how did you send me this message?"
really they're just having some site not resolving.

so, in other words....

[Stormie]

I do take issue with that particular writeup, although it is true in many senses.

Today, many so-called internet users have their access mediated by firewalls and NAT. This reduces the set of internet services available to them.

(I'd even say, as a slight exaggeration, that their ISPs had engaged in false advertising by calling it "Internet Access")

By the original definition of the internet, anyone with access (control of one host) could send packets to any address:port combination, and open any port to inbound connections.

This means that everyone with internet access should be able to run an HTTP, FTP, or UT server. But many people are prevented by their ISP's routing policies.

Firewalls and NATs supposedly "add value" to the internet by making it safer for some users. But it's not made a lot safer (worms get through even today), and it has "lowered value", because creating new applications is more difficult. For example, today there is a movement towards SOAP; XML-RPC. Unfortunately, one of the motivations to promote it is to allow arbitrary, application-specific traffic to travel over port 80. To work around firewalls which only permit HTTP, we're starting to see a legitimization of tunneling commands over HTTP.

(I'm not saying that was the original goal of SOAP- but sneaking around firewalls is one reason that some developers are eager to try it)

So there's an example of why "adding value to the Internet" is generally bad.

However, there are cases where it may be good. We all know that IPv6 will be a postive (someday). Multicast extensions to the internet were developed well after it was first created, and are generally accepted as a good thing, although their deployment so far is well short of universal. Multicasting is a superset of existing internet functionality (assigning a single packet to be destined to multiple recipients).

Multicasting may turn out to have downsides, depending on how it's implemented (and I haven't followed development closely enough to be sure what the direction is). If it creates an unfair environment, where large corporations (CBS, MTV, RIAA) can create multicast streams, but individual users cannot, then it will cement inequality and make internet use move closer to resembling traditional television viewing. I feel justified in hoping this won't happen, however.

And QoS (quality of service) is a debatable issue, not a flat-out bad one like the article suggests. IP, the existing internet protocol (not to be confused with Intellectual Property), makes no guarantee that packets will arrive quickly or in order. It doesn't state that packets will travel at the same speed as each other. It doesn't even state that a packet which is sent will ever arrive, only that the network make a "best effort" at getting it through someday.

Since IP makes no guarantees of transmission speed, adding an optional mechanism to request QoS efforts won't break the existing protocol definitions. Yes, it may disturb some people to consider that internet packets, which used to be fair and unbiased, may someday have preference given to them based on the sender's bank account- but look at the alternative:

• Today, internet access is filtered by bank account- if your wealth is too low, you can't use the internet at all. Allowing some packets to be more expensive to send allows the rich to subsidize the poor, who might be able to afford some access instead of none.
• Today, deploying applications like voice, moving video, and arcade games over the internet is difficult, because your packets have latency and jitter. That's because they are competing will all kinds of email, IM, HTTP, FTP, and NTTP protocols as they move accross the network. To make low-latency interaction work better, we can either invest a lot to make the entire internet super-fast, or invest a little to recognize which packets need high speed, and bump them ahead of the lines.
• Someday, your ISP w

Re:Wrong about advertising

[mosb1000]

Or maybe you should just realize that putting content on the internet costs money.

The question is how do you want to pay for the content you view on the internet? Would you rather pay for it yourself and skip the ads, or not pay for it and let the advertizers pick up the tab. No, you can't choose the neither option.

P.S. Most people choose to watch the ads, that's why they are there.

Re:Adding value can be a good thing...

[Wesley Felter]

The way I see this, prioritizing packets also ensures that a minority of users can't abuse the network ressources the everybody else want to use.

No, fair queueing ensures that a minority of users can't monopolize the network's capacity. Prioritizing packets based on applications hurts all other applications.

Prioritizing packets within your own network is fine because you know what you want. The core of the Internet doesn't know what you want, so there's no way for it to provide reasonable prioritization.

Re:Political, not descriptive

[starm_]

I don't agree. The internet is well defined in what is called the "internet protocol". And this protocol is just an agreement on a way to communicate. It is not like a government. It isn't more than that. People use it for lots of things and different kinds of communications but that doesn't make more than an agreement.
A government is much more than a simple agreement. It is define by more that one simple protocol. That people use the phone to talk about a lot of things does that mean the phone is more than a way to talk to each other?

A LAN is not a type of internet. It can use a subset of the internet protocol, but to be an internet, you have to connect multiple LANs trough gateways.

And usually when people refer to the internet, they mean the main one that most people connect to.

Much Ado about Nothing

[NixLuver]

Lots of cantankerous responses to the article, claiming variously that it's wrong, wishful thinking, whatever...

The problem with the Internet as an advertising medium is that it works backwards from the mass media. We're used to having ads thrown in our face, and that's the only paradigm that MegaCorps are capable of dealing with right now. Fortunately, there are many tech savvy thinking individuals who are more than happy to build ad blocking infrastructures that render bulk advertising moot.

Right now an internet presence is not necessarily a profit center, but a lack of one can certainly cost you money - more and more middle class (and up) people are turning to the internet first for information about what product they will buy or service they will use.

In the end, the internet presents the nightmare of true value comparison; the advertising that it's ideal for is comparison research; backwards from the current model which resembles a firehose, this becomes "on demand" advertising.

I research nearly every major purchase on the internet prior to spending money. It has saved me a lot of money, in the long run; whatever product I am considering, I can usually find posts somewhere on the web from someone who has one, and is either really happy, or really unhappy about that fact.

Someone mentioned QOS and bandwidth hogs vs backbone bandwidth - network bandwidth will increase until there are essentially no bottlenecks. It's a fact. Eventually, our network connection will exceed our local bus speed now. QOS is a stopgap measure to shoehorn technologies onto the 'Net before it's grown to accomodate them.

Re:Adding value can be a good thing...

[Mr. Slippery]

Right in my home network I had to prioritze RTP packets (VoIP) so that other people in the house couldn't screw up my phone conversations

And exactly as the authors state, in so doing you de-optimized the network for other people in the house. It sounds to me like you're abusing the network ressources that other people want to use. ("Screw your ping time! I'm on the phone!")

Who ever heard of the Internet?(anyway)

[shubert1966]

"The federal agency responsible for allocating spectrum might notice that the value of open spectrum is the same as the true value of the Internet."

Sounds like some damn rant. The bloody FCC never did nothing right. Their cahooting diffusion with ICANN and the registrars, and phone companies . . . Then the audio/video hogs woke up and attacked . . . Soon a bunch of outta-loops was doing File->Save As->Web site. Heck I got some shovels to sell any prospector foolish enough to philosophize about protocol awareness.

It's really all about the breaks. The break between content provider and audience. The wireless and wired networks. When the right people or products coalesce - will it be a monopoly? Open-Source wireless networks deployedtoday are the only way to ensure bandwidth for open-minded transmissions later. As TimeWarner if the offer Movies, VoIP and Broadband in uncompetitive markets . . . Who can stop them? Congress? Ha! Al Gore they ain't and that fool backed Howard Dean!

I did not get much from the article at all - and think it was an esoteric sailing trip. But I too wrote a rant, so there was some stimulus. Like the style of Kurt Vonnegut my satire aims to ape:

" The encapsulation format and rendering of data and metadata of the sources and possible Endings of user input. Various handshakes and transfers as made available through the GUI. Not a sophmoric semaphore, but a protocol delivered by competition, at first empiracly academic, and now in the hands of any SK who wants to do something today."
And a little child shalll lead them.

[Context] x [Subject] x [Amplitude] x [Frequency] x [Time]

Re:FreeNET

[Saeger]

FreeNet allows for secure and anonymous communication.

Sure does. At least until "Trusted Computing" comes along and takes control away from the individual at the hardware level. In such a scenario, subversive software like Freenet would never be "trusted" (by an authority other than YOU) to execute locally, and even if it could (like on chinese blackmarket hardware), its packets would be deemed "untrusted", and dropped, by the new breed of UN-approved "trusted" routers.

--

The Internet Can Be Censored

[mckelveyf]

I'd liked his points especially the three virtues one. I think that internet is really important because its been the only mass technology that has allowed for such seamless participation on all fronts. Its allows for mutually-empowering users.

But what I don't think is correct is in article is the statement that Internet is free from censorship. It quotes John Gilmore, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." True, it's free from censorship for us, in the developing world, because everday people have access. They are the dominate users and we are actively making sure that it remains free.

However, if you look at a place like China, things differ. Western companies and the Chinese government are doing everything in the power to stop anything unwanted from appearing on the Internet. Basically they are building the Internet to be controlled and frankly, I think it is working.

I still believe the net can be a great tool that can beyond censorship. But I don't think it is that way by default.

fenn

Re:Adding value can be a good thing...

[Dun Malg]

I think maximizing the routing of internet to return small packets of information with less lag (and less speed), large packets of information with more lag but more speed, and streams of information at a constant rate with constant lag would help everybody. So long as the trade off was enforced at all points, I think it would be honored by protocol developers.

The one problem is that such a system would require centrally-managed routing. How do you guarantee constant-rate packet flow unless there's a central authority monitoring traffic flow? Adding a priority control layer to IP communications will require someone telling us what priority our traffic may be given, else everyone will just set the checkbox labelled "all traffic priority 1" in their network settings and **poof** the utility is gone. It's bad enough with ICANN and Network Solutions pulling the bullshit they can now, without adding that to the mix. Do you really want those NS clowns (or a totally new bunch of clowns) telling you "Priority 3 is free, but if you want Priority 2 clearance, that'll be $5/megabit; Priority 1 is $25/megabit"?

Re:Obligatory

[Tuxedo Jack]

Actually, that GIF shows the amount of data that's on Kazaa at any given moment, not the size of the Internet.

The Internet encompasses infinity (especially in the number of pornographic files). How can we describe it, then? I quote Adams:

"Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that infact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real 'wow, that's big,' time. Infinity is just so big that, by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here."

Re:Just more Searls bullshit

[another_twilight]

For a strict definition of 'internet' you are correct. However, more common usage ignores the hardware and protocols and deals with what those are used for. For most people the internet _is_ Google, websites, P2P and the like.

For that definition of 'internet' a lot more of those statements in the article hold true.

The article is not pitched at the technically literate or technically literal.

I call straw man.

Adding Lowers Value: Right, but how bout...

[adamontherun]

I agree with Dave and Doc that in most cases mucking around with the physical and code layers of the internet is a Miserble idea.

Not only technically will it likely muck things up, but in the real world, some big gorilla of a firm will find a way to take advantage for them selves, at the expense of others.

But, as I once told my ex-crush, Never Say Never baby.

As I picked up from MIT's Tech Review Planet Lab. Seems to me like a good idea, but not sure. Particularly after all the time's I've read Lessig pound the end-to-end point home. Here's a snippet from the Intel press release on Planet Lab. what do you think?

SANTA CLARA, Calif, June, 24, 2003 -- Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, HP, Intel Corporation, Princeton University, the University of Washington and more than 60 universities from around the world have joined together to form PlanetLab, a global test bed for inventing and testing prototype Internet applications and services. The researchers aim to spark a new era of innovation by using "overlay" networks to upgrade and expand the Internet's features and capabilities.

PlanetLab may lead to new ways of protecting the Internet from viruses and worms. It could also enable new capabilities, such as persistent storage, the idea of giving the Internet a "memory." For example, 100 years from now a piece of data could still be found, even though the original computer on which it was posted no longer exists. In addition, this research could influence the future design of servers and network processors.

Upgrading the Internet The Internet has been based on a small set of software protocols that direct routers inside the network to forward data from source to destination, while applications run on computers connected to the edges of the network. The simplicity of the software model enabled the Internet to rapidly scale into a critical global service; however, this success now makes it difficult to create and test new ways of protecting it from abuses, or from implementing innovative applications and services.

The PlanetLab concept was born when Intel researchers gathered a group of leading network and distributed systems researchers to discuss the implications of a new, emerging class of global services and applications on the Internet. This new class of services is designed to operate as "overlay" networks, which have emerged as a way of adding new capabilities to the Internet. The concept of an overlay or "on top of" approach might be familiar from text books where additional details are added to an image by laying a transparent sheet containing new graphics on top of an existing page. An example of this is overlaying an image of human muscles on top of an illustration of bones to show how the body works.

These overlay networks incorporate the Internet for packet forwarding, but integrate their own intelligent routers and servers on top of the Internet to enable new capabilities without affecting its performance today. These applications are decentralized, with pieces running on many machines spread across the global Internet, they can self-organize to form their own networks, and include some form of application processing inside the network (instead of at the edges), adding new intelligence and capabilities to the Internet.

One example of an overlay network enabling a new kind of Internet application is robust video multicasting. Today, a standard Web site that receives too many requests for the same video clip can bog down or crash; however, if this site were supported by an overlay network of smart routers and globally distributed content storage sites, it could redirect requests on-the-fly, sending them across the Internet to the nearest available content site to ensure the best viewing experience while keeping the site up and running.

Sometimes you just have to say screw it, w

Re:for sale...

[91degrees]

You do realise that most people see a computer differently from you, don't you? You - presumably - see it as a big dumb piece of electronics with software running on it. Other people don't. They just see it as a smart piece of electrnoics.

It doesn't occur to them that there's anything unusual about computer desktops all looking the same. Of course they do. It's what computers do. How else is it going to look? They don't know what an OS is. They don't really care. Asking them is like asking what software their DVD player is running.

This explains why WAP flopped

[edxwelch]

Excellent artical. This explains why the internet is so successful, while WAP flopped.
The phone companies really killed WAP. Firstly, they made it too expensive - 30c to view just one WAP site (at least that's what it is here in Spain).
Then, they restricted access to only their own internal WAP sites and a select few external pay-per-view sites. The artical says the internet is so successfull becuase it's free and unrestricted and not controlled by anyone.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

[Gendou]

A couple years back, the trolls discovered that you could widen the page by posting long strings of characters with no spaces. Widening the page by posting a comment like that would make the entire Slashdot story basically unreadable for those without the patience to continuously scroll right and then left again for each line.

Malda implemented a new feature that prevented any strings longer than 50 characters from being posted by inserting a space after the 50th character. The trolls found various ways to get around this and widen the page anyway (some of which only widened Internet Explorer), but over time they've all been disabled in various ways.

Your best bet is to simply make a href link instead of trying to paste the link into the message text. Either that, or shorten the link. The link in the post you replied to would have been space-free if the http:// were stripped off.

Content IS free (sometimes).

[npsimons]

It's free to me for one reason alone:
Internet Advertising.

False. Just because you think that everyone is greedy doesn't make it true. There are some people who are willing to give away information without bogging it down with ads. For instance, I run my own webserver with lots of documentation available for browsing. I pay for it - all of it - out of my own pocket. I have no banner ads, no corporate sponsorship, no government funding. I keep it up because it's useful to me and I like to think I'm giving back to those on the Internet who have done so much for me.