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Post "Good Google," Who Will Defend the Open Web?
psykocrime writes "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have started a discussion about Google and their relationship with the Open Web, and questioning who will step up to defend these principles, even as Google seem to be abdicating their position as such a champion. Some candidates mentioned include Yahoo, IBM, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft and The Wikimedia Foundation, among others. The question is, what organization(s) have both the necessary clout and the required ethical principles, to truly champion the Open Web, in the face of commercial efforts which are clearly inimical to Open Source, Open Standards, Libre Culture and other elements of an Open Web?"
There aren't any. /thread
Because I would have thought a dude with the title "Chief Internet Evangelist" would have something to say about this.
Open Web? Have you idiots heard of this thing we call the internet?
Which one of you bought this thing? Who owns this thing?
Free? Lickspittle, I am the only free man on this train. The rest of you are cattle.
Oops, I meant Slashdotted. The link was Slashdotted.
Samsung!
Even if such a mythical company existed, you can't pick that one because ideas change; people change; companies change. For the same reason, you can't grant party X the power to do M, because party Y will use that power to do N. What may seem "good" now will never remain that way.
If the grassroots don't organize then all will be lost. There is too much money to be made closing it all up, overcommercializing it, and using it to extract maximum revenue from compliant consumers.
Unfortunately, I don't think we will. Too many people have been blinded by the merchants of "cool" to see the true cost in terms of freedom and privacy which come with drinking the Apple/Google kool-aid.
We have to stop doing business with those who close it up. That means a full boycott of DRM and paid content. That means eschewing privacy-stripping "app stores" on locked down platforms for sideloaded FOSS. That means running strict ad blockers to choke the funding stream and make being intrusive scumbags a bad business model.
The web is turning into a hybrid shopping mall/movie theater. Don't like it? Stop funding it. Stop being a source of revenue and eyeballs.
I'm sure many of those who read this post will complain about the direction of the web then head right back to the app store to buy something they don't need on a platform they don't control.
The "web" is no longer what is in a browser. It now extends to all Internet-connected services. Locked down paid apps on restricted, DRM-friendly platforms are going to replace open, standards-compliant pages, but only if we let them.
You, sir, need a life.
DoD, and universities. Use Internet standards or we'll kick your...well, you won't get that contract renewal. It worked pretty well in the old days.
We will all go to hell.. It's ova. See ya!
There's only one company on that list that seems qualified to me, and that would be Mozilla.
My reasoning (and this is based on my opinion, so mod how you will):
Mozilla has long championed open standards, and although they once toppled the "invincible" Microsoft, whether they still hold that kind of power remains to be seen...
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!
...not sure how we got on that list
What? Hosts files seem to have something to do with every discussion out there (didnt you know).
Someone is either a massive troll. And/or a massive idiot.
If a troll then he will never give up because he gets off on it.
If a 'true believer' he will never give up because he must let his word be know to the heathens.
Either way he will never give up. Best stuff is is the -1 troll/offtopic land for him.
my vote goes to microsoft to champion an Open Web. Past history has shown that they are staunch defenders of the principles which guide the Open Web initiative, and I would always trust them, when the time comes, to make a solid business decision which is in the best interests of an Open Web.
hahahahahahahahaa omgwtfbbq roflamo hahahaahahaha.....
MS has never been about any open web, they have been trying to make their own standards since the beginning.
MS only cares about MS.
Be seeing you...
What about 4chan?
Microsoft is the only company that cares or will defend the rights of the end user to ensure all software is secure, free, Open and meets all standards which the end user should be able to use, understand or knows of.
Microsoft has proven over the past 35+ years how much they do their best to meet the needs, requirements of all end users.
They are also very trust worthy and honest when it comes to doing what is right for the end user. For example, look at how IBM attempted to rip off end users with OS/2. Microsoft saw this for what it was, and worked on their own version called 'NT', which meet and surpassed OS/2 in every way.
Another example is Netscape and IE. Microsoft saw Netscape ripping off end users by selling something which could be giving away for free. Microsoft produced IE which was free, met all standards, and allowed end users to have secure, free and open access to the Internet. Without IE, the Internet would be locked down and owned by Netscape.
Microsoft even fought Sun/Oracle on the Java front. Granted they lost, because they did not provide enough finical incentives to the US legal system, however they still stood up to Sun/Oracle to keep the Internet free from Java, which as we all know is a security risk and should never be used in DVD Players, Blu-Ray Players, nor even for server side Chat Room Programs.
Now Microsoft is taken on Apple and Google with their Windows RT and Windows 8. Will hope they win as they feel the sales of Windows RT and 8 tables and phones surpasses the sale of iOS and Android combined.
When Windows 8 was being developed, Microsoft wanted to reduce the source code size and the final binary size of Windows 8 to improve the performance for the end user. They removed the start button, which has increased the performance of Windows 8 and all other Microsoft products running on top of Windows 8.
Microsoft only cares about the end user, and will do whatever it takes to own to standards to keep the end user free and open.
As Mr. Gates said in an interview a few weeks ago, if we give Mr. Obama enough power to do what is right for the people of the US and the rest of the world, we will be free, and safe.
So lets all give Microsoft and Mr. Obama all the power they need to do what is right for everyone.
Some candidates mentioned include Yahoo, IBM, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft and The Wikimedia Foundation, among others
It was clearly over four minutes before you posted. Pretty much everyone here would scoff at MS.
What's left is pointless discussions of opinion about "Oh, I think THIS large multinational corporation which is utterly devoid of any conscience, as they all are, is lately acting better than this OTHER one, so we should root for them instead."
We may as well skip right to godwining. (Insert the name of the company you think is evil) is basically (insert inappropriate historical bad guy here).
Just send me loads of cash so I can quit my regular job and devote my efforts to your needs.
What was it you wanted again?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I'm don't exactly disagree, Google is a corporation, and corporations will defend and support structures and principles like the Open Web as long as they percieve strategic benefit and fianacial gain, so clearly other organisations need to defend these structures and principles. But other for-profit companies like Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft? Seriously? Companies will defend and protect their interests only, our interests are users can only align with theirs, not be permenantly linked.
In fact, I still believe that Google 'gets' the web in ways that other companies, like some of those that are listed as alternatives, don't. This doesn't mean that they are 'good' but that they at least have a decent long-term interest in seeing some of the principles crucial to us as users be upheld. I've gone in deeper in this in an article on 'Our uneasy relationship with Google' (resolutely ad-free and non-commercial, please don't kill this comment as spam).
But long-term and from an ideological viewpoint, the only organisations that you should have faith in for the big issues that will affect us and shape the future of the web, it'd have to an entity with no financial stake and no legal obligation to shareholders. There is simply no way around the fact that any corporation will retain and protect principles only as long it percieves them to be benefical to itself as a business.
Most of the interesting stuff I read on the Internet these days is on email lists, which are relatively hard to find and hence have a high signal to noise ratio from people who went out of their way to find them, while the web has mostly become a means of tracking people and pushing ads on them.
Slashdot is basically Rasputin. ... Am I doing it right?
+i, Fear for your future
Because this is a complete troll piece to begin with, and adding Microsoft to the list just makes it blatant. Nowhere is evidence given for Google "abdicating their position as such a champion," it's simply stated with the hope we accept it as a given. Then toss Microsoft into a list of "good guys".
Who owns Fogbeam Labs, anyway? They claim to be "Open Source 2.0" (what does that even mean?) and very new.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Best stuff would be for Slasdot to provide a RegExp filter, even if it had to run on client-side in JavaScript. It would be nice to improve the signal to noise ratio, even if just a bit.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
The solution is that hosting companies and FOSS developers see the light, that is start packaging already existing free software to provide self-hostable, portable environments that make it easy also for non-geeks to set up and use their own personal cloud. Details at http://stop.zona-m.net/?s=alternatives
Alright, this is retarded. I've butted heads with APK myself, and yeah, the guy's got issues... but I actually think he's honest about them. He really thinks the hosts file is a reasonable security measure, and he's just trying to explain this brilliant design to the world.
This, though, is purely offensive. Besides derailing conversations, it's mocking someone else's opinion (sane or not) without provocation. As a parody, it was funny once. Now it's just sad.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
In the end, there is no one foundation or company. We have to use technology to create p2p/distributed types of solutions that can bypass the state and proprietary controls, even assuming they have 100% control over the infrastructure.
That's the problem right there. All power corrupts, absolute power etc.
Pick your example; MSFT, Google, Politicians, Catholic Church, in the end they all end up acting, overtly, covertly or usually both, to protect their positions.
History shows that you can't depend upon others, especially large organisations with power, to defend your interests.
(Although as pointed out above, the EFF has a good record; but they're hardly Google).
You have to do it yourself. Vote for politicians who support open standards, insist that your suppliers send you documents in open formats, educate your peers and customers about open alternatives.
Stop whining and get off your ass, basically.
Platforms, services, and applications for the web are changing faster than any one company can respond to, and have ever since Netscape released Navigator v2 in 1995 (which introduced Java applets, JavaScript, SSL, cookies, frames, etc). A standards organization such as W3C is helpful, but all they do is ratify what all the major players can agree on (b/c if a top commercial player rejects the standard, the world takes notice and the status of the standard is jeopardized). Besides, different segments of the market have drastically different needs and preferences regarding the rate of change, security, stability, localization, hooks for vendor customization, etc.
By the time the demand for change slows down enough for a body such as W3C to take effective control, the Web will be dead and the world will have moved onto something else.
Any questions?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Extrapolation, much?
Evidence for abandonment of the "open web" - cancelling Reader and the CalDAV API. Evidence for support of the open web: Chrome, GWT, open sourced jscompiler, V8, tons of random libraries and developer tools, SPDY, extensions to SSL, HTML5 rich snippets in search, etc.
I will state right now that I'm a Google employee, so you may think that makes me biased, but employees are often the companies harshest critics (internally). Yet this is a ridiculous stretch. Yes, I love(d) Reader too. Cancelling a widely loved but ultimately niche tool for which there are many replacements is not "abandoning the open web", it's recognising that with a finite amount of resources not every product area can be tackled.
Those who say Wikimedia is powerless, I completely disagree. They're a non-profit concerned with sharing the largest quantity of the most accurate knowledge with the most people. They control several of the most popular websites on earth with few commercial interests and have representatives in MANY languages.
Their largest subset (or was it them too? wp and wm?) also showed their willingness to shutdown completely for a day to demonstrate principles. Google would have taken quite a hit monetarily if they completely shut down (they just posted links and warnings).
I think so.
In Pre-Soviet Russia, mystic advisors slashdot you!
None of these organizations, except IBM, has the clout with the federal government to be more than a buzzing mosquito in the ears of our elected representatives. And, that being said, why would IBM want to put themselves out?
If it's not IBM, Intel, Google, Amazon, PayPal, eBay, Facebook, Oracle, or Microsoft, you aren't going to get the ear of anyone other than the Congresspeople representing the area where your corporate headquarters is located. And even then, you'll need more than your one Representative and two Senators to get any changes in place - that would take lobbyists... many, many lobbyists. And your other suggestions don't have the juice for that.
The notion that the internet will be managed for anything other than evil in the upcoming years is laughably naive, unless you can get the corporate giants to fight among themselves to make that happen.
That is all.
The entire list is irrelevant and has no influence.
Aside from that the real question is, does the Internet need to be open?
I believe most people are falsely lulled into accepting that the moment you put open in front of something it must, by rights, be better then the alternative. Open Web is obviously better then the un-Open Web (really, what do you call the alternative), but who exactly is crippled by the current state of the Internet? Is there someone or some organization out there fundamentally unable to use the Internet because its not "open".
It can't be about expense because its is ridiculously inexpensive to host a website these days. Yes maybe running something like Wikipedia is arguably expensive, but then again, if Wikipedia had any influence on web standards and innovation they would have invented a cheaper way to run a massive web services.
It also can't be about access because while I agree there is a huge layer of telecom interfering with web access, fundamentally it is easy and relatively inexpensive to find and access web services. You may not always have blistering fast speeds or unlimited downloads, but there are internet service providers offering internet for as little as a few dollars a month making it virtually affordable by anybody that cares to go online.
So I don't exactly know how the current un-Open Web is interfering with people's ability to access, communicate, socialize, and even, shudder, profit from the Internet?
The fact is that the Internet as we know it is slowly dying, instead morphing into a services platform to back native applications. Argue all you like about native apps vs web app, but a considerable amount of internet traffic these days is through an app running on a device. Netflix accounts for a huge portion of internet traffic and a significant portion of that is through a device, NOT a browser. Our TVs, phones, tablets, refrigerators, thermostats, even light bulbs will account for more internet traffic in the near future then people hopping onto a web page through a web browser on a "computer". And again, has the un-Open Web interfered with our ability to webify devices? I can buy Raspberry Pi or Arduino and have a device online in minutes, open devices using un-Open Web.
I think it comes down to nothing more then senseless idealism that something so fundamentally ubiquitous as the Internet should also be fundamentally "open". But sometimes advocates of a cause can't see past the cause, and thus don't realize how pointless it is. Put on your orange bracelet and lets all support the Scause!
Maybe Google stopped championing open web because they have come to the conclusion that it is a completely irrelevant concept.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
None of those Corporations can be what we wanted Google to be, in fact it was inevitable that Google would not be what we want it to be. The informational problems inherent to hierarchical organizations demand that the customer conform to the business model and not the other way around (because the business model can't change rapidly enough in a typical Corp to conform to consumer needs). Any corp that has a board/CEO/whatever dictating policy from the top will eventually oppose Open Anything, because they can't control it.
Best stuff would be for Slasdot to provide a RegExp filter, even if it had to run on client-side in JavaScript
You could always prototype this as a script for an augmented browsing environment such as Firefox with Greasemonkey.
He really thinks the hosts file is a reasonable security measure, and he's just trying to explain this brilliant design to the world.
APK, if you're reading this, I'm willing to give you some space on my wiki to explain how to protect a computer with such a DNS blacklist.
The big problem is that almost everybody in US "mobile", telephony, and cable already has a "walled garden". From Comcast to Apple, everybody in that space has a tight grip on their users. Most "apps" are really just a form of DRM.
This is a US thing, though. In Europe, and most of the rest of the world, everybody uses interchangeable GSM phones. The carriers have less control over handsets.
I'd like to remind everyone here that google is an ad company first and foremost.
They may have been "good" as a whole for awhile, but at their core, they never were.
I would say that Google is still carrying the flag of Open Web.. to a point. Ever heard of Android? You know, the most commonly used mobile operating system. You could make a program and put it on the Android today if you wanted to, because it's pretty liberal about allowing a lot of programs out there, thinking that the better programs would be rated more highly and rise to the top anyways and so the crap ones wouldn't be that big of a deal to be on there. Meanwhile, in Apple-land, there's about 100 programs on there and most of them are from the mothership. Google is still kind-of carrying the flag of open computing, they're just not doing it as much these days.
An enterprise's sole function is to make profits as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Unfortunately, once an enterprise becomes publicly traded by speculators with a 90-day or shorter window, "quickly" often begins to eclipse "efficiently".
Governments by definition cannot make a profit
USA was making a surplus in the closing years of the Clinton government.
That means eschewing privacy-stripping "app stores" on locked down platforms for sideloaded FOSS.
In that case, who will finance the production of video games as free software and free cultural works?
One of the dirty little secrets of IETF working groups is the phenomena of ballot stuffing where "rough consensus" can be achived by mobs of outsiders with no domain knowledge or history of prior WG participation chiming in at opportune moments in the process.
Google for example deserves a ban from the tcpm working group for continuing to push protocol extensions with overly aggressive characteristics which are good for them and bad for everyone else.
If you read the text of the actual Fogbeam blog post, the writer only brings up Microsoft to immediately disqualify them.
I think the historical pattern is pretty clear - companies support openness and interoperability when they have a very small share of the market, because it lets them potentially claim a bigger share. Once they own a big share of the market, it's in their interest to break interoperability and close down options, because it lets them lock competitors out of the market. Google has passed into the second category when it comes to social networking, maps, and RSS.
Google has not reached the point where closed is better than open with Android, and given the open source nature of Android it's possible they can't ever reach it. If Android 6 is proprietary, many companies may decide to fork Android 5 and work from that. That's a good thing, but I'm not sure if any of it came from altruistic planning on Google's behalf, or just the reality in 2006 that if they didn't adopt a very open platform, Android would have never gained marketshare.
Still, I think overall Google's lockdown is beneficial, it wakes up people clinging to the delusion that Google would put "Don't Be Evil" ahead of its business model.
Learning the last decade of commercialization and enforcement of the http protocol, it's now the time to do another one with much clear case of what can be and waht cannot be over it.
Open sure.
Private sure.
Anonymous sure.
Create by the user for the user, sure.
Sign me up. Another protocol, another standard sets, another browser set for another thing. The thing that everyone want to be in and that nobody can grab for his own. Now dreamer of today, let's manifest our wet internet dream of tomorrow.
AC
The real question is what company stands to benefit from a free and open net.
You see when you get to the real world it becomes about money, and if there is no money to be made, companies will stop working towards those goals.
If you want a corporate entity to work and push for something, they need to see a good ROI on that investment, or they will simply focus on other things. Only if it is important to their business will they really put effort into it. I'm sure that Google will step up when they see a threat that will hurt their business, but otherwise they don't really care, and they shouldn't really care, unless it impacts them.
If you simply want advocacy, go to the EFF, they've been quite effective.
I would be happy if all the big-media content companies created a big walled garden and bricked themselves up inside it. Why can't we create a web for them and lock it down so they can't ever get out of it? I have no interest in pop culture, pop music, celebrities, movies, advertising, or any of that stuff. I think it would be fantastic if the MPAA and RIAA member companies had their own web with their own DRM walled garden where people had to pay to access it. We could throw expertsexchange and all the rest in with them. The real web could go back to what it was in 1991, with a few FTP sites and comp.lang.c. If other people want to spend money on pop culture, let them. What would be nice is to have a Google like it was in 2008, before they started crippling their search engine with sloppy, inexact results and ruined their design.
If you need a company to defend your rights, you are doing it wrong.
Companies are interested in their own goals. You could look if these goals are identical to yours (which they will not be in most cases) or not, but that is only currently.
Most likely the companies goal is to make money for their owners. You can then look at how these companies go about in doing that and you might even find one that does it in a way that you like and agree with.
However if they think that to achieve their goals it might be best to change the way they do business, then they will.
Companies have changed the way they do business for the better. e.g. no sweatshop. The reason they do this is not so much because they disagree with it, but because it got in the way of their real goal: making money.
Do not hope for a company to defend your rights unless it is your company.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
IMO, the time is ripe to start creating of P2P, decentralized, server-less web - staring with the (mostly) static content like Wikipedia and YouTube and numerous other predominantly publish-only website. In the beginning, a way to push updates, a newer version of content, would suffice for the dynamism.
Models and implementation for decentralized directories (with search function) are available (Kademlia, BitTorrent's DHT). Ditto distributed naming services. But there nothing I'm aware of about how to, in decentralized, in highly redundant fashion, partition and store data on user computers.
YouTube is probably very remote target, but decentralized, server-less Wikipedia I think could be accomplished.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Corporations have their own agenda. Which basically comes down to "how much money can I rip out of the poor suckers wallets". Do not rely on corporations. Rely on yourself and your associations with individuals. That is all that matters. Real people.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I mean, their software runs most of the web anyway. If you consider the extent of their library portfolio, and how central it is to other web servers and web services, they enable even more of the web which doesn't directly run HTTPD.
I believe they may have the influence, but they rarely assert themselves. They only instance that springs to mind is when they left the executive committee for the JCP shortly after Oracle bought Sun. If they began a hard, public push for open web, Google, RedHat, IBM, Mozilla, et al, would likely come in behind them.
NS. ANd don't forget M$' pet Yahoo... They've got to be joking...
You didn't do well since hosts are cached http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2779659&cid=39677101 plus on numerous other points in favor of custom hosts files. Especially for you allegedly, according to you at least, being a software engineer of 16 or more years. A software engineer of 1 year in academia would know that, so you must really suck.