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Pirate Bay Founder: We've Lost the Internet, It's All About Damage Control Now (thenextweb.com)
Mar Masson Maack reports via The Next Web: At its inception, the internet was a beautifully idealistic and equal place. But the world sucks and we've continuously made it more and more centralized, taking power away from users and handing it over to big companies. And the worst thing is that we can't fix it -- we can only make it slightly less awful. That was pretty much the core of Pirate Bay's co-founder, Peter Sunde's talk at tech festival Brain Bar Budapest. TNW sat down with the pessimistic activist and controversial figure to discuss how screwed we actually are when it comes to decentralizing the internet.
In Sunde's opinion, people focus too much on what might happen, instead of what is happening. He often gets questions about how a digitally bleak future could look like, but the truth is that we're living it: "Everything has gone wrong. That's the thing, it's not about what will happen in the future it's about what's going on right now. We've centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who's basically the biggest dictator in the world as he wasn't elected by anyone. Trump is basically in control over this data that Zuckerberg has, so I think we're already there. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and I don't think there's a way for us to stop it." One of the most important things to realize is that the problem isn't a technological one. "The internet was made to be decentralized," says Sunde, "but we keep centralizing everything on top of the internet."
In Sunde's opinion, people focus too much on what might happen, instead of what is happening. He often gets questions about how a digitally bleak future could look like, but the truth is that we're living it: "Everything has gone wrong. That's the thing, it's not about what will happen in the future it's about what's going on right now. We've centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who's basically the biggest dictator in the world as he wasn't elected by anyone. Trump is basically in control over this data that Zuckerberg has, so I think we're already there. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and I don't think there's a way for us to stop it." One of the most important things to realize is that the problem isn't a technological one. "The internet was made to be decentralized," says Sunde, "but we keep centralizing everything on top of the internet."
Make a parallel open internet using the open backbone with end to end encryption. Done. Internet. Good idea stolen by NSA and recovered by open systems as UCLA envisioned.
Listen.
"The internet was made to be decentralized," says Sunde, "but we keep centralizing everything on top of the internet."
It's an inevitable consequence of asymmetrical Internet connections. The vast majority of Internet connections currently in use today have microscopic upstream bandwidth compared to downstream. The Internet would be a great deal more democratic if hosting a server at home didn't mean that your sister would be too impatient to wait for the family photos to load.
If high speed Internet provided by cable companies didn't have its origins in one giant kludge, things might have been different. Unfortunately they were in a far better position to take advantage of packet switched networking. The phone companies were stuck with a circuit switching legacy that really crippled their ability to deploy decent Internet. And here we are. The companies that viewed their customers as silent consumers own the majority of the Internet, and to this day they really hate that their customers are allowed to upload anything at all. The companies that viewed their customers as equal parts producers and consumers lost the market.
Fiber to the home, deployed by someone who isn't the incumbents, would solve the problem. And... yeah, that's over. Everywhere. So he's right, we've lost the Internet. Get ready to pay $65/month for your Basic Internet Bundle of Five Websites! For only $30/month extra, you can add ten more! All of them are owned by one of the existing media conglomerates! You will take this deal and you will like it! You have no choice!
The internet was built by DARPA and universities, and the web by large research labs - paragons of decentralization? I think not. This fantasy of decentralization got added on later by college kids listening to Napster and thinking it would all turn into some golden, trans-national mass of utopian rainbows. I was one of those college kids in the 90s, and gave that kind of thinking a funny look even back then. Much like nuclear power and Tang, the internet is just a weapon of war that we have somewhat re-purposed into cat videos and porn (both of which are better than Tang).
There was never a "we" that "had" the internet (unless one believes in said utopian rainbows), so "we" cannot "lose" it. it's just a medium for ideas, like books or democracy, although a darned good one, and frankly one that has caused more democratization of more ideas than anything since the printing press. Just because some power-hungry curmudgeons have figured out how to fat-finger their way into a few tweets that help win political office, it doesn't mean the internet wasn't a step forward for ideas overall. It's working, it's healthy, so forget this drama-dude.
Even as a fan of the dystopian viewpoint, I don't see it's any more 'broken' that at the inception of the internet.
The cost of entry used to be high, in terms of money, knowledge and creativity required. That cost has been removed. But using the internet in a free, decentralised, uncensored, anonymous, and 'anarchic' way is viable, it just has a high cost of entry.
Long distance communication for the masses hasn't always been free, or un-monitored. News hasn't always been outside state control. But with enough education, knowledge, money, time, and possibly contacts, these things are viable.
In the past. Now. And as far as I can see, in the future.
With knowledge and money, I can buy an old Thinkpad. Libreboot it using a Beaglebone Black. Run Debian (Tails). From a cafe using cash-paid wifi on a random but plausible MAC address. Obtaining information from 'unstoppable' websites running over Tor. Running DAO-style businesses on the Etherium blockchain. 'Laundering' proceeds using Ring-signature Monero because otherwise 'big finance' says my coins are 'tainted'.
Your average person probably wouldn't understand a single sentence in that last paragraph. But they probably wouldn't have understood the computer department staff at UCLA in 1969 or Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1991.
For each problem, there is a solution. It just requires some intelligence and work. It might be out of reach of the masses. But that's how the internet (and the subject of networked computing devices in general) was at the start.
My point is that it was very short time when open standards were popular.
I'm horrified at what people accept as "normal" now. I recently tried to have a club use a mailing list. I told them Google Groups would mean that having a Google account would be a requirement to join the group... "so?, they're free!"
They looked at me like I didn't understand what Google groups was.
It seems we're going back to a time when only geeks are on the Internet. Everyone else is in various marketing silos.