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."

Comments

Yep

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever something goes main stream, its only a matter of time until its cheap and ruined.

Re:Yep

[infolation]

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.

Re:Yep

[Rick Schumann]

I've been using Tor quite a bit for the last month, in an attempt to piss off Comcast, preventing them from collecting browsing data from me.
Tor has been more or less deprecated. You're solving captchas constantly because of Cloudflare, and everyone uses Cloudflare. Some sites deny you access of any kind, citing 'abuse', because you're on ANY Tor exit node. Some sites just plain won't work at all if you're on Tor (try ordering a pizza from Dominos; it redirects you endlessly back to their corporate site, you can't get to where you order a pizza, ever). Banking sites and utilities sites still work over Tor, but how long before they, too, start using Cloudflare, or just plain deny access because you're on a Tor exit node? I can't see paying for VPN as a viable alternative for privacy protection, because they'll all either end up treated like Tor, or they'll be the ones logging all your data instead of nosy ISPs, which defeats the entire purpose of it. Using anonymous proxy servers is a non-starter, because who knows who the hell is running those, and what sort of MitM attacks they might be perpetrating while you're using them?

Then there's what other commentors in this discussion are saying about so-called 'social media', mainly Facebook: it's the Leviathan of the Internet, and just as evil, sucking up all the data that people willingly provide it, and 'controlling the narrative' as much as it can get away with, meanwhile the world increasingly sees nothing wrong with 'requiring' you to have a Facebook account to do anything, and as one pointed out: Try convincing Immigration that you *don't* have any social media accounts, and see where THAT gets you..

I agree with Sunde; the Internet is horribly, fundamentally broken, because of what the corporate world and some governments have allowed to be done with it. It may in fact not be repairable and may need to be abandoned entirely. For at least a couple years now I've been slowly contemplating and devising an Exit Strategy from the Internet, as it becomes more and more a complete clusterfuck of a surveillance platform rather than a communication and data retrieval system. Tough, but leaving it behind could be done. The one problem you can't solve however is societal; you leave the Internet behind, you're going to be judged as a 'luddite' or 'anti-social', or in the case of people from my generation, 'too old to understand the Internet' or 'suffering from dementia' or somesuch nonsense, regardless of the fact that my work helps create the devices that everyone else is using to tether themselves to this worldwide surveillance platform. Meanwhile the vast majority of people are not only oblivious to what's going on, they're not capable of even comprehending it on a technical level if you try to explain it to them, their eyes glaze over, and at some point they just start talking to you like you're 'off your meds' and need to go see a shrink because you 'think everyone is out to get you'. What they don't realize is that the Internet *IS* out to get them -- and in fact already HAS them; they're stuck in the Matrix, and in many cases that's all they've ever known, so they don't even know the difference.

Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Answer

[Z00L00K]

Back to basics of CW communication on the HF bands.

Re:Answer

[tigersha]

> Without us, internet is just a shell with no participants

And without the large companies running the place, the network and the large websites the Internet would be nothing or some chaotic dump

Re: Answer

[Z00L00K]

Or Hellschreiber.

Re:Answer

[drinkypoo]

without the large companies running the place, the network and the large websites the Internet would be nothing or some chaotic dump

That's what it is now, and the only large entity upon which we really depend is google or similar to allow us to make some sense of it. It was actually possible to navigate the interwebs just with the Yahoo! directory back in the day, so I'd say it was actually less of a chaotic dump and made a lot more sense.

Then don't use Facebook

[SIGBUS]

Seriously, I've distrusted Facebook from the very start, and never will trust it. Given that Zuckerberg is on record as saying that anyone who trusts him is a fool, I'm going to work accordingly. I've got better things to do with my life then spend it tethered to bullshit.

Re:Then don't use Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

The overwhelming majority of people use Facebook. They don't give a shit about the ideals of freedom and decentralization. And they outnumber us hugely.

We can't "win" in an essentially democratic system wherein a tiny "we" is up against a massive horde of "them."

We get the Internet that They deserve.

That's all.

Re:Then don't use Facebook

[AHuxley]

A past generations introduction to the internet was FB. A newer generation only knows the internet as social media sites.
The rest of the internet is going the way of ftp, Veronica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., Jughead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., Archie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

Re:Then don't use Facebook

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

They don't really even need your name and personal info. Web sites report your IP and the shit you look at to central advertising computers that assemble a dossier of the types of things you would statistically be interested in buying, then sell that off ad space at an increased rate to particular products being advertised.

It's all automatic and doesn't need your name at all. A name or phone number lets them tie you together across multiple devices, and to a larger historic record of you-the-person, but just an IP is good enough for 90% of it.

Re: Then don't use Facebook

[KGIII]

I don't think that's true. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people do not use Facebook. There are more than seven billion people on the planet.

I, for one, don't use it. I don't believe I have ever made an account.

C'mon

[argStyopa]

Look, I've taken a fair amount of copyrighted content down the TPB myself.
There's no way in hell I'd have paid for most of it, so for the producers to cry that it's "lost revenue" is bullshit - if I'd even decided it was worth the trouble I'd have waited for Netflix or Hulu or Netflix DVD and watched it.

Further, I think the draconian copyright laws, and copyright ad eternium is ridiculous and frankly unconstitutional.

But for TPB to cry "we've lost the internet" is very much like Blackbeard crying "I've lost my freedom of the seas!" - true as far as it goes, but let's understand that your PRIME activity was copying crap that was for sale and essentially giving it away for free without authorization. You're not the "good guys" here.

Re:C'mon

[Jaden42]

I'm going to take a lot of heat for this unpopular opinion, probably, but since I visit this site less and less anyhow for various reasons I'll take the karma hit.

Do you also steal candy you don't like and eat it to only tell shop owners they didn't lose any revenue because you wouldn't have paid for it anyway since you figured it would suck and wouldn't have bought it anyhow? Is it ok to steal non-physical products because you can't feel them?

I am really sick and tired of this "it's not lost revenue because I didn't want it anyway" mentality. You downloaded content that was produced by someone and they expected to be paid for it. But you didn't want to pay for it. What you mean to say is "I didn't think it was worth giving my money to the producers/actors/musicians but I took the content anyway". It doesn't matter whether you think it was worth it or not; but they surely did.

I am no saint. I've used TPB and other trackers. But I'm not a fool who tries to convince the whole world that I wasn't stealing. I'm just adult enough to admit it.

Re:C'mon

[Anonymous Coward]

The candy analogy is broken, because the shop owner loses sellable candy whereas the content producer loses nothing.

Re:This guy is an educated idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

My data is not centralized, it is on my computer and nowhere else.

Bullshit. Unless you count "your data" as pictures of your cat, which nobody cares about. But data about your activities is tracked and traded. Have you ever bought something online? Have a Paypal account? Sent email to a company with email hosted by gmail (even if their domain was not gmail.com)? Ever visited a site with javascript enabled? Owned a smartphone? A thousand other things like those?

Then your data is harvested and traded as a commodity. It is not made obvious to you, but it happens.

But hey, out of sight, out of mind.

Re:This guy is an educated idiot.

[Gravis Zero]

My data is not centralized, it is on my computer and nowhere else.

This statement is a contradiction. If all your data is in one place then it's centralized, be it facebook or your own computer.

Ya I've never understood this Facebook paranoia

[Sycraft-fu]

It is not like it is mandatory, and I don't see it going that way either. I know a lot of people who use Facebook all the time, who are glued to it. I know a lot of people who use it occasionally but don't give much of a fuck. I know a lot of people that don't use it at all (I'm one of those). This spans all ages too. There is this false idea that every single younger person is glued to Facebook so in the future it'll be the only way to communicate. Nope. Plenty of our students don't give a fuck about FB, whereas others love it. Same shit with older people.

So far I've seen no indication that not using Facebook makes you an outcast, unable to get jobs, unable to travel, or anything like that. As such if you don't trust it, don't feel what you give up is worth it, or just plain don't care, then don't use it.

Re:Ya I've never understood this Facebook paranoia

[Anonymous Coward]

>not mandatory
But we're getting there.
I had to start a huge fight to be allowed to not be on Facebook for a required university course.
I can't contribute to a number of sites (e.g. addic7ed.com ) because they make it a requirement.
When US immigration asks for people's "social" accounts, do you think they will take "none" for an answer?

Re:Ya I've never understood this Facebook paranoia

[fph il quozientatore]

US immigration *does* ask for social accounts now. I just made an ESTA. And (for now) they take "none" as an answer.

Re:This guy is an educated idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

My data is not centralized, it is on my computer and NSA servers.

FTFY

It’s not an easy fix

[Picodon]

I tend to agree but it’s not easy to change. Technically, the internet (as I understand it) is just a bunch of interconnected networks, all sending and receiving data. By that standard, we should all be running our own little networks, complete with all the services that we need: DNS, AAA, mail, VoIP, VPN, web, etc., and also the applications that we want: media serving, short message (Tweet-style) publishing, etc. At that point, sites like YouTube or Twitter would only be used either as aggregators (specialised search engines and directories, finding stuff on our servers and linking to it) and as CDNs (for increased performance, if desired by us). The problem (as I see it) is that, instead, the internet has really become more like a giant local network: a bunch of pure clients (consumers) connected to servers (a.k.a. the cloud), with the peculiarity that those servers on the network are run by administrators that are unrelated to each other and to the clients, and who only have their own interest at heart.

To regain some freedom, people would need to be able to serve data freely and effectively. And, right now, most of them cannot, for various reasons:

• Their upload speed is abysmal.
• Their ISP abusively prohibits them from running a server. Any kind of server.
• Their ISP abusively denies them the most basic right of obtaining a static IP range. (And, along with hardware vendors, ISPs have historically contributed to making it near impossible by delaying support for IPv6. And even with IPv6, they have no interest in changing their practice and nobody says anything about it.)
• Their connectivity is not neutrally provided by a pure ”dumb pipe” utility that only competes (or is regulated) to provide the best transport possible for the lowest price, with some guarantee of service (as opposed to only a rather bogus “best effort” promise).
• They’re stymied by insecure standards (for example, mail) that allow malicious operators (for example, spammers) to operate and proliferate, which in turn may cause major operators to block traffic received from servers typically operated by individuals.
• They’re stymied by a dearth of standards that would address new needs (such as those covered by popular social media publishers) to be implemented in a distributed manner (network of independent servers, like the web, with third-party search providers bringing it all together), as opposed to a central service controlling and mining everyone.
• They’re not knowledgeable enough to setup and maintain a reliable and secure server. Not because they’re dumb (you can drive, but can you build an automobile?), but because the software is too hard to properly/securely use.
• They’re not willing to foot the hardware and electric bill, and low-cost low-energy servers are not widely marketed to the average consumer.
• High reliability and high availability are currently too difficult and costly to achieve in a consumer setup.

I don’t see this changing anytime soon, for several reasons:

• The infrastructure is seriously lacking.
• There is no incentive for commercial operators to invent and deploy standards, technology or services that effectively enable consumers to no longer depend on those operators for anything more than low-value service.
• Corporate operators are scared of consumers serving pirated data.
• Governments are not active in fostering open standards, and are mostly doing the bidding of major commercial operators.

Obvious

[Areyoukiddingme]

"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!

Ridiculous, hysterical nonsense.

[engineerErrant]

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.

Re:Ridiculous, hysterical nonsense.

[Powercntrl]

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.

Thanks to the will of the mob, rumors, misinformation, and sensationalized bullshit can spread faster, further and wider than ever. I'm sure the most brilliant minds believed giving the power of instantly networked information to everyone would lead to a new age of enlightenment, but you can't fight human nature. People prefer having their superstitions and incorrect beliefs reinforced, rather than challenged.

Today, we live in an age where pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo is placed on equal footing with real, established science. Where rumors and hearsay gain as much notoriety as researched fact. People can choose to believe that vaccines cause autism, GMO food contains toxins, and aspartame causes cancer - because that's what their friends on social media are sharing.

This Pirate Bay guy is correct that something has gone horribly wrong with the internet thanks to social media, but he may be pointing his finger at the wrong monster.

Re:This guy is an educated idiot.

[johannesg]

That's not 'insightful', that's autistic. The word "centralized" implies a single location for the data of all people, under the control of a single,powerful entity. His own data, on his own computer, is separate from the data of all the other people, and is therefore not centralized.

Anyway, what did mr. Sunde do himself to keep the internet decentralized? Did he, perhaps, build a protocol to have decentralized distribution of .torrent files (which would have been easy enough)? Nope, he set up a single, centralized webserver where he could gain ad revenue. From stealing other people's work, no less.

Re:Then don't use Facebook - the problem is

[hazardPPP]

I don't FB, lost my unused pswd 5-6 yrs ago so I Email my friends. Often its "I spend most of my time on FB and don't remember to check - why aren't you on line"? Ughhhh. It *IS* a problem

This. The only reason I joined FB was because I started missing out on the parties and meets ups. Why didn't anyone call or e-mail me? Oh, there was a Facebook event. WTF is a Facebook event? I left a couple of years later when I gladly traded less party invites for more sanity and privacy.

Also, consider bars and clubs. They used to have websites. Now they have Facebook pages. If they still have websites, it's a single page with a logo, address, and a link to their Facebook page. If my girlfriend didn't have Facebook, I would be at a loss as to where to go out on the weekend, since all information is on Facebook.

I absolutely *HATE* the way the internet has gone backwards. Sometimes I feel we've essentially abandoned the Web. The Web is supposed to be this open thing where everyone has an address and it points to your website that anyone with an internet connection can easily reach. Yet we've closed it all off into walled gardens. First it was the social media platforms, and then mobile made things worse with the invention of apps. Social media on a PC is still accessed via the browser, so it leaves the Web open to you...on a phone, you rarely have the need to open the browser. Paradoxically, it feels a little bit like the pre-internet days when using these services. Facebook and Twitter are the modern AOL and CompuServe.

Re: This guy is an educated idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. We are just seeing the inevitable consequence of the Eternal September.

Re:Then don't use Facebook - the problem is

[Dr. Evil]

Rewind to 2002 and people sounded like this:

The only reason I got online was because I started missing out on the parties and meets ups. Why didn't anyone call me? Oh, there was email. WTF is email? I shut down my connection years later when I gladly traded less party invites for more sanity and privacy.

Also, consider bars and clubs. They used to be in the newspaper. Now they have websites. If they're still in the newspaper, it's a single line with a link to their website. If my girlfriend wasn't on the Internet, we would be at a loss as to where to go out on the weekend. She tells me I'm an old man for phoning her or leaving a voicemail.

The time of popular open standards was short. ~2002-2006 RIP.

Before that, not everyone was online. After that, Facebook swallowed them.

Re:Then don't use Facebook - the problem is

[Zumbs]

There is a big difference: Choice.

Free email service were provided by many companies, and ISPs also often had email service as part of the subscription. On top of that you could create your own or buy access to an email service if you wanted. And best of all? Everything worked together, because the communication protocols were public and free.

Facebook is one company. You have to use Facebook to interface with all the goings on, because almost everyone else is using their closed (but free) platform.

Re:Then don't use Facebook - the problem is

[Dr. Evil]

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.