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.

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.

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: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.

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!

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: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: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: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.