[HN Gopher] The Privatized Internet Has Failed Us
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The Privatized Internet Has Failed Us
Author : hyperluz
Score : 76 points
Date : 2022-06-17 20:44 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slatereport.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slatereport.com)
| cyanydeez wrote:
| The privatized _____ has helped us.
|
| Mmmm
| iamdamian wrote:
| See also: Late capitalism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism
| [deleted]
| kristopolous wrote:
| The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield" is just false. As is
| the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack. It's uncited
| in the book, I've got a copy. That's because it's bullshit
|
| It was built by academics for tasks like remote timesharing.
|
| All the early nodes were at academic institutions. Exactly 0 were
| on military bases.
|
| The project goals, people involved, sites it was installed at,
| technologies built, all the founders, Cerf, Kahn, Taylor,
| Roberts, Linkletter - zero military people - 100% academics. None
| of this suggests military purpose
|
| It just doesn't
|
| Look at the abysmal security the network had. Do you think email,
| rcp, ftp and telnet was designed for military use?
|
| Anyone could just fraudulently send email as generalSmith@dod.mil
| in 1975 and you'd have no way of knowing if it was real.
|
| And then it would traverse in a totally nondeterministic
| completely unencrypted way over any machine that claims it can
| get it there. Designed for war?
|
| It was openly bridged to the Soviet research network through
| IIASA, you know, cause that's how cold war things happened - open
| door policy to the enemy
|
| Or what about the routing protocols where a rogue network switch
| could just announce itself and then start soliciting for traffic
| to pass through it.
|
| In 1997, a misbehaving router singlehandedly took down the net
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS_7007_incident ... Sure,
| designed for nuclear war.
|
| Look at DNS host transfer up to about 2002 - you could just query
| for all records dumping your entire network topology, to just
| anyone.
|
| Look at finger and the original whois, an email and personnel
| lookup tool. You could use it to get people's schedule, all the
| people who work under them, what they're doing, how to contact
| them, where they last logged in at
|
| There's zero security in any of these. The doors are unlocked and
| swinging open with a giant honking welcome sign blinking.
|
| Edit: Apparently reality is unpopular. I'm committed to reality
| far more than being popular. I don't care
| cfmcdonald wrote:
| > The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield" is just false
|
| It's actually true, more or less. Bob Kahn's initial motivation
| for thinking about internetworking was in order to connect
| PRNET[0], a packet radio network intended for possible field
| use by the Army (by using mobile trucks as stations), with the
| computing power in ARPANET.
|
| > As is the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack
|
| Yes, but I don't see that mentioned here.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRNET
| [deleted]
| jml7c5 wrote:
| This article was already sumitted here yesterday, where it
| garnered a lot of discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31773233
| hyperluz wrote:
| Searched for it before posting, but did't find it. Next time,
| will search with an external search engine.
|
| Edit: yesterday's OP used a highly modified title
| lmm wrote:
| They may well have used the original title and got edited by
| a mod.
| pvg wrote:
| That site looks like a content farm which might be root
| problem.
| jml7c5 wrote:
| It's a bit of an odd one to search for because both the title
| and site are different. I wouldn't have found the original
| either. (And, in fact, didn't! It was only because I knew the
| previous submission was to Jacobin that I could locate it.)
| jonas21 wrote:
| The site in today's submission seems to have copied the
| original article wholesale and slapped their own byline on
| it, along with a bunch of ads.
|
| The only credit to the original author is at the very
| bottom, and that's probably accidental (it was mixed in
| with the article content in the original).
| vt85 wrote:
| walrus01 wrote:
| What has failed us is putting people like Ajit Pai in charge of
| the FCC and the federal government trying to remove net
| neutrality.
|
| The economics textbook version of the term "regulatory capture"
| is what has failed us in the large telecom and large ISP
| industry.
|
| The private internet has failed us? No shit, maybe we shouldn't
| allow entities like the combined Centurylink/Level3 to acquire
| various mid sized players and reduce the market competition.
| Maybe we shouldn't allow Rogers and Shaw to merge in Canada.
| Things like that.
|
| Maybe when the US federal government hands out subsidy money to
| companies like Frontier and Verizon to build suburban and rural
| FTTH they should be held accountable when they just take the
| money and _don 't actually build the service promised_.
|
| Maybe people in their ordinary homes in ordinary neighborhoods
| should have better options than degraded DSL from the local
| "phone" company on 30 year old copper POTS lines or the near
| monopoly local Comcast DOCSIS3 coax cable service, squeezing
| every last dollar of ROI out of that legacy coax plant.
|
| bias/point of view: I do network engineering for a small/mid-size
| ISP that directly competes with the telecom dinosaurs.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| I feel like the federal government at large has failed us, due
| to financial conflicts of interest taking priority over
| everything
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Which is just privatization of X.
| [deleted]
| svachalek wrote:
| It's gotten really bad, and still seems to be accelerating in
| that direction. When government stops responding to voters,
| it's no longer a democracy (or democratically elected
| republic if you want to go there).
| rabuse wrote:
| We're shifting towards a feudalistic society.
| uoaei wrote:
| Call it corporatism, techno-/neo-feudalism.... Call it a
| mess.
|
| Make no mistake: these dominating and coercive structures
| and the natures of their functions are built with
| intention. In each example you will find expressions of
| capitalist ideology, namely, control and exploitation at
| the behest of the profit motive, as fundaments of their
| construction.
|
| This is not how government _ought_ to be, and I really
| hesitated before using that word because I don 't like to
| assert it lightly. Government is for governance -- in
| democracies and even democratic republics, it is _by
| definition_ a service for the people. The cost of those
| services, inasmuch as you can quantify a cost borne by _a
| sovereignty that manages its own fiat currency_ , cannot
| use the same language nor apparatuses as are applied "at
| the kitchen table" so to speak. That is ridiculous in the
| most spiritedly literal interpretation.
|
| Additionally, we know by now that optimizing for wealth
| re: quarterly profits does not mean optimizing for
| cultural/societal/civilizational longevity and
| sustainability. I have not yet seen a significant
| apologia regarding this basic fact. So clearly the
| incentives are wrong vs the stated justifications for the
| existence of governmental bodies. The fact that
| corporatists infiltrate sovereign governments to install
| or convert allies who manipulate public opinion and
| policy to produce such a narrative should be considered a
| political crisis second to none.
| usrn wrote:
| There isn't a single functioning agency of the federal
| government. The entire thing has been turned against the
| American people in order to serve these large corporations.
| gumby wrote:
| I think you're missing all the stuff that works, and thus
| isn't written about.
| Calamitous wrote:
| I'd be curious what stuff you feel works well, in the
| federal government?
|
| (I'm not being snarky, just genuinely curious)
| [deleted]
| Vladimof wrote:
| > What has failed us is putting people like Ajit Pai in charge
| of the FCC and the federal government trying to remove net
| neutrality.
|
| Net neutrality is good, but so far it hasn't fucked with us so
| I don't know what you are saying... What really messed up the
| internet/world is the centralization... Google, Facebook,
| etc... which allows them to control speech on a major scale.
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| As this article very aptly points out, "centralization" and
| it's counterpart, "decentralization" have very little to do
| with how, "free" a system is. Consider that when Standard Oil
| was broken up it became more powerful and as many small
| companies than one large megalith. I'm no fan of Google,
| Facebook, the like (..._) but it wasn't these institutions
| that failed us necessarily-- it was an uneducated and
| tasteless public which had demand for, "dopamine-rich" social
| experiences and a lack of insight into what the real causes
| of innovation have historically been that created the many-
| headed tech Hydra of the day. The present crisis is an
| educational and cultural crisis. The structural
| characteristics of institutions isn't the only determining
| factor in terms of how the public comes to participate in
| technology. It's actual marginal in the grand-scheme.
|
| tl;dr-- Freedom of Speech is stifled in the United States not
| because of tech companies but because of its toxic,
| unrectified post-Civil War culture where-in huge swaths (100
| millions) of people are systemically kept in cycles of social
| stagnancy as a result of the real realities of human life in
| post-industrial societies. We've chosen the Machine for
| ourselves and the desperation of Americans (you see it in the
| Trump people) is the manifest spirit of people caught in the
| teeth of the gears of history. What makes this so appalling
| to us is the almost religious belief that this is period of
| great historical exceptionality-- consider though that
| Caesar, Alexander, Hegel, and Napoleon also considered their
| time, "exceptional." Consider the October Revolution and
| Marx' historicism.
|
| Life is better than it's ever been. We're upset because out
| expectations are made artificially high by our own lack of
| historical prudence and a strange overabundance of
| imagination. The post-war culture lied to us and told us
| anything was possible. We're constantly traumatized by the
| fact that we're not living in a perfect world. Bless our
| little hearts.
|
| People like Ajit Pai are flies in the ointment. When the
| priests see what's happened they'll throw the whole jar away
| and I'm quite sure all the little flies will have learned
| their lesson; that is of course until they have the cunning
| to become wasps or dragonflies.
| walrus01 wrote:
| My semi-ranty post is more on the topic of actual large
| carriers/telcos/cable company/ILECs/last mile and middle mile
| ISPs. Although google has some last mile stuff through their
| acquisition of webpass they are not in the same market
| segment.
|
| There are definitely a whole lot of screwed up things going
| with walled garden social media platforms and centralization
| there as well.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > In his analysis of capitalist development, Karl Marx drew a
| distinction between the "formal" and "real" subsumption of labour
| by capital. In formal subsumption, an existing labour process
| remains intact, but is now performed on a capitalist basis. A
| peasant who used to grow his own food becomes a wage labourer on
| somebody else's farm. The way he works the land stays the same.
| In real subsumption, by contrast, the labour process is
| revolutionised to meet the requirements of capital. Formerly,
| capital inherited a process; now, it remakes the process. Our
| agricultural worker becomes integrated into the industrialised
| apparatus of the modern factory farm. The way he works completely
| changes: his daily rhythms bear little resemblance to those of
| his peasant predecessors. And the new arrangement is more
| profitable for the farm's owner, having been explicitly organised
| with that end in mind.
|
| > This is a useful lens for thinking about the evolution of the
| internet, and for understanding why the dot-coms didn't succeed.
| The internet of the mid-to-late 1990s was under private
| ownership, but it had not yet been optimised for profit. It
| retained too much of its old shape as a system designed for
| researchers, and this shape wasn't conducive to the new demands
| being placed on it. Formal subsumption had been achieved, in
| other words, but real subsumption remained elusive.
|
| > Accomplishing the latter would involve technical, social and
| economic developments that made it possible to construct new
| kinds of systems. These systems are the digital equivalents of
| the modern factory farm. They represent the long-sought solution
| to the problem that consumed and ultimately defeated the dot-com
| entrepreneurs: how to push privatisation up the stack. And eBay
| offered the first glimpse of what that solution looked like.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31784966
| [deleted]
| voz_ wrote:
| Is this that jacobin article again?
| wmf wrote:
| It's another review of the same book that Jacobin reviewed.
| gyre007 wrote:
| Strange, but if privatised internet has failed us, why is there a
| massive banner on top of the article?
| [deleted]
| ok123456 wrote:
| Didn't see it.
| [deleted]
| rank0 wrote:
| Nobody is going to run core internet infrastructure for free. The
| government can't even handle our current infrastructure of roads,
| bridges, electrical grids, and utilities. How on earth is the
| government supposed to operate as an ISP? We need better
| regulation, not public ownership.
|
| Or I guess we'll just tack on another Trillion dollars to our
| annual deficit...infinite government expansion/spending can solve
| every problem right?! /s
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I worked for a government telco and ISP, that serviced
| govenrment customers. At the time, our cost structure was about
| 30-40% less than an equivalent telco service.
|
| Once you get past the "derp, government dumb", the government
| has a lot of competitive advantages. Government entities have
| better ability to do capital spending as they aren't beholden
| to Wall St analysts, who hate capital.
|
| For an ISP, a .gov could bond out to build and contract private
| operators at a much lower cost than monopoly companies charge
| themselves internally.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The government can't even handle our current infrastructure
| of roads, bridges, electrical grids, and utilities.
|
| If they stop doing this today, because they're so bad at it,
| what system do you think would take roads, bridges, electrical
| grids, and utilities over, and would they do a better job or
| hasten us into libertarian Mad Max hell?
| seoaeu wrote:
| > The government can't even handle our current infrastructure
| of roads, bridges, electrical grids, and utilities.
|
| Other than the (private) electrical grid in California and the
| blunders in Texas, handling of the electrical grid has been
| pretty good. And despite all the complaining from government
| contractors who want more road/bridge repair funding sent their
| way, those things are honestly in pretty workable shape
| walrus01 wrote:
| there is a middle ground in between asking that the government
| run the internet, and allowing telecom behemoths to merge as
| they please and reduce consumer competition.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=largest+t...
|
| You can run a totally fine regional last mile ISP with 10, 15,
| or 50 FTE staff positions. Depending on your geographical
| scale. Or 500.
|
| You don't need to be a Comcast, Centurylink or Verizon sized
| monster.
|
| In fact some of the absolute best consumer-service quality 1GbE
| and 10GbE symmetric FTTH ISPs that I'm aware of are run by
| teams of less than 25 people in total. On a county sized scale.
| klipt wrote:
| You seem to be assuming government means federal, but local
| government is also government and there are many towns with
| municipal fiber their residents are happy with.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Yes consumer focused regulation to ensure net neutrality, ISPs
| not spying on you to sell data, and good value for money would
| be the solution IMO. You pay for broadband, the watchdog
| ensures that the monopolies are doing a good job.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > Nobody is going to run core internet infrastructure for free.
|
| Agreed. Is the domain name slatereport correlated with Slate,
| the news site, which seems to be historically very pro big
| government?
| shuntress wrote:
| Working for the public trust does not automatically make people
| incompetent. Publicly run projects have been run fine in the
| past with excellent results and there is no inherent flaw in
| the model that prevents public projects from succeeding.
|
| The "Deficit" boogeyman is a tired scare tactic. Spending money
| on things that are worth their cost is not bad.
| hitovst wrote:
| [deleted]
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| Great article. I like that it gets to the real meat-and-potatoes
| of what determines, "tech policy" in the United States. Moving
| forward it doesn't seem like a movement back to a, "science and
| research-first" communication architecture is really feasible but
| I think, considering that the real, "Internet" is just,
| "computers talking to each other" that there are going to be
| parallelized cultures existing on-top of the extent TCP/IP
| infrastructure that might be worthwhile.
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