Comment by tivert

Comment by tivert 8 days ago

4 replies

>> The Internet has never been less free and open than it is today.

> In what ways?

In the past the internet was a collection of a multitude of relatively open and decentralized sites. Now, it's utterly dominated by a few large platforms, frequently focused on exploiting user data to the fullest. Everything else is pretty marginal.

psd1 8 days ago

They're are at least two different lenses looking at "the internet" ITT.

I don't see how Mozilla could have shifted the needle on the rise of big web properties. In fact, I want a browser to be completely agnostic, so if Mozilla had, e.g., prevented the rise of Facebook, then I'd probably conclude that they were anti-open.

What I do want is web standards. IE built its moat, partly, by breaking standards. To be charitable, perhaps standards were moving too slowly.

The sane thing is ming again with chrome. Now, by my choice not to use a chrome engine, i have patches of nonfunctionality. I feel like we've been trojan'd.

  • frenchy 8 days ago

    Standards are great, in theory, but a standards group can easily be co-opted by throwing enough people and money at it. That's basically what happened with DRM.

    • mmooss 8 days ago

      > a standards group can easily be co-opted by throwing enough people and money at it.

      The word 'easily' does a lot of work there. How easy? Many standards work well. The Internet, an incredibly successful engineering project, is built on standards.

pjmlp 8 days ago

We are back to MSN, Compuserve and AOL days, before Internet became widespread.

Apparently centralization is what most regular folks rather adopt.