We're basically opposed to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet

We have "too-big-to-fail" companies running all of the services that most sites and users depend on, which they can shut down at any time with little-to-no repercussions (Google in particular is notorious for this). We've got governments erecting their own firewalls to shut down opposing views. We've got ads, trackers, and biased algorithms that help ensure you stumble upon their sponsored content.

Of course this sort of stuff should arise "naturally" by man, but we can do better.

There's no such thing as "Too Big To Fail" on the internet. There was a period of time during the earlier days when infrastructure was centralized but those days are behind us I've read, and if one major backbone provider were to fail the system could adapt.

SaaS providers like Google and Facebook don't matter at all. Their importance has been exaggerated to epic proportions. If Google/Alphabet were to fail tomorrow the Internet would barely notice outside of social conversation. It'd be a curiosity, but the system would adapt. "Some People" might be without E-mail for a few hours, and a lot of E-mail providers would see surges in sales.

We can help encourage the survivability by teaching new users of alternatives for search, blogging, following friends and so on.

A large part of the internet economy operates on the assumptions that services like AWS and Google and Facebook remain available. Businesses are built on top of these services, and it's not clear that other SaaS providers could fill the gaps, were the big guns to fail.

Tens of thousands of businesses would lose their primary source of income (google ads). Tens of thousands of businesses would lose their workplace services (G Suite). Analytics systems that are running 24/7 for multibillion dollar corporations would shut down. Who has the capability to fill that void? Millions of creators would lose their platform (Youtube)

You can definitely claim that "Too Big To Fail" is not a true concept, but the significance of the failure is not to be taken lightly.

businesses fail all the time. The market adapts, what makes the internet any different?

Advertising is dead, so if your revenue is 100% ad based start looking for new models before it dries up.

Advertising is dead? Come on "<x> is dead" gets said all the time about a wide range of subjects and is almost universally bullshit. If advertising is dead why are companies still shelling out millions for 30 second TV spots during the super bowl? How are some kids are paying off their student loans by making YouTube videos? I agree that a revenue model that's based on advertising needs to be thought long and hard about, but 'dead' -- nah. I doubt that advertising will ever truly die, unfortunately they've figured out how to hack human brains and emotions with it.

"If advertising is dead why are companies still shelling out millions"

Think of it like a sponge, the water the sponge soaked up is money. Those companies are trying to wring out the last drops of water. Some people think the water will go on forever but those people are short-sighted and often greedy, at least in my limited experience.

I've been saying advertising is dead for a couple years now, and my prediction is usually met with hostility. My observation is based on the business trends of newspapers. What used to be a solid marketplace is now one of the most difficult to survive in, because the only model that really works is subscription and nobody wants to subscribe when the news can be found for free elsewhere.

The last year or two showed us desparation tactics like using Javascript tricks to yell at consumers for having ad-blockers installed. Business psychology experts have confirmed this is a terribly stupid approach to customer service, and I think it's safe to say if those site operators were not desparate for revenue they never would have gone that route.

We can also conclude that Ad blockers aren't going away. They're getting smarter and more commonplace. The ability to filter out the data we receive from outside sources is one of the most powerful things that technology allows us. People hate ads. I forget who said that, but they pointed to the success of technologies like Tivo, and I would also say look at how pirated television is very popular, one common trait about pirated TV is the ads are removed.

The conclusion is obvious, if you're paying attention. Advertising is dead. That is not to say you can't make a few bucks from it still, but it's an advance warning to start thinking about other revenue models. Businesses will always need to advertise, but The New Market Order will see free advertising opportunities replacing paid advertising. Why should a business owner waste money on ads that nobody will see and thanks to ad-hostile plugins like Ad Nauseum, analytics can't accurately report results for, when they can get better results from social media engagement which costs nothing?

I apologize for not citing my sources but I don't have the time to spend looking up things I've read for the past several years.

>There's no such thing as "Too Big To Fail" on the internet.

The article doesn't say that Google et al are too big to fail. It says they have entirely too much power over internet user's experience and are misusing it in many ways.

>We can help encourage the survivability by teaching new users of alternatives for search, blogging, following friends and so on.

Really? So you and some other people will somehow contact the millions of new users that come online each year and persuade them to stay from Facebook?

"Really? So you and some other people"

Are you unwilling to participate?

"will somehow contact the millions of new users that come online each year and persuade them to"

That's literally how the internet exploded, why can't the same process work for improving people's ability to use it to serve their best interests. The process is helped along by certain public organizations like the EFF or celebrities like R. Stallman encouraging people to move away from corporate controls.

The greatest feature of the internet is decentralization. Facebook and Google aren't going to change that, even tho every corporation would like to. As long as we don't fall asleep at the wheel as users.

I didn't think banks could be too big to fail.

Where exactly would handle, say, just the email? American legislatures would pass their first bipartisan business legislation by the day's end.

You can teach all you want to, but the PHB's with the money and power will overrule any moral high ground you're sitting on.

"Where exactly would handle, say, just the email?"

Don't take personal offense, the idea that you need some corporation to handle your E-mail is an ignorance, one that's reinforced by those very corporations' marketing departments.

I've been operating my own E-mail servers for two different domains for pennies per day for years now. It's cheap, it's (relatively) easy, and it's _better_ when you control it yourself. If Gmail were to fail, it would be one of the best things to happen to the world economy.

"The Web" is commonly understood to be HTTP on top of DNS. These are centralized protocols, in that each resource name entirely depends on a single entity to serve/steward that resource.

HTTP on top of TCP, with DNS (also on TCP/UDP) used for resolving domain names.

TCP isn't involved in naming; HTTP and DNS (or worse, IP) are.

All they were saying is that TCP and UDP are the transport protocols that DNS uses, not that they're directly involved in name resolution.

If net neutrality dies, the web absolutely becomes centralized. Facebook and Google aren't the web, but they will be the web if they're the only ones that can pay to have their data passed over the wire.

Net neutrality would be nice to have, but the way it's been overhyped is silly. The internet developed without it. We've never really had it -- people like to cite a few years before the recent FCC decision as a period of net neutrality, but it had so few effects that the average consumer did not notice it being implemented and did not notice it going away. It certainly didn't prevent anything Google or Facebook wanted to do.

If you're worried about centralization, net neutrality won't help much. Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality.

>The internet developed without it. We've never really had it

We did have it. Defacto net neutrality, enforced by a competetive ISP market. It worked. And once we started to lose that, consumers absolutely did feel the impact. Remember when Comcast throttled bit torrent?

>If you're worried about centralization, net neutrality won't help much. Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality.

Sure, they can still dominate under net neutrality. It's just significantly easier without it.

The Net Neutrality law that was pushed recently did nothing for actual net neutrality, which was already preserved by existing legislation.

Also, if these laws were so obviously needed, why did they need to shovel $196M toward promoting them [0]?

0: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/soros-ford-foundation-sho...

>...a few years before the recent FCC decision as a period of net neutrality, but it had so few effects that the average consumer did not notice it being implemented.

The whole point of net neutrality is that you shouldn't notice it, because you should just be able to use your network connection for whatever you want.

In 2005 a Republican appointed FCC commissioner under a Republican president ordered an ISP to stop blocking VOIP services on their network. This is a real thing that happened and I think plenty of people have noticed how useful VOIP and related services like Skype, Facetime, Hangouts, Discord are even if they aren't aware that the ability to use them has only been enabled by regulatory intervention.

If that's the case I was thinking of, that was a single regional ISP in North Carolina. VOIP would have happened anyway.

One of the original reasons that Bittorrent clients started sending encrypted data was to get around ISP packet inspection that tried to throttle torrents. That worked for a while, until ISPs started throttling based on torrent-like transfer patterns.

That wasn't a single regional ISP; it was a pretty common behavior. It's also something that would be fixed by either having a range of different ISPs available in a region, or enforcing net neutrality (in the sense of treating data as an opaque payload to be delivered).

> Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality.

"crowd out" is a vague term. Maybe they make the most money, but money isn't the only thing that matters. The forums I frequent and the DuckDuckGo are doing just fine, but I'm not sure they would be if net neutrality falls apart completely.

I'm in full support of net neutrality (as it seems everyone but the telecom companies is yet here we are, but I digress) but I like to think if this "doomsday" scenario were to happen then the outcry would finally be swift and effective in tearing that down for good. People won't accept it because they have already experienced what the open web can be.

The internet is communication technology, and communication technology is network-effect-heavy. The value of "The Web" and "The Internet" is more than proportional to the number of people using it. Email is useful only when the person you are messaging has email.

So... If much of the web (by usage) exists on Facebook, much of its value exists on Facebook. That value is under Facebook's control, logorithmically to scale.

>much of its value exists on Facebook

This depends on how you define value. If you're talking about advertising revenue, then yes (and bizarrely other services let you authenticate through them, which I still don't understand). But if you're talking about the exchange of practical information, then Facebook's pretty meager and sites with technical documentation or Q&A are much better (for software developers, anyway).

I don't believe network effect is one-size-fits-all. Facebook is fine for keeping up with casual acquaintances. But if you want to find a local group with shared interests, then you may have better luck on Meetup. Or if you want to share Q&A with other developers, Stack Overflow is probably better. Each one has its own domain within which it's king.

I've found a lot of technical documentation on people's personal blogs. Some bit of code they wrote or some problem they solved. We can socially encourage this kind of approach.

Yep, that's great too. There is a challenge there, which is finding that information on personal blogs in the first place. That's been solved with search engines so far. I'm curious if a more distributed, network-oriented approach might work. Basically the Bacon number applied to information.

If people have a means to extract their Facebook posts and publish their content on their own blogs, then that value isn't really under Facebook control. It's a symbiotic relationship, and it's a safe bet that if Facebook were to make the wrong moves, the users would simply leave. Indeed that's been happening in recent months over privacy concerns and other things.

If consumer use of the web focuses on a handful of sites, then, effectively, the web is centralized. At least with regard to the article.

How to improve/fix? Some random thoughts I have had of late:

• Disallow comments on YouTube. What honestly would we lose?

• Users can delete their Facebook accounts (I did)

If we would think in terms of regular, non tech-savvy consumers, it is true, they are pretty much synonyms of the internet. Google is especially ubiquitous in this regard and reminds me a Microsoft in pre-firefox age.

If we think of it, the amount of lockdown to google is scary - it's browser, search, mail, navigation, advertisement, all photos and documents and now with AMP to a certain degree the web content itself.

If you ask them to describe the world with their own vocabularies, then yes, those things are "the internet". But if you take away the rest of the internet, these users will absolutely notice, even if they might struggle to correctly articulate what happened.

That's not true. Large percentages of websites run on AWS hardware and a small number of big CDN providers. It is centralized.

An ecosystem needs to reach a minimum threshold to thrive. I don’t know if a web without both companies would meet that requirement.