I think the main advantage we have today is the hindsight of the past 25+ years.
>What would be different this time around if we started from scratch?
I think instead of one big Internet we'd build a bunch of smaller, trusted intranets, and provide controlled access via something like a web-of-trust system.
>You can't expect every person to be skilled enough (and with the time and desire) to be their own network administrator
It's up to your tribe/family/community to have its own networking person, and you can compensate any way that's agreeable to you.
Just like it's smart to have your own doctor and mechanic in the family, you should also have your own networking and computers person you can trust.
Many people complain about family coming to them for computer help and suggest that they should go to a "professional". I think this is an insensitve and unempathetic point of view. Where else would they go? Who else can be trusted to help them except you?
No, it's up to us to take care of all whom we care about, because no one else out there will do it for us. And if you shy away from this responsibility, your punishment will be watching family members get taken advantage of.
There are food reasons people get tired of supporting their tribe or family’s IT infrastructure:
1. What we are supporting is often badly designed for individuals and so we’re doing mindless make work to overcome problems cause by corporations. I.e. we are experiencing an externality that a corporation is profiting from.
2. It’s often not reciprocated. Many people have no problem letting someone spend hours fixing a messed up computer, but won’t think to do anything in return. This isn’t universal, I have family members who are very appreciative and will make me dinner, or otherwise value what I’m doing for them, but ‘tribe members’ often just take it for granted that it’s ok for them to just lean on people helplessly for support.
3. Similar to 2. A lot of people keep doing stuff that causes them problems and won’t follow advice that would prevent this. My experience is that it’s the same people who take the help for granted.
I agree that it’s our responsibility to help, but it’s not our responsibility to be enablers.
These are real problems that need to be addressed in order to make tribe technology sustainable.
The last time it could have been possible, with tremendous effort, to divert things such that the Internet didn't become the Network and something else did, would have been around 1990.
That's the point where JIPS happens. Up until then, the US has a lot of IP networking, but some other rich industrialised countries have the ITU's X.25 networking. The ITU in some sense are a logical place to look for the beginning of this Network because they oversaw technological development for its predecessor, the Public Switched Telephone Network.
Anyway in the UK they have some X.25 but people are interested in this American IP stuff, so they agree to offer establishments with X.25 access to IP as well starting January 1991, in a programme called JIPS (the JaNET IP Service). JIPS is an enormous success, everybody loves IP and soon it is apparent that the future is IP not X.25. Game over, the Internet becomes inevitable at that point.
Now, I care also about the last mile, "phase I delivery of the Network" meaning that ordinary citizens in most of the world have access to the Network. No iterations of the Network have been truly universally accessible. Even for the oldest (the global postal network agreed in Bern in 1874) you need at least literacy, a taught skill not truly accessible to every person. But we can get very close, and it took several more years for the Internet to do that.
It takes time for bureaucracy to take over. Think of the natural cycle of a startup becoming an enterprise, a niche shop becoming a large chain.
Why would this new internetwork have to be made available to "those people". This comment seems to reframe the article's implicit "call to action" to a new set of constraints. It presupposes that an internetwork can only be created when it exists for commercial exploitation of its users, despite the author's example of a popular peer-to-peer network that generally has never been used as such, not to mention the "Internet" we are now using was not created for that purpose. (commercial exploitation)
It is curious this fascination with the definition of an internetwork as one that must mirror the present one and include amongst its users unskilled persons with no time or desire to learn how to use it but with money and a willingness (maybe even a forced necessity) to pay others to help them.
I wonder if there has ever existed a internetwork used only by skilled persons with time and desire to learn to use it, and not seeking to be compensated for the time they spent learning and the skills they developed as a result. If not, perhaps there will be.
This article seems to be a call to action, and it doesn't make sense to ask for something if it already exists.
Regarding creation of new networks, it seems your issue with this article applies more to this internet we are using right now. The one that you imply may have non-technical users reading about creating new networks for "technical" ones.
Yes, this article is not addressed to non-technical readers, but my interpretation is that they are wanting technical people to create this "new internet" for the masses.
I think the issue you have is more with the internet ("Internet", capital "I") we are using right now, which is dominated by a www "for the masses" and "content" like this blog. The Internet allows and encourages the type of senseless "content" you are criticising. New networks do not have to be "for the masses", or dominated by a www, their creation and administration does not have to itself be a commercial enterprise, nor do these networks have to be open for commercial use.
IMO, it is the "for the masses" and "open for commercial use" characteristics of this Internet that lead to blog articles like this one. The blog entry is arguably just a means of steering readers to a website, mentioned at the end of the article, that purports to offer training courses to aspiring "revolutionaries".
decentralized PKI, decentralized DNS are part of the ticket.
The other aspect is a monetization scheme at the transport layer to enable ideas like "Web Monetization" https://webmonetization.org/
Diode has implemented both - it has a full deployed decentralized PKI and DNS, has mapped Web2 domains to dDNS (BNS), monetizes infrastructure at the bandwidth level, and is making other strides on the application front.
Check out the Diode dDNS / BNS: https://diode.io/prenet/#/dns
You can't expect every person to be skilled enough (and with the time and desire) to be their own network administrator, so someone will have to run the network for those people... and they will need to be compensated for that work... and some people will be really good at running that network, and will have lots of clients and get very efficient at running networks, so more people will hire them.... and they will get big enough to hire people and pay for laying cables between networks... and suddenly we have the exact same system we have now.
What would be different this time around if we started from scratch?