A lot of people ask me why I haven’t updated yet. In fact, there are too many things happening recently, and in fact, every thing is worth writing an article, but every time I come to write, I feel that I have nothing to say, so I haven’t written it. I have been dragging and dragging for a long time, and now I am. And at one point I thought my account was going to be closed, but it turned out to be, so keep writing.

Keep writing about the Internet. In the last year or so, more than one prominent figure has said that the Internet has got it all wrong. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW, or Evan Williams, the founder of Twitter, should not be ignored, given that the WWW is almost one of the most important parts of how people use the Internet.

But for most people, the first question to ask should not be how to solve the problem that the Internet is wrong, but “What is wrong?” . It’s not surprising that most users don’t notice this problem. After all, the term Internet has changed so much over the years that people just start to feel something is wrong, and they don’t really feel the meaning of the change until today. The Internet we use today is very different than it was 10 years ago.

It’s easy to answer this question by thinking about how many Internet services (websites or apps) a typical user currently uses in a day. Most people would probably answer no more than 10, and despite all the apps on their phones, there are only a few that are frequently used. Americans are Google/Facebook/Amazon/Instagram… Chinese people are BAT series, wechat, Tmall, plus a Meituan. This is an almost synchronous global trend, with people using more and more centralized Internet services.

More than 10 years ago, Google became the center of the Internet, but the idea was to distribute traffic so that people could find what they needed and leave Google and go to other sites. Every big company that has sprung up in the years since Google has tried to keep users on their services for as long as possible and not go anywhere else. As they eat up more and more of their users’ time, they turn around and start eating the Internet. After the popularity of smart phones, this trend of centralization has developed faster. In addition to the concentration of traffic and time, the investment and merger in capital level have never stopped. All changes are in the direction of more centralization.

After the centralization of the Internet, the interests of users began to be violated. Content used to be all over the Internet. Finding it took a while, but killing it wasn’t easy either. Today, you turn to the circle of friends a Wang 54 article will know, within 10 minutes, there will be countless friends told “can not see”. In addition to removing articles “in accordance with laws and regulations,” a company can create countless reasons to remove content from its platform easily. In the past, content was in the hands of the creators themselves, and companies could not easily kill them. On the other hand, powers that used to be legal have now been delegated to corporations.

Companies don’t just control a post, they control data, and it’s user-generated data that doesn’t belong to them. As for apple’s recent app removal, we’re not going to discuss apple’s position on the matter, just the nature of it. In essence, Apple provides the device and the channel. The real buying relationship is between the end user (the person who uses the iPhone) and the developer (the person who makes the App). The Apple Store provides the channel. But the problem is that Apple is a company that can make a deal impossible with the full consent of the buyer and the seller. The end user is willing to pay, the developer is willing to give it away for free, but even if the buyer and the seller agree, as long as Apple doesn’t agree, the user doesn’t get the app, because the iPhone is a closed system, and there’s no way for the user to put the app on their phone except through the App Store. Enterprise deployment can solve a bit of the problem, but we won’t discuss that particular case here.

It is unprecedented in the history of computing, and perhaps even rare in the history of mankind, for one corporation to have so much power. Can you imagine in traditional times, you wanted to buy a pair of shoes from a shoemaker, but the store told you you couldn’t get them? Even considering the existence of chengguan, you and the shoemaker can find a private place to trade. On iOS, that’s not possible anymore.

In this era, enterprises have more and more power, but users have less and less power. Examples are everywhere. For example, users save a large amount of data in the network disk, which is created by the user. Theoretically, the user owns it, but if the account is blocked, the data is difficult to get back. There are many reasons for being blocked, some are probably reasonable, some are not, and some are wrong. But for whatever reason, no matter how infrequent it is, once it’s blocked, the data you created is gone.

More extreme examples are digital products after purchase. This is an era when people can easily buy music, movies, games and software online. Unlike in the past, users can’t own these products even though they pay for them. Even leaving aside the extreme case of an account closure, things can suddenly disappear, such as when the copyright holder withholds it and you may not be able to use it after buying it. As opposed to the traditional model, I bought a console cartridge and it was part of my sacred property. It was almost impossible to take it away, as long as it wasn’t physically damaged, I could play it forever, or give it to someone else, which is impossible in the digital age. No wonder so many people still collect old game cassettes, CDS and records, which they regard as solid and their own. If still created from the user whether to have their own data into consideration, these problems are the same, in the online purchase of digital version, create user data can be regarded as a money, they should have is private property, but in this day and age, enterprises through a variety of users have to abide by the user agreement, make the scope of the data from the user’s private property. Companies tell you that you are only buying the right to use it, so I have the right to ban you from using it in the future. The problem is that users don’t seem to be spending much less than they used to. Even if users are willing to pay more for a version that is truly theirs, companies often don’t offer this service, even though content creators are often willing to offer it as an option.

What is more serious than the digital assets that are traded with money is the data that users create while using the service. The sovereignty of this data is even more ambiguous. In theory, of course, it belongs to users, but in practice, users can’t access it, or even back it up. An intuitive example: Can you easily back up your moments? I know there are some sophisticated ways to do it by simulating wechat, but it’s hard for ordinary users to do it. The absurdity of this day and age is that you create your own data and end up having no control over it.

Tim Berners-Lee specifically pointed this out, arguing that users should own 100% of the data they create. Of course, it’s too hard to do. From the moment people put everything in the cloud, even when advertising became the norm, users were doomed to lose their data. As users’ data became the basis for profits, companies grew bigger and bigger, eliminating or acquiring peers or competitors that didn’t, and we finally came to this point. This is an era when users have given up almost all privacy and companies are doing everything they can to mine user data in order to sell more advertising.

“When I designed the WWW, it was a decentralized structure where everyone could build their own website,” berners-Lee said. “Now the Internet is centralized. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a social problem.” Indeed, that was the way the Internet went for a long time, until the last decade, when a confluence of factors conspired to make concentration faster and faster. Today, when it comes to building your own website, it sounds like someone who has stepped back in time. In China the trend is particularly obvious, given the record and a series of measures, the difficulty of building a web site, costs and risks are increasing, which has a simple microblogging or the public, even if to overcome these difficulties, traffic sources is also a problem, why spend so big strength, build a nobody see website? That’s how major platforms have brought content creators in, and the same thing is happening with the ecosystem Facebook has created.

At this point, companies can decide not just what people see, but how they see it in more subtle ways, and ultimately subtly change people’s attitudes about many things. Weibo changed the ranking, they were scolded badly, but they kept doing it, Facebook changed the ranking I don’t know how many times, I opened a Facebook page, it takes a long time to find out what is the latest news, everyone did the same thing. All businesses use algorithms to redistribute traffic and claim to be providing value to users. Is it really for users? For the sake of the user, I should at least be allowed to choose to restore the old sort, or even pay to choose the old natural sort. Unfortunately, they don’t. That’s what happens when data is monopolized. I’m willing to pay for it, but no one is willing to sell me what I need. Algorithms will continue to play a role in the future, with millions of machines collecting and calculating day and night, just selling more ads now, and god knows what will happen.

Zuckerberg insists that AI is harmless. Of course he insists that it is harmless. If it is, wouldn’t the biggest enemy of humanity be Facebook, the ambitious company with AI capabilities and tons of data? Kai-fu Lee also expressed his opinion, saying that human-like AI is just science fiction and will not happen in the near future. Yes, I agree that science fiction like Blade Runner in which machines generate human intelligence won’t come true for a while, but the book’s author, Philip. Dick also wrote another book called Minority Report, which is about what happens when humans master the ability to predict crime, which is also science fiction, but it’s almost true.

All of these, are from the user to give up their own interests began. Ordinary users, along with Internet companies and capital markets, have created the largest cage in history and managed to lock themselves in. From these historical developments, I agree that centralization is not a technical problem, it’s a social problem, and I believe that whether Tim Berners-Lee or Evan Williams, or Mozilla LABS… The decentralized Internet, which everyone is trying to invent to reverse all this, will not work because they will struggle to find a decent and essential application to support the system. After thinking about it, I think humanity’s last hope for getting out of all this is the most demonized of all dark web.

The dark Web is now described as a place where people who live in cities think the wilderness is full of danger. City people always say, don’t leave the city, you will be eaten by wolves in the wilderness. But in fact, today’s fully functional cities have evolved from the wilderness as well. There are no wolves in the city, but they are also full of dangers, and in many cases, people are more dangerous than wolves.

The dark Web is not as scary as legend has it, but the most successful application of decentralized networks. It is not a place of terror, but more like the Internet that was created by the original creators of the Internet. The history and evolution of the Dark Web is a long story that we’ll save for the next one.

Finally, on a side note, in addition to reading the article, you can also check out the comic book “The Mysterious Programmers” that Sijo and I created together. Many old readers presumably know this, but new readers don’t. Please scan the qr code below to see the cartoon.

Reference Note:

  • Image used under Standard license from Shutterstock.com Image used under Standard license from Shutterstock.com

  • What are you paying for “free” on the Internet?

  • Good news for the Internet, bad news for the Internet

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