DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification - Cory Doctorow
www.youtube.com
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things b...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344

The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn’t have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don’t have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!

  • rickdg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    432·
    2 years ago

    The internet will always have many niche places, but overall it can’t escape late stage capitalism.

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 years ago

      Big tech has really ruined what we all thought the internet would be

      I remember when the Internet first came out in the '90s, you would occasionally read someone talking about how when radio and TV first started they were pretty cool and wide-open as well, but they gradually got taken over by large corporate interests and played/showed a lot of trash filled with advertisements.

    • clutchmatic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      The ideal internet was open and free if you could pay hosting and bandwidth costs - generally those who were associated with universities could

  • lloram239@feddit.deEnglish
    212·
    2 years ago

    Antitrust and privacy regulations are all nice and good, but I think the core problems of the Internet is a technical one: We don’t have peer to peer connectivity on the Internet anymore.

    The whole reason for the Internet to exists in the first place was to connect computers, but for whatever reason, that feature of the net never made it down to the average user. Dynamic IP addresses means you can’t find anybody and firewalls/NAT means you can’t connect to them even if you do. Even trivial tasks like copying a file from one computer to another have no standard solution on the Internet. This means everybody is forced to services like GoogleDrive or Dropbox as an intermediate. Same is true for chat, video calls and so on. Everything has to go through another service to be usable. The majority of those services don’t even use standard protocols, lock the user in, which in turn empowers them to use enshittification.

    Until peer to peer connectivity is solved I have little hope for the Internet to get better.

    • vic_rattlehead@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      If someone wants to host something, NAT won’t stop them. IMO the bigger problem is that most folks have neither time, skill, nor interest to make p2p a reality. I’m a pretty savvy admin, host a lot of services for myself and family, but I don’t pretend to be good enough or vigilant enough to run anything public, i.e. mail server, lemmy server, etc, without major security concerns.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      Part of it is the war between security and privacy vs open architecture. The moment you leave your car unlocked some creep will rob you.

  • ashtefere@lemmy.worldEnglish
    152·
    2 years ago

    We need more than this.

    We need a way to make sure that the internet can’t be owned, physically.

    We need some kind of easy to use and fast and robust open source alternate internet that we can all use.

    Something that somehow costs nothing to run, that has enough storage and bandwidth for everyone and everything.

    Something that has interoperability built in. Every platform should confirm to openid or openauth or activitypub or something like that.

    And you know what? we have the technology!

    We all have spare devices lying around. Old PC’s, old laptops, old phones - they could all be running some kind of node in a distributed platform of some kind of open source AWS equivalent, and let anyone host anything and post anything without getting ad-raped or data stolen.

    It’s a pipe dream of mine, and I’m sure others… but with a will and a movement we could just take it all back, all at once.

    • Rouxibeau@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      and let anyone host anything

      That’s how they’ll spin the legislation to ban it:

      Pedophiles and terrorists use that service!

      Side note – I wanted to use ‘X’ instead as a variable above, but Musk ruined that.

      • lloram239@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        That’s why you need digital signatures and authorship tracking. Copyright just by itself would already put an end to every P2P alternative or at least stop it from ever gaining any mass traction. On the other side if everybody put a digital signature under their published work, others could mirror it without themselves becoming responsible and you could have take downs of objectionable material via blacklists.

        So far very few of the P2P alternatives implement anything like that and even those that do just have arbitrary accounts that don’t link back to any real person.

        This of course goes against the whole anonymity and privacy focus that has been predominant in this field for the last 20 years. But if we actually want a real alternative to the Web, not just some toy app with a dozen users, I think it’s the only way to go. And of course you could also have a layer of indirection in there to provide some anonymity or pseudonymity, so it’s not like those things would be impossible, just reduced.

  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    2 years ago

    That was such a great video. I highly recommend everybody listen to it (there is no visual presentation so listening is enough). Great content, great delivery.

  • los_chill@programming.devEnglish
    101·
    2 years ago

    While I don’t know how well it will work, nor if the implementation is even fully possible, I like the idea of Yep.

  • Touching_Grass@lemmy.worldEnglish
    93·
    2 years ago

    To stop enshitification we have to kill all advertising and marketing of products online. Make the net as hostile as possible to people trying to capitalize on it.

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    2 years ago

    Just get people out of the equation if you want to stop this pattern.

    Seriously though, this is how every industry has developed throughout history.

    • Barack_Embalmer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      2 years ago

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      →If➡️ I 👁️ ever see👀 another🫴 🍑emojee💯 I’m ⏰gonna🪬 💦💦💦 🍆 ⚰️ 🚾 ⚠️ ☯️🅱️ 😎😎😎