How to fix the internet | MIT Technology Review

I generally agree with Notopoulos take on this, but I would clarify and extend a bit. In general, the explanation of "what is wrong" with the Internet is not much different than "what is wrong" with any large scale system or society. In a way, I don't know that we can anymore differentiate the Internet from society and culture. It is just another place that those things are expressed, no different than our physical places or the memes (to invoke the original Dawkins intent here) that exist in human societies. The internet is just us, and we are it.

I do disagree with the way that Notopoulos invokes the term "freedom" here. It is a bit of a nod to the Free Software Foundation idea of "free as in beer, not free as in speech". There is nothing wrong with an insistence on freedom in my view, but I do agree that the lack of commercial mechanisms is a problem.

The internet's original sin was an insistence on freedom: it was made to be free, in many senses of the word. The internet wasn't initially set up for profit; it grew out of a communications medium intended for the military and academics.

The issue with commercialism on the web is bigger than the article suggests though.

1. Yes, there was generally a push for free things and a non-commercial space. I think that was likely reinforced by the heavy academic hand in the early Internet.
2. It was also true that credit cards were not as dominant at that time, and the security of the web was terrible and it would have been a bad idea to type your credit card number into a browser.

So you combine a lack of desire to build financial capability into the core protocols, and a lack of security to make it work for people to put credit cards online, but a need and desire to build businesses and the answer is, drum roll, advertising!

When we think of what's most obviously broken about the internet--harassment and abuse; its role in the rise of political extremism, polarization, and the spread of misinformation; the harmful effects of Instagram on the mental health of teenage girls--the connection to advertising may not seem immediate. And in fact, advertising can sometimes have a mitigating effect: Coca-Cola doesn't want to run ads next to Nazis, so platforms develop mechanisms to keep them away.

But online advertising demands attention above all else, and it has ultimately enabled and nurtured all the worst of the worst kinds of stuff. Social platforms were incentivized to grow their user base and attract as many eyeballs as possible for as long as possible to serve ever more ads. Or, more accurately, to serve ever more you to advertisers. To accomplish this, the platforms have designed algorithms to keep us scrolling and clicking, the result of which has played into some of humanity's worst inclinations.

This broken economic system with a third party, the advertiser, paying for the service that you as a customer are enjoying does need to change.

Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and blogging pioneer who worked at SixApart, the company that developed the blog software Movable Type, remembers a backlash when his company started charging for its services in the mid-'00s. "People were like, 'You're charging money for something on the internet? That's disgusting!'" he told MIT Technology Review. "The shift from that to, like, If you're not paying for the product, you're the product… I think if we had come up with that phrase sooner, then the whole thing would have been different. The whole social media era would have been different."

Notopoulos suggests two solutions for making things better: paying for things you use and less centralization.

The part that she misses on the financial side is that we need something that removes big platforms from the economics too. This is where the beauty of a digital cash like Bitcoin Lightning opens up a world of options that are amazing. If we insist on non-digital cash, mediated by Visa and other private companies, we are ultimately going to limit our freedom in the speech version, not the beer one. See my Lightning: Fun, Fast, and Free-ish and Lightning Ideas for my thinking here.

On the big, I think that bringing economics to the Internet deeply, fundamentally into the protocols, is the cure for many ills. I keep thinking how much different (and better) email would be if there was a Lightning transaction required for every email. You could send 30 emails for one cent, not much. But it would radically redo how our mailboxes behave.

I agree as well regarding reduced centralization, but I think that isn't just about federation. I think that the tech community can do more here to create services that you pay for, and then help you build your own individual services to operate off of.