Advogato: About the future of the web.

Somebody on LinkedIn posed the following questions:

1. What would you like to change on the web?

2. What would you really want to keep?

3. What are the technological chances for internet?

4. What are the threats?

I had something to say about it, so I answered the questions. Ironically, if you read this, the response form was too fragile to accept my answer. Since I thought it was thought provoking and might be of interest here, I decided post here and link to it. As always: Flame On!

1. What would you like to change on the web?

I would like the web to be more robust. It is much too fragile. The transport (TCP/IP) is quite robust, standards compliant, etc. The stuff coming into browsers is beyond broken. It is most annoying that sites depend upon all kinds of arcane plugins and invasive client side scripting. I am constantly given the choice of either not viewing the site or allowing it to do what it likes in my browser. To work around these problems, we need a trust system (PKI or similar) that is inexpensive enough to be practical for use by everyone. We could then simply allow sites we can trust to go on about their business while blocking sites that cannot be trusted.

The web is crazy-slow. So are all the components. I have a 5Mbit connection and should see pages instantly appear. Instead, I can count five seconds between clicks half the time. The obvious thing to do is to create a dense programming language that server and client understand. This has been done a few times (Rebol comes to mind), but the purveyors all want to 'own' that network. The marketplace has rightly rejected that.

Java/AJAX/Web 2, etc. weenies would like to insist that they have the answer to the above. However, their solutions are frighteningly fragile, slow to the point of dysfunction, and by the time anyone finishes one of these projects the standard has been changed so old code does not work. It is to laugh.

Speaking of changing standards, somebody has to get the whole LAMP environment under control. Versions of Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Subversion, CMS systems like Joomla, Wikis of various stripes and many other applications keep breaking compatibility. They do this, in most cases, without letting the other code know. This is a chain. If I run Subversion with Apache (as many do); I should not be facing an upgrade to Apache to install a new version of Subversion. What actually *did* happen at one point was that the current version of Apache did NOT work with the current version of Subversion and people (like me) had to use unsanctioned builds of Apache modules to make this critical system work. [Subversion is a popular source-code control system. It is very bad if it breaks.]

I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the fact that everyone and his brother seems to think I want to be on his mailing list and I want to sign up for his site so I can view a page. What is the deal with that? Even large companies like IBM and Microsoft who should know better keep sending me stuff that I DO NOT WANT. They do this by making me opt into a mailing list whose name should be something like: 'a tiny number of important notifications that crucially affect your life, plus a TON of stuff we KNOW you would not accept otherwise'.

Once upon a time, people used 'handles' with wild abandon. They could post anonymously. I liked that. Sure, we had to put up with nonsense at times, but we would see stuff that could only be posted under a 'handle'. People could keep their privacy. The mechanisms (or at least the underlying technology) exist to allow people to both keep their privacy and still be 'known valid'. The people resisting this are mostly motivated by self-interest. They use your information for their personal gain. If they made it possible for you to withhold that information, they would lose money. They will not do it voluntarily. Informed 'netizens' should insist upon it.

BTW -- this is just a personal preference, but I would like the web to be less 'noisy' with cleaner pages that do not have their entire content on the first page along with moving graphics and flashing letters.

Bottom line:

I would like the web to stop breaking. It breaks more now than it ever did. I would like the web to be MUCH more efficient. I would like the web to be MUCH more secure. I would like the web to be MUCH more convenient. I would like the web to be MUCH more private. I would like the web to be more pleasant.

2. What would you really want to keep?

I REALLY, REALLY want to keep and enhance rights to freedom of speech, privacy, security of the person, etc. I also want to keep the ethic of freely sharing information so that people can collaborate without paying EvilBogusIPRightsCo for the pleasure.

I also 'rilly rilly', want to keep the robust nature of the transport and network 'ethos'. If we continue on that path, I expect we will have a virtually indestructible network.

I want to keep and accelerate convergence of media such as voice, music, video, etc. One network for all!

3. What are the technological chances for internet?

I am not sure what the above question means, but:

Opportunities The network could converge completely so that all forms of EM bandwidth such as radio, television, IR, etc and all forms of transport such as wire, network cabling, fiber-optic, etc. carry IP traffic. Breaking the EM spectrum into small enough cells could make transparent, ubiquitous, robust, high-speed transport possible. It would eventually mean you do not even have to carry a phone if you wish. You could just speak your request into the air and the network would make it happen.

Imagine:

"I need to get to Union Station" -- voice from the sky says, "I'm a cab nearby, would you like me to pick you up?"

"Joe, what was the name of that restaurant you mentioned?" -- Voice from the sky says -- "Joe said it was called Blue-Sky grill. It is five blocks away. The cabby passing by has said he will drop you there for free."

If the question means, "what are the odds it will go away"; I would say zero. Within a decade or two, the entire world will be so integrated with the network that shutting the network down would shut everything else down as well.

4. What are the threats?

The threats are very grave right now. As we speak, forces are gathering to gain complete control of the network. They have some probability of success. Unlike other times in history, once a despot takes control, there is no way to unseat them. With a wave of a hand, the ruler could shut off water, food, electricity, gas, oil, train service, highways and perhaps even the air you breathe. Oh, to make a point, they probably would leave communications on so that other potential revolutionaries can see what they are up against, but face it -- they could sure shut down your communications.

Unless we are vigilant, the system will be configured in such a way that the 'bad guys' will have complete control. Thus far, with the DMCA, the Patriot Act, Black Box Voting (and associated 'irregularities'), Carnivore, take-down notices, unlawful copyright extensions, unlawful software patents, the RIAA, Google censoring searches (for China), 'Trusted' Root certificates only owned by entities with fundamental conflicts of interest (and by the LAST people I would trust with my wallet), uh -- etc. I would say that we have decidedly NOT been vigilant.

As a tactical matter, current vested interests -- phone companies, network companies, media companies, etc -- all bandwidth 'owners' are doing their level best to confound convergence and/or extend their control over converged networks. It is a mess, it is bad, it is costly and it benefits only a vanishingly small number of people at enormous expense to the rest of us. Convergence will happen, but its ownership and control could become a very ugly thing indeed. Meantime, a convergence that would take about 18 months start to finish to the benefit of everyone is taking literally decades.

Unless the first part of this section did not make it clear, there is a very real physical threat to health and safety if control of networks fall into the wrong hands. Eventually, everything will be tied into the network. Something as mundane as a light switch could become deadly.

There is also a rather odd negative effect happening that will be accelerated with the converging network. People are losing their literacy. It is happening piece-meal, so it does not seem so alarming. Widespread literacy in languages such as Latin and ancient Greek is vanishing. Artisan skills are vanishing. The generations born in the 20th century are dying off. As they do, their skills, and much of their knowledge will go with them. In a world where computer interaction is done with spoken languages, gestures and even implicitly without communication at all, what will happen to keyboarding, handwriting or reading?

There is a danger that as machinery (amplified to ungodly heights by network effects) begins to take everything over that our skills will atrophy. There is, in turn, a danger that people will become more specialized to the detriment of general knowledge and skills. How much social cohesion is afforded by common understanding of language, arts and science? What will happen socially as people come to have less in common with each other and more in common with their prosthetics?

There is a very real danger that as our machines become more powerful and we more dependant upon them that we will eventually become slaves to the machines. Arguably, my wife's Blackberry is the senior partner in their relationship already. It tells her where to be and when to be there and she does it. It has more success with that than I do.