Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

Discussed at the time:<p><i>Keep the Internet free and open</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4863009" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4863009</a> - Dec 2012 (18 comments)

Now, I guess the Internet is &quot;free and open&quot;... as long as you use Chrome.<p>There&#x27;s an interesting comment from the linked 10-year-old discussion that suggests Google have actually changed the article to static HTML from what may have been an SPA at the time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4864426" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4864426</a>

Vint Cerf was right. The internet is dead. What we have now is the splinternet, where a lot of countries have giant Galapagos intranets.<p>We can all thank China and Cisco with the innovation of The Great Firewall for this

Vint Cerf... drinking his own cool aid. Pure propaganda. Centrality can never do what he said. Using a centralized system in a decentralized and free way is bad systems strategy. Why not design for what we actually want rather than try to repurpose a system voted-up artificially by the US Department of Defense?<p>But we hacked ourselves. I still wonder what the world would be today if we had RINA from the start. Then even one word of that could be true:<p>&quot;Our protocols were designed to make the networks of the Internet non-proprietary and interoperable. They avoided “lock-in,” and allowed for contributions from many sources. This openness is why the Internet creates so much value today. Because it is borderless and belongs to everyone, it has brought unprecedented freedoms to billions of people worldwide: the freedom to create and innovate, to organize and influence, to speak and be heard.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Recursive_Internetwork_Architecture" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Recursive_Internetwork_Archite...</a>

“Free and open” is all well and good as long as everyone is super nice. But the people preaching freeness and openness are most often the bad guys. It’s a notion that can easily be abused to pitch totalitarianism to the disempowered because it seems like a good idea in principle, but the world has existing power structures. If you take the state now as “free and open” and attempt to preserve it, you cement those power structures in place.

O Google

How the mighty have fallen eh