<story><title>A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet</title><url>https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-internet.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dash2</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them....
  As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate
  computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown
  too large to remove without killing the host. The technical
  flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world
  where middlemen business models thrive.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
The handwave is the word &amp;quot;prefigure&amp;quot;. How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? This is an analogy masquerading as an argument.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  It is not fundamentally necessary to have any intermediate 
  company profiting whenever a person reads news from their 
  friends, rents an apartment from a stranger, or orders a 
  ride from a driver.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
The author provides no evidence that the services of Airbnb, Uber etc. have no value added. These companies carefully designed interfaces to help us find what we need. If they did not add value, we would still be using newsgroups.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dTal</author><text>&amp;gt;How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera?&lt;p&gt;Very directly, I would say, by making the barrier to running your own low-traffic website too high. Modern social media is all about hosting content - microblogs, photos, etc. Geocities was an early workaround to an inability to host things, and it&amp;#x27;s worth remembering that MySpace was originally positioned as a kind of evolution of that with the social aspects bolted on - it (notoriously) allowed arbitrary HTML, so that you could make your own &amp;quot;homepage&amp;quot; on the internet. Facebook further evolved this, offering a much more restricted experience. Were it not for NAT, I would have expected an explosion in tiny self-hosted personal sites around the time that dialup was replaced by always-on cable connections, and before long we would probably have had various wordpress-like frameworks to do the social aspects. Which is not to say we wouldn&amp;#x27;t have eventually had a Facebook-like entity, but it would have faced much stiffer competition than it did, and people would perhaps have been less forgiving of its restrictions if they&amp;#x27;d had an easily-accessible wild-west to compare it to.</text></comment>
<story><title>A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet</title><url>https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-internet.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dash2</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them....
  As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate
  computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown
  too large to remove without killing the host. The technical
  flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world
  where middlemen business models thrive.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
The handwave is the word &amp;quot;prefigure&amp;quot;. How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? This is an analogy masquerading as an argument.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  It is not fundamentally necessary to have any intermediate 
  company profiting whenever a person reads news from their 
  friends, rents an apartment from a stranger, or orders a 
  ride from a driver.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
The author provides no evidence that the services of Airbnb, Uber etc. have no value added. These companies carefully designed interfaces to help us find what we need. If they did not add value, we would still be using newsgroups.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacquesm</author><text>&amp;gt; How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? This is an analogy masquerading as an argument.&lt;p&gt;Because it made peer-to-peer no longer an option. Keep in mind that NAT is a poor man&amp;#x27;s firewall and once NAT&amp;#x27;d systems were common peer-to-peer firewall transition became a real problem.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.fourmilab.ch&amp;#x2F;documents&amp;#x2F;digital-imprimatur&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.fourmilab.ch&amp;#x2F;documents&amp;#x2F;digital-imprimatur&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; (2003, still as relevant today as when it was written)</text></comment>