<story><title>Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/technology/facebook-government-regulations.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AlexandrB</author><text>I find that the headline and the article mischaracterizes what is happening. The &amp;quot;Wild Web&amp;quot; was reigned in long ago by commercial interests. A distributed web with many small nodes would still be hard to control and police effectively. However as much the web has been centralized by the likes of Google, Facebook, and large media conglomerates effective government censorship is once again possible.&lt;p&gt;This is like a wild meadow turning to a manicured lawn. The near-monoculture of the web will have a much harder time withstanding legal assault by state actors than a distributed web would have.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skybrian</author><text>The wild Internet is definitely still there. The problem is that it got too hostile for most users due to spam, viruses, malware, phishing, trolls, doxing, and so on. It will get worse, as attackers adopt machine learning techniques and automate social engineering at scale.&lt;p&gt;So users have a problem. Companies that solved it the right way became enormous, because protection from all that crap is something people want, and they want it to be easy to use. In the early days it was anti-spam (Gmail). More recently, Snapchat helped teens avoid creating a permanent record of things.&lt;p&gt;Sure, you can go outside the walls at any time, but how many people really want to? The way to win users is to provide better protection than before, including defenses against new privacy threats, not to somehow convince people they don&amp;#x27;t need to care about it.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes providing better protection results in more freedom (of a sort). For example, a well-maintained app store means users don&amp;#x27;t have to worry about malware and viruses, so they can download whatever games they want without worrying that they&amp;#x27;ll infect their machine. This wasn&amp;#x27;t true of Windows in the old days.&lt;p&gt;Ironically, the web started out pretty safe (or so we thought) and degraded as more adtech came along. These days you can hardly click on a link without getting ads in your face. There&amp;#x27;s opportunity for someone.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/technology/facebook-government-regulations.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AlexandrB</author><text>I find that the headline and the article mischaracterizes what is happening. The &amp;quot;Wild Web&amp;quot; was reigned in long ago by commercial interests. A distributed web with many small nodes would still be hard to control and police effectively. However as much the web has been centralized by the likes of Google, Facebook, and large media conglomerates effective government censorship is once again possible.&lt;p&gt;This is like a wild meadow turning to a manicured lawn. The near-monoculture of the web will have a much harder time withstanding legal assault by state actors than a distributed web would have.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justinmk</author><text>&amp;gt; A distributed web with many small nodes would still be hard to control and police effectively.&lt;p&gt;I would guess that today&amp;#x27;s distributed web (IPFS, etc.) has more content, and users, than the &amp;quot;wild web&amp;quot; of 1992 or whatever era you fondly recollect.&lt;p&gt;Yes, centralized players created tools that produced exponentially more content (and control). But it&amp;#x27;s lazy to blame that peripheral phenomenon for a perceived &amp;quot;loss&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The wild web still exists, and has the potential to grow (cf. Urbit). What&amp;#x27;s stopping it?</text></comment>