he open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.
Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.
Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that’s not good enough.
Now, the hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what’s still open, and likely won’t rest until they’ve either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.
I could see corporations take over the mainstream public web but the open networking tools will persist to create a new open web besides it.
If the “darkweb” does one thing very well its demonstrating how there will always be a way.
Yeah, the protocols that corporations and governments rely on were (mostly) not their own creations, and they cannot feasibly change the underlying TCP/IP stack itself, which has quite a lot of ‘grey space’ baked into it in terms of controlling traffic. Even China, whose government could much more realistically create another alternative model with a totally different protocols (a la DTNs) and mandate domestic equipment use them (enabling them to block the current suite of protocols), just haven’t even bothered attempting that route because of how huge a lift it would be.
The biggest danger is probably national boundary isolation, which countries have moved further and further towards. This is not actually all that rare, and countries have a lot more ability to control cross-border network traffic than people probably realize (most people probably envision something akin to The Great Firewall, but that is explicitly about still facilitating north/south traffic at-scale).
Totally discrete ‘mini internets’ via e.g. mesh networks or directional wireless P2P bridges is totally doable, but generally not a way to avoid government scrutiny as it’s very easy to detect. If we ever get to a point where you’re not subscribing to an ISP for internet, but to ‘Disney Network’, with just their services (and add-on bundles for other services!), it’ll be in conjunction with regulatory capture to help them ‘protect’ against pirate (as in, un-controlled by government, not as in copyrights) networks.