beth (defunct)

Forbidding participation by businesses and favoring educational institutions and individuals/collectives maybe? Or is that just the web and not the net. Maybe I'm misunderstanding

through public library systems build local community managed nodes where local users as a collective consent to the traffic that goes through it. public terminals at library branches everywhere (including just bringing back the phone booth except its a library terminal for when you are out and just want one thing) free of use and with assistance available; the collective has a licensing process to add private terminals for individuals which is a shall-issue process based on just promising that youre not gonna dick with the network on purpose.

not that i regularly think about exactly this kind of thing, or anything 👀

in some way or another, prevent the development of profitable enterprises based on providing that content, or introducing consumers for that content

nationalize all infrastructure, require all users to be licensed to connect, revoke licenses of bad actors. Unfortunately that's synonymous with a surveillance state and we'd never get any of the cool freak shit that makes online good

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You would have to slow it down immensely, and probably nationalise it just to institute massive vetting of its traffic.

idk i think the only way not to have it turn to shit is for there not to be perverse incentives, and i think the only real way to do that is for it to be unimportant

I think what breaks the internet we have is that it's free to show people spam and ads, and takes effort to not see spam and ads. If we added even a tenth of a cent tax to "this is bullshit and I don't want to see it", all the invasive adware business models would implode. This might actually even be a use case for Crypto Bullshit.

Of course there are downsides. Making the internet cost (more) money restricts access. I could see these being trivially weaponized by TERFs and Nazis and other scum. It might not be better, but it'd be different.

look up xanadu

Well it would be impossible in our current society, due to the government and land laws, unless idk if you’re like Elon musk rich but even then I don’t think it’d be at all possible like laying that much cable and then you’d have to fund laying cable on the ocean floor, to connect the other continents in which you get into international issues, it would take an incredible collective effort to build a second internet and I don’t think anyone has time or money for that

some people saying "nationalize it" but may i offer "localize it". neighborhood internets

every computer can send a maximum of five things to any other computer a day. They could be emails, 4gb video files, an automated backup, but you only get five, then you gotta wait or get another computer. choose wisely

If you can stomach reading Urbit’s impenetrable documentation, it seemed to me to be trying to do this. Of course, it’s got Mencius Moldbug all over it, so it can’t be used without ideological sterilization — e.g.: the design deliberately chose 32-bit unique identifiers for individuals on the network, which (if it were to supplant the internet) would exclude half the world’s population; the way unique identifiers are distributed is structured in a lord-and-vassal hierarchy; etc.

have you heard the good news about Eywa

destroy middleman platforms that handle monetization and discovery for people, and make it prohibitively difficult to directly show random unknown third-party content (i.e., advertisements) on a website

you can still make money on Internet 2, but you have to do your own marketing and come up with your own monetization

the spam and generative garbage exists because of the ability to automatically monetize views via middleman ad-broker services, as well as the increasingly total dependence on algorithmic discovery. buying ads and showing ads can both be done with zero human involvement, which throws the floodgates wide open for abuse

so much malicious content over the years has boiled down to trying to scam ad algorithms out of a bit of money. from the old days of pop-unders and popup floods to the modern era of generative content mills. it all boils down to tricking you into clicking something that'll cause your computer to display ads for just long enough for them to get paid

nonnonononononononono