What I don't see among the raised call to action questions is "who pays the bills"? It's a very important question that explains the existence of silos they feel sad about.
The number of people using the internet won't shrink, but grow steadily. Facebook, Google has enormous operating costs and if they want to offer an alternative, a better future, those costs (at least bandwidth) should be factored in. The infrastructure is not free, but Facebook and Google users are not paying for it now (well, not with money). But imagine if we say that hey, here's the new web, it's awesome: it's decentralized, privacy is baked in and works everywhere. You just have to pay 0.01€ to access the New York Times. Per page. Then it would be a different situation if costs are not baked in the beginning.
Then there's video. Gazillion of videos are created per day and it grows exponentially as devices get better and better at recording ultra high resolution. Now, again, YouTube pays the bills and users get it in exchange for watching advertising. How do you want to offer an at least as good service as YouTube, but decentralized, privacy concerned and universally accessible and free?
What I see here is a problem that really exists, but the proposed radical new solutions are a bit misguided. You won't convince people with a sub par (but technically better) alternative you have to propose a iPhone level of wow, because only then you can get people's attention.
> Change the naming system, and stop thinking of the URL as a location—it’s a name, a format he picked to look like a Unix file name simply because people were comfortable with that.
That's a problem again, most people use Windows. Don't assume that the end users will instantly "get it" because it's more Unix like. This leads my to the next point.
Another question I haven't seen raised is User Experience. UX. Today's web is rather good at it, at least the top players embrace it very well. Most company websites now pay attention to get it somewhat right. Startups also pay a lot of effort to get UX right.
How about baking in good UX too to the new web? Today I only need to buy a $500 phone and I'm ready to consume the web. How? I type in a string and the rest is magically handled for me. I can read, watch anything. Can yo do the same with the decentralized web? I don't want to install anything, nor download terabytes of blockchain data, no encrypted distributed filesystem of somebody else's cat videos, waiting for hours to sync in. I also don't want pay for hosting somebody else's cat videos. Torrents work well for TV shows, but what would it look like on YouTube scale?
That's they key part here. To have a radically new internet, getting technologies right doesn't stop at replacing HTTP, HTML, CSS, DNS... you need to replace ISP-s and infrastructure providers too or at lest factor them in so that the new system is not born dead.
The number of people using the internet won't shrink, but grow steadily. Facebook, Google has enormous operating costs and if they want to offer an alternative, a better future, those costs (at least bandwidth) should be factored in. The infrastructure is not free, but Facebook and Google users are not paying for it now (well, not with money). But imagine if we say that hey, here's the new web, it's awesome: it's decentralized, privacy is baked in and works everywhere. You just have to pay 0.01€ to access the New York Times. Per page. Then it would be a different situation if costs are not baked in the beginning.
Then there's video. Gazillion of videos are created per day and it grows exponentially as devices get better and better at recording ultra high resolution. Now, again, YouTube pays the bills and users get it in exchange for watching advertising. How do you want to offer an at least as good service as YouTube, but decentralized, privacy concerned and universally accessible and free?
What I see here is a problem that really exists, but the proposed radical new solutions are a bit misguided. You won't convince people with a sub par (but technically better) alternative you have to propose a iPhone level of wow, because only then you can get people's attention.
> Change the naming system, and stop thinking of the URL as a location—it’s a name, a format he picked to look like a Unix file name simply because people were comfortable with that.
That's a problem again, most people use Windows. Don't assume that the end users will instantly "get it" because it's more Unix like. This leads my to the next point.
Another question I haven't seen raised is User Experience. UX. Today's web is rather good at it, at least the top players embrace it very well. Most company websites now pay attention to get it somewhat right. Startups also pay a lot of effort to get UX right.
How about baking in good UX too to the new web? Today I only need to buy a $500 phone and I'm ready to consume the web. How? I type in a string and the rest is magically handled for me. I can read, watch anything. Can yo do the same with the decentralized web? I don't want to install anything, nor download terabytes of blockchain data, no encrypted distributed filesystem of somebody else's cat videos, waiting for hours to sync in. I also don't want pay for hosting somebody else's cat videos. Torrents work well for TV shows, but what would it look like on YouTube scale?
That's they key part here. To have a radically new internet, getting technologies right doesn't stop at replacing HTTP, HTML, CSS, DNS... you need to replace ISP-s and infrastructure providers too or at lest factor them in so that the new system is not born dead.