Strikes me the key is to control more of the news supply chain and become their own aggregators. I think it's similar to the way Hulu is owned by some networks and some studios.
There's a substantial difference between forcing someone out because of the potential that other people would shun them for political reasons vs because they are taking a stand that you think would do irreparable harm to your industry. The first is pure politics, with only the indirect consequences on your company that all businesses could face. The other is a piece of pointed legislation whose primary goal will disrupt your industry.
As a new programmer I'd say there's an aspect that you're ignoring. The need to take reasonable steps, and to know if not your limitations at least where you stand.
You want to take the next step that has enough familiar aspects that you can acclimate reasonably quickly and build non-trivial programs (the fun part) in a reasonable amount of time. But also different enough that you're exposed to new concepts and new ways of thinking about programming, and also to have access to a more powerful language.
Simply diving head first into a powerful but completely foreign language might not be the best way. Coding can be as frustrating as it is rewarding. And there's something to be said for trying to maximize the rewards and minimizing the frustrations.
What better way to know your limitations than to seriously challenge yourself? I taught my friend to program in Haskell and while he struggled early on he found it incredibly rewarding. Since then he's found it extremely easy to learn other programming languages, despite their extensive differences from Haskell.
There's also a lot to be said for habit-forming. Imperative languages teach you a lot of habits and cause you to develop assumptions that might actually make it harder to learn a language as different as Haskell. This makes the concept of "taking steps" in your growth as a programmer a nonlinear one. Some languages might even hurt your ability in the long run.
What do terrorist networks and how they live have to do with internet security or even the outsourcing of trust in general?
On a technical level there's no meaningful connection.
Just talking philosophically they "live in caves" because the US & other govt's have armies trying to kill them. It has nothing to do with trust networks. If anything that style of trust networking has made them more secure as it's difficult to penetrate. The point that OP was making.
Finally, personal trust networks have worked remarkably well. Look at guanxi in China, social societies like the Freemasons (not in a "control the world" way, just better business contacts, etc.). These are all based on networks of trust.
I have no idea if this is the best way forward for the web but a comparison to terrorist networks is meaningless.
The point of the comparison is that the size of networks for which trust is actively maintained are necessarily small due to the expense of maintenance. Indeed, both of your counterexamples have this property.
The OP believes that to be economically viable, trust networks must be large. Hence, outsourced trust.
But I agree with you: once your personal network grows beyond a certain size, the property connecting you directly to any particular node is no longer exclusively "trust", but will increasingly be "convenience". Usually followed shortly thereafter by "abused by".
The reason for the comparison is that terrorists require absolute security of their communications and can't make sacrifices for convenience. As such, they have a difficult time coordinating any large-scale attacks and this is a huge strategic advantage for their enemies. Replace large-scale attacks with "buying things online" and you start to see the limitations of the web of trust as the exclusive means of securing communication. I only brought up the comparison because it was the best example I could think of where the ONLY trust is personal trust, and even then it still gets exploited through social engineering (spies & informants). Even if you take it to the extreme like that, it's not fool-proof (or even incredibly effective). The entire point was that the failings are not technical; they're structural to the concept of trust.
Personal trust works well, and nobody's implying that you can't or shouldn't use more peer-to-peer solutions where you feel you need more security -- but it's not going to form the backbone of the global economy. At the end of the day, you need some form of centralized trusted authority with which individuals can contract to provide trust-management services, otherwise you spend all your time verifying trust and not actually doing anything.
