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DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification - Cory Doctorow (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 year ago by JRepin@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.world

99 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344

The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn't have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don't have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!

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[–] lloram239@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's why you need digital signatures and authorship tracking. Copyright just by itself would already put an end to every P2P alternative or at least stop it from ever gaining any mass traction. On the other side if everybody put a digital signature under their published work, others could mirror it without themselves becoming responsible and you could have take downs of objectionable material via blacklists.

So far very few of the P2P alternatives implement anything like that and even those that do just have arbitrary accounts that don't link back to any real person.

This of course goes against the whole anonymity and privacy focus that has been predominant in this field for the last 20 years. But if we actually want a real alternative to the Web, not just some toy app with a dozen users, I think it's the only way to go. And of course you could also have a layer of indirection in there to provide some anonymity or pseudonymity, so it's not like those things would be impossible, just reduced.