I agree with the sentiment of this article, but only to a degree.
I recommend anyone interested in this to read Open Standards and the Digital Age, by Andrew Russel. The book is a partial refutation of the idea of an 'open web' using historical examples, the most shocking being the failure of open and democratic methods to build an open Internet standard versus the success of Serf and Kahn inventing TCP/IP in a closed and corporate environment, funded by the military. The reality is that some systems critical to the operation of the Internet, such as DNS, are highly centralized, un-open, un-private and un-free, or at least when compared with cyberlibertarian expectations of how the Internet should be. It also addresses other perversions of 'open', such as the irony that some of FLOSS's biggest customers are megacorps like Apple and Microsoft, who up until recently contributed way less back than what they took.
I don't think the web was 'stolen' from 'us', I think people just don't realize how controlling it was before. They're mistaking an epiphany for an actual loss of freedom that may or may not have been there in the first place. We need to fight for a free and open Internet, but let's not kid ourselves with inaccurate and misleading language.
You agree with the sentiment of the article but then you're muddying the waters and shifting the discussion from Big Data companies like Google and Facebook to some abstract ideal of freedom and openness.
The only "misleading language" that I see here belongs to you. The author is very clear about what disease has infected software development and the internet.
I don't remember many spyware as a service and data collection software platforms ~10 ago.
The freedom to not have your information collected, analyzed, stored forever sold off and used against your interests WAS there.
I remember extended discussions on Usenet etc about commercialization of the Internet. Not long after Eternal September, as I recall. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Internet of Tim's dreams still exists. Several of them, really. But they're tiny, with relatively few users. What people now call the Internet is a horrorshow of predators and prey. So it goes. Natural selection rules.
And greedy algorithms always fail to reach max optimization.
Balance is the gist of the article.
I can't possibly stay sane _and_ write something if I have to account for every possible reception by every possible buyer of that data. There are too many variables in play, and the data is too easily bought and sold. If we don't regulate, the least scrupulous agent will overtake the competition and it's Thunderdome beyond that.
Do you want to joust for your supper, because I don't.
On the flip side, I remember arguments twenty years ago about how the owner of a mail server had a fundamental human right to read all the mail that passed through her server. That the processor and hard drive were her property and that any government intervention that stopped that sysadmin from reading, saving, and distributing any of the messages that passed through was the first step to an Orwellian dystopia.
Seems correct, on the assumption that all users of that mail server understood those terms, and that by entering a contract that, for example required anonymous usage, she gave up that right.
i.e. rights can be voluntarily waived by contract, and users must have the choice to choose who handles their mail, or what conditions (contracts) the agents must abide by to be permitted the job.
I concur. Parent's post was interesting, but if we narrow down to datamining and surveillance, it has gotten a whole lot worse to a degree that is beyond appreciable.
In agreement with your comment allow me the indulgence of posting a favorite passage from the great Don Quixote:
After don Quixote had satisfied his stomach, he took some acorns in his hand, and, examining them with great care, raised his voice to speak words like these: “What a happy time and a happy age were those that the ancients called Golden! And not because gold—which in this our Age of Iron is so valued—was gotten in that fortunate time without any trouble, but rather because the people who lived then didn’t know the two words yours and mine! In that holy age all things were commonly owned. To find their daily sustenance, they had only to raise their hands and take it from the robust oaks, which liberally offered their sweet and ripe fruit to them. Crystal clear fountains and running rivers, in magnificent abundance, offered them their delicious and transparent water. In the fissures of boulders and in the hollows of trees, the diligent and prudent bees formed their republics and offered to any hand, without recompense, the fertile harvest of their very sweet work. The robust cork trees shed their lightweight bark without any artifice other than their own courtesy, with which people began to cover their rustic houses, built only for protection against the rigors of the heavens. Everything then was friendship, everything was harmony. The heavy plow had not yet dared to open nor visit the pious bowels of our first mother, for she, without being forced, gave everywhere from her fertile and broad bosom that could fill, sustain, and delight the children that possessed her then.
“It was then that the simple and beautiful young shepherdesses could travel from valley to valley and from hill to hill, either in braids or with their hair flowing behind, with only enough clothing to cover modestly what decency requires, and has always required. And their ornamentation was not like the Tyrian purple and silk woven in a thousand different ways that women esteem nowadays, but rather it was of intertwined green-dock and ivy, with which they carried themselves with perhaps as much dignity and composure as our courtesans do nowadays, strutting about in extravagant dresses. In those days, literary expressions of love were recited in a simple way, without any unnatural circumlocution to express them.
“Fraud, deceit, and wickedness had not as yet contaminated truth and sincerity. Justice was administered on its own terms and was not tainted by favor and self-interest, which now impair, overturn, and persecute it. Arbitrary law had not yet debased the rulings of the judge, because in those days there was nothing to judge, nor anyone to be judged.
“Young women, with their chastity intact, traveled about on their own anywhere they wanted, as I’ve said, without fearing the damaging boldness or lust of others, and if they suffered any ruination it was born of their own pleasure and free will. Nowadays, in our detestable age, no young woman is secure, even though she be hidden and locked in a new labyrinth of Crete, for even there, through the cracks or borne in the air, the plague of lust finds its way in with the zeal of cursed importunity, and brings her to ruin in spite of her seclusion. As time went by and as wickedness grew, the order of knight errantry was instituted to defend young women, protect widows, and help orphans and needy people.
“I am a member of this order, brother goatherds, and I’m grateful for the hearty welcome and reception you’ve given me and my squire. For, although under natural law all living souls are obliged to show favor to knights errant, it’s still fitting that—knowing as I do you received and entertained me with no knowledge of this obligation—I should acknowledge your good will with utmost gratitude.”
All of this long speech, which could well have been spared, was given by our knight because the acorns brought the Golden Age to his memory. And he was moved to give that useless speech to the goatherds, who, without saying a single word, were listening to him open-mouthed and amazed. Sancho also remained silent as he snacked on some acorns and visited very frequently a second wineskin that had been suspended from a cork tree to make the wine cool.
The problem with succinct and clever phrases is that they can be used to shut down discussion of important issues.
It's such a great reply that people may, not wishing to appear to be one of these naive souls who romanticize a past that never existed, refrain from pointing out that it is possible to lose things from the past that did exist and were exceptionally valuable. It's even possible to have these things stolen from you.
Yes, it is certainly possible to romanticize a past that never existed. Also: the web is less open than it used to be, and Facebook had plenty to do with it.
Of course it's a shady corp run by a shady guy using pretty much all the dirty tricks and techniques in the book. But the only thing that facebook had for itself was the use of actual names instead of pseudonyms even on previous similar websites such as myspace or friendster.
By the time zuckerberg launched the facemash website using people pictures without permission, google had been pioneering surveillance and centralizing for a long time (and getting a copy of the human genome among many many other very creepy things).
Google turned into an enemy of the internet when it became an ad network, but google had to balance things out as it needed the web and to appear friendly to web users.
But the story starts before google came into existence, there's the internet's original sin[1]. There was also this giant corporation trying to kill and replace the web with its own network called MSN, the microsoft network, supposed to be the "internet killer" which came preinstalled in windows 95. Let's not forget this pioneer in tracking users also launched in 1995 to sell books online under the name amazon.
The turning point starting the path leading to nowadays surveillance capitalism was may 1995 when the ban on commercial activities was lifted.
I do agree that facebook is a major offender and plays a role, but this is the case because the roots of surveillance as a business model were established and a large portion of the population who doesn't know better had now internet access.
The web is less open than it used to be, for some definitions of open.
The barriers to entry to the web nowadays are virtually zero. Anyone can get a free Wix or free WordPress site going in minutes. From their pocket computer no less!
Back when I was a lad, and access to the web was via a modem, the barriers were at least: have some technical knowledge and the right equipment.
Try getting out of your privileges and you may learn that there are places where you don't have reliable electricity, no access to a computer, or dial-up is the best internet connection available and there you'll find facebook trying to push its own version of the internet before the actual internet gets everywhere, but also google trying to offer connectivity for a similar profit based reason.
So no the barriers to entry still exist and the worst actors of the online surveillance capitalism are there.
Then again wix or wordpress are part of the very issue (centralization, giving away control of your data, etc.) the way to do it right is self hosting which is not that hard with things such as yunohost, cozy or sandstorm. The difficulty is having a symmetric bandwidth and reliable connection to the internet. Now we're dealing with another part of the issue: tier 1 operators and the cost of bandwidth.
FB did steal the web and your social network. Remember how FB grew? If not, let me remind you: "See which of your friends are also on FB! Just give us your Google and Yahoo contacts". Yes, you gave FB permission to check your contacts, but FB omitted to tell us that they would be HOLDING ON to your contacts forever and ever. FB then sent those contacts, without your permission and not per your request, an email saying YOU were on FB or and email that YOU had asked them to join. Initially there was a little quid-pro-quo, you could also export contacts from FB to Goole and/or Yahoo. This was closed down soon after they gobbled up the contact lists of the world[1][2].
Of course, LinkedIn later did a similar thing, and grew in a similar fashion, but at least there you could, and can, REMOVE the contacts you've handed over without full disclosure.
I willingly GAVE my contacts to Google/Yahoo, and they provided a service for me, GMAIL/YMAIL. Facebook STOLE what I gave to google/yahoo, and they used dark patterns.
The cat is out of the bag, but let's not forget our history.
PS Articles have even claimed that shadow-profiles were created for those who had not signed up yet, which could be matched with actual sign-ups at a later date.
Facebook still does not (officially) know my phone number. It keeps asking though. It also keeps telling me which of my friends have already done so, among them a number of my friends who I know for a fact have not, after asking them (because they are similarly distrustful of Facebook).
Same with a lot of other "all of your friends are doing it" UI elements: my best friends IRL (and of Facebook) have healthy levels of internet paranoia, so I know for a fact that they haven't.
At the time it was implied they would be matched to existing members (a one-time check, as other services did). The "we're holding on to them in perpetuity" bit was definitely not clear. The spammy part happened a little later.
It all went wrong at the firewall. As soon as peer-to-peer was over and NAT became a security layer as well as a technological construct to put more than one host behind one public IP it was essentially game-over.
If you want to reboot the web then you need to reboot the internet first, solve the insecurity of privately hosted servers first and convince ISPs that symmetric connectivity should be the rule.
Operating some server software on the wimpy VPS is very different different from having everybody's daily-use computers be fully networked with other computers. Also, you likely already have an Internet connection so the marginal cost is zero. And you don't need a credit card to do it.
To get network effects, it's all about low friction and low barriers to entry.
There is still a long way to go to make it work for your grandparents, however I think we already made quite some progress. The act of getting a domain and a server itself is still something most people might not be comfortable with though.
In the end I think there are only technical issues to be solved to get to a state where having a server and installing apps, just like most people now do with mobile apps on their phone, is entirely viable.
Here's the announcement, they moved back from being a for profit startup to an open source community effort. Most of team is now working at cloudflare.
The consequences of that asymmetry go much further than just a price difference. It's about a whole raft of applications that are simply impossible or at best extremely hard.
The internet was meant to be peer-to-peer not server-to-consumer.
Adding more servers, even at $5 won't change that.
The internet started as a server-to-client effort, and the peer-to-peer nature evolved much, much later. The entire purpose of ARPANET et al in the early days was to give researchers access to national supercomputing centers across the US. If anything, what we're seeing today is a regression to the days of old because large corporations provide centralized value to consumers, and consumers can't pry themselves free.
You're mistaken, ARPANET is not the internet. ARPANET was one network, there were others. The intenert is the internetworking or network of networks that emerged from connecting those networks together.
From the network standpoint it is peer-to-peer as the internet is a network of dumb pipes with intelligence put in the periphery of the network. This is different from say the european minitel network[1] where dumb terminals were connected to a central intelligence.
But it can never be truly peer-to-peer or decentralized due to the economics of last-mile connectivity. Connecting machines in a neighborhood is more expensive and difficult from an infrastructure perspective than hooking up a computer in a server farm.
This in of itself changes the costs and expectations of the parties involved which means things will likely slump back to a permutation of this status quo even with a different standard.
Only if you assume high bandwidth cost. If it's more convenient to do something at home, it is cost-dependent whether people opt for the more cumbersome but cheaper centralised solution.
The current last-mile problem is that there is not enough demand for high-bandwidth applications to justify rapid improvement (we'd all have 10 gig connections by now if the 2000's trend had continued).
This comment show a big misunderstanding about the nature o the internet. The internet is dumb decentralized network with the intelligence placed in the periphery.
The server farm is part of the periphery of the network and has a last mile connectivity same a residential home connection. It is really expensive and only makes senses if you stockpile machines to have economies of scale.
While I agree with the gist of the article, I have a problem conflating Google and Facebook in the same evil bag.
Facebook is the evilest of evil, not only for the reasons stated, but also because information entered into Facebook never comes out. You have to have an account on FB to see anything on the platform. That is contrary to everything the Web ever stood for.
Since I don't have a Facebook account, most of my friends don't either, and I will prevent my kids from having one for as long as humanely possible, I'm not sure what kind of benefit it provides. (I'm aware that 25% of all of humanity is on Facebook so they must find something in it. I just don't know what it is, and would rather not find out.)
But, to me, Google is quite different. Not only is Google Search is unparalleled, it's also quite open. Yes, Google constantly tries to have you "login" and turn on search history, etc., but one can still use Google Search completely anonymously. That's not a detail, that is a very important feature of Google Search.
* * *
Now about fighting back, what about starving the beast with adblock? Everyone concerned by any of this should not only use adblock but heavily promote it to everyone. That's probably not the complete solution but it's obviously part of it.
I think they lost that argument when they started Google+, going into direct competition with Facebook with a comparable product, albeit unsuccessfully.
If anything Google is more sinister to me, with a much broader reach than Facebook into areas like mapping and navigation, personalized ad tech, personalized search, mobile OS, PC OS, web analytics, etc. etc., all at least partially geared towards data mining.
Not defending Facebook by any stretch, but "my dictator is not as evil as your dictator" does not hold up for me.
The information that should be public without an account -- public events, businesses and so on -- is visible on Facebook without an account, including comments people have made on these pages. (Admittedly, the "Sign up to Facebook" banner is pretty large.)
The private stuff on Facebook -- personal posts, friends lists and so on -- is also private on Google+, where it exists.
The problem with Google is that all the money it makes are gained by selling top search positions for money with adwords. It is like corruption.
The real evil are ads. They are bedrock of all worldwide bullshit and scam. They make seller don’t care about reputation, competitors and eventually product quality. They transfer products completion into ads competition. They make all products more expensive because of this “advertising tax”.
They turn off customer’s head to make a zombie who buys best advertised product instead of one with the best quality. They are good only for advertising companies and scammers.
Try turning off any of the incredibly invasive features in Android. If you try to turn off constant location, for example, maps starts throwing all sort of cryptic messages at you. You can't use google play without an account. They want to get you to log into Chrome so they can hook up your desktop searches to your mobile searches and profile you. If you've ever used Ok Google, every word you've ever said to it is recorded and stored in their servers.
Their entire existence revolves around extracting your personal information to sell you things, to profile you and sell that information to others to sell to you.
When you actually look at what they're storing about you Google's shockingly invasive.
They steal traffic and revenue from content creators, and are getting ever more brazen about it because they know the content creators have nowhere else to go. They use their dominance in search to promote their own sub-standard offerings, exactly as Microsoft did years ago. They've systemically attacked and destroyed other aggregators, while at the same time getting those aggregators to normalise that content so they can scrape and steal it in the form of data annotations, etc. to present the data directly to users without redirecting the user to the site that's actually provided the information.
It's not at all a noble cause and it definitely hop, skipped and jumped feet first into evil years ago.
And now they're trying to take over all mobile web traffic with AMP to lock everyone into their search platform.
They're evil coated in Engineer Cool to fool people like you.
EDIT: I do think they're a necessary evil though. If the government stepped in and forced web search to run as a public utility, which sometimes I think it should be, perhaps even at cost, it would decline.
I actually like what they started doing lately, where the answer to my query is extracted from the page, and shown at the top of the results, especially when it's something simple that I just want to double check.
When's sunset today?, what was the name of that movie with surgeon turned spell caster?, how long does it take to go from A to B? Another way to say XYZ?
Too many sites are full of crap, so this saves me a non-trivial amount of time.
There was an article on HN front page recently showing how this feature is at best unreliable. I don't have the link but the story was from a teacher asked about a US president being a member of the ku klux klan.
I encourage people to use Adblock, but I don't think it does much to combat companies like facebook. On facebook the adds and sponsored content is mixed in between your regular news feed, and it would be hard to tell the two apart.
I do think google belongs on the evil list though. They are not as bad as Facebook, but they sure know a lot about you even when you're trying to be anonymous. I've never used my work machine for anything private (I'm odd like that), I've never had it on my own network without a vpn, yet google seemingly knows that it's mine. I've taken quite a few work related certificates over the years, and every time I do, I'll find adds for those exact courses and certificates pop up on my private devices.
Like I'll log into gmail on my iPad, a few days after having searched for TOGAF courses on my work machine, and there will be a sponsored message about a TOGAF course near me.
Blocking ads is highly effective against facebook, that's why they're trying to workaround ad blockers. With enough users using ad blockers facebook would disappear sooner rather than later.
It's also effective against google which is nothing else than an ad network, until they pivot into being the self-driving car company or something.
Oh, but google is as evil, just in a different way. Google collect everything. With android it has your phone activity, postion, text messages, conversation and contacts. With gmaill is has more contacts, and emails. With search, youtube and analytics, it knows everything you are interested in. With map it has a recording of everything that has a location and a visual of it.
It keeps accumulating intimate data on a scale way larger than facebook. And we know that google, like facebook, cooperate with governments, sharing this data.
Google also has a strong AI background, using it for search, driving car, data analysis... This makes it concerning at best.
Google is even scarier than that, it's not confined to the online world.
Let's not forget they were involved in sequencing the human genome and are involved in genomics from investing in 23andme to their own "baseline study". And that's just one thing among many.
Google is a lot less useful than it used to be... Google getting rid of blog search, forum search, and google reader has done as much as facebook to silo-ize the web.
In my opinion, Google stopped being a "search engine" roughly 10 years ago. These days I'd call it a "recommendation engine" and it seems to primarily work by giving you results that people similar to your profile (according to the tracking surveillance data they have) have clicked with keywords similar to your query.
Not that I necessarily blame them, all the SEO and blogspam crap made searching the web with something similar to pagerank and impossibility a long time ago. I think the eulogy was served by the "miserable failure" thing when GWB was elected (it was called a "Google bomb" in the media). That and all the low-effort wikipedia copies with their advertising made it impossible.
That said, I regularly do feel creeped out by the "search results" and the advertising they present to me. Sometimes the results are pretty useless too, I was once presented with a page of results where the 7 of the top-10 were written by myself (HN comments, etc) when I was searching for the docs of an obscure GCC feature I've discussed in the web often.
I don't know if there's anything that can be done to "fix" this. I generally try to navigate directly to an url I know or e.g. do a search on Wikipedia (Firefox + Vimperator make using many search engines on the address bar easy, unlike Google Chrome where the address bar UX seems to be designed to maximize Google searches and advertising).
With the gradually worsening signal-to-noise ratio, the web is getting less and less useful to me every day.
> Not that I necessarily blame them, all the SEO and blogspam crap made searching the web with something similar to pagerank and impossibility a long time ago. I think the eulogy was served by the "miserable failure" thing when GWB was elected (it was called a "Google bomb" in the media). That and all the low-effort wikipedia copies with their advertising made it impossible.
They use to fight the spam, though, and you could still find obscure-but-relevant sites. Not 99% of searches are, at best, a few top results from the same handful of sites that always seem to top the results, then a sea of spam. They seem to have just given up and ranked hard toward the top traffic sites and let the spam sites simply have the entire middle of the search rankings, starting around '08 or so. If you manage to search for something that's not on the couple hundred top sites, you end up with nothing but spam.
I agree. Google's removal of the discussions filter was a big blow to the openness of the web. There are some hacky solutions that emulate that feature but it is not as good. I was hoping Bing might pick up on it and introduce similar features, but it looks like their ad sponsors are just not happy with people having instant access to uncensored and unmoderated product discussions and reviews.
"Google's removal of the discussions filter was a big blow to the openness of the web"
This!
With that filter I could name a product and find common people talking about it, now all I find is companies selling the product.
This is getting even worse when searching political topics because from mixed people discussing the topic I now find only news sites or biased sources promoting their point.
You can use the query below (or something similar) to narrow results to include keywords found in popular discussion boards (modify it to suit your needs):
Alphabet as innocuous is ridiculous. Guess their elementary school name and bright primary colors are working.
You realize that your search results are topped by people who pay Google right? That they use your browsing activity to sell things to you just like everyone else?
> You realize that your search results are topped by people who pay Google right?
What do you mean? Do you mean ads? Or do you mean "natural" results are influenced by people who buy ads?
I almost never see any ad because I use uBlock both on the desktop (90% of my browsing time) and on Firefox Android.
I really don't think there's a connection between buying ads and getting top ranks on "natural" results; I could be wrong about that but I would need proof, not a simple assertion.
If you went on Facebook you might be disappointed by how mild the evil is. Holiday pics, cats, people eating etc. There is also an argument for controlling that in a non open way - you don't want the kid photos up everywhere or trolls piling in with threats like Twitter etc.
I don't have a problem with conflating Google and Facebook. Facebook's encroachment on your privacy is just less subtle.
Yes, you can use Google search anonymously. But the search results you see are tweaked and tuned by the majority that don't search anonymously. Without them, your results would look more like DDG's. And "anonymous" is malleable. It still dumps cookies and fingerprints your browser, etc. Not logged in != anonymous.
For me DuckDuckGo works pretty well. If I can't find something there, I always try to use Google, to no avail. It proves that DDG is as good as Google at least for my searches.
> one can still use Google Search completely anonymously
If you try to use it via Tor, you'll have to solve CAPTCHAs, not for every search, but still pretty often. It's annoying and not very anonymous-friendly. Sure, you can use Google Search anonymously, but Google does enough to discourage you doing it.
Google has a quite efficient PR strategy to make sure it does not look that bad while it is a worst offender than facebook simply because google had a several years head start.
Make not mistake here, google and facebook are both enemies of the internet, though each with a somewhat different approach, google being much broader as in facebook makes an app that runs on pocket computers operating a google OS and desktop users visit the facebook website using a google browser.
In aggregate, the article may be right in conflating Google and Facebook, as my own view on them is pretty much the polar opposite of yours.
Facebook is oft-criticised for their "walled garden", but it is their walled-garden. Facebook is:
- mostly opt-in (though admittedly there's a huge social pressure to do so for many people)
- I can very easily choose what I do & don't share with Facebook and my set of connections on it (again, this has a few caveats and gotchas. Instagram shares data with Facebook by default, but does provide an opt-out, and Facebook used to allow a kind of 2-degrees of separation data sharing where friends could share your data with 3rd-parties without your consent, but they have since shut this down)
- oddly transparent about their weird, creepy, dodgy activities[1]
- they have a very open and positive (recent) history of relatively large contributions to the open-source community
---
Google on the other hand is attempting to convert the internet as a whole into their walled garden. They are:
- completely pervasive: not only opt-out, but almost impossible to opt-out of. There are thousands of vectors to consider, all of which involve significant compromise of one's ability to use the internet conveniently in order to mitigate.
- the ways in which they track you are not apparent. One particularly grievous example of this was the Google WiFi Location service, which up until recently was sending Firefox and Safari user's locations and WiFi network data to Google (desktop's and laptop's included), a fact users not reading lengthy Ts&Cs would be unaware of. Thankfully initiatives like Mozilla Stumbler are battling this feature now, but there are so many other invisible vectors. Adblockers block Google Ads and often Google Analytics, but most don't block Google CDNs, Google fonts, and many more ancillary services. This is before we get started on Maps and Youtube embeds. You're opting into Google's systems by using any popular website.
- unlike Facebook, Google are notoriously clandestine about their practices.[2]
- Google's contributions to open-source, while massive in scale, leaves a lot to be desired in execution, sentiment and commitment in my view (though there are obviously exceptions). This is kind of a lengthy topic however...
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TL;DR
- a Facebook account is exactly as creepy as it appears; no better, no worse. And pretty much opt-in.
- Google is invisibly everywhere, it's largely opt-in, near impossible to opt-out of completely. Choice is removed.
I agree that Google is worse in most of the ways you noted. However, I would note that the choice of not using Facebook is a somewhat-arbitrary one, due to the incredibly strong network effect and the huge userbase.
Google is somewhat better in this regard - they're so huge because so many people use them, but in many cases you have options for not using Google, or most of their services. Or using them less intensively / intrusively than people tend to use Facebook.
Depends on the user, mostly. Both are quite detrimental to the liberty of users overall, I would say.
This is just unnecessarily divisive. Look, this is the way commerce works. Checks on corporate behavior come in two realms, legal and ethical. Companies will violate ethics if everybody else is doing it. Companies violate the law if they are the proverbial bad eggs.
If unethical practices become normal, the thing to do is to get a law passed. It's the way this has always worked. Laws change the entire landscape of commerce. They shake things up enough to where a new status quo is found. Law isn't perfect but it can shift the ethical regime more in the direction of the people.
The author's recommendation of a world without kings is a fantasy. If you eliminate hierarchy that means everybody must become an institution. Being an institution is not fun. It's fun to fantasize about building your own house but only the really motivated actually do it. Kings do us a favor by creating structure where there once was none. Silicon Valley is ultimately a force for good.
> Companies violate the law if they are the proverbial bad eggs
I would suggest that in general companies violate the law if the benefits of doing so exceed the costs (risk of penalties, imprisonment of officers and so on)
I would say there's certain segments of markets that will violate the law. I think this fits within the "bad egg" characterization I made before. New laws are often targeted directly at these segments, it changes the fabric of the market.
Definitely not. Just go back a few thousands years and there was nothing remotely close.
> The author's recommendation of a world without kings is a fantasy.
Only go back 5 centuries or so for this one. This is very well summarized in writings by Etienne de la Boetie in his discourse of voluntary servitude[1].
Go back a few thousand years and commerce as we know it didn't exist. My point still stands. If you want to generalize over all human systems of exchange, then be my guest, make a TED Talk and I can't wait to watch it.
And my point about kings also still stands. Yes, there was once a world without them. In these worlds, everyone had to do everything. Do you really want to be your own soldier, builder and priest?
If a change in law is your recommendation, I'd suggest that this is not unnecessary. Rallying public opinion is often a necessary precursor to legislation.
There seems to be a lot of antagonism directed at Google and Facebook in this piece, making it sound as if those companies knowingly stole or forced people to fork over data.
I know sometimes it's easy to play the evil mega-corp card, but we need to ask ourselves the question: what is the goal here, to take down Google and Facebook? 'Cause if you're worried about an internet with extra surveillance and restrictions, taking down Google and Facebook doesn't really solve things.
Plus, even in a world with Google and Facebook out of the picture, there will still be political trolls hired by other companies and nation-states. There are also alternate-Googles that can just swoop in and fill the void you create if say you do take down Google. They are not necessarily better than Google today.
> making it sound as if those companies knowingly stole or forced people to fork over data
Both Google and Facebook are engaged in exactly those practices. Stolen and forced are apt adjectives to describe their behavior. Stolen like Whatsapp data after acquisition by Facebook, like contact lists, location history, voice recordings from your Android phone. Forced like Facebook constantly demanding you provide them your phone number, and making it clear to you that it's not an option by removing the 'no' button and replacing it with my favorite dark pattern 'i will provide it later'.
The problem with both is they're so much more than just a web service. They're pervasive in all facets of life in the developed world. You can't get away from then no matter how much you want to, because they're using your friends to effectively spy on you. And to an extent, both now hold most of the population hostage. I can only begin to imagine how I would need to change my entire lifestyle if I wanted to stop either of these companies from pervasively tracking me. Give up my smartphone, browse the web only with NoScript, only on sites that still work with it, never let my friends take photos of me and upload them, never use any of the popular chat apps to stay in touch with them, etc. Basically the only way to unplug from these monsters is to live like Stallman.
Given the amount of people deeply involved in the tech industry who read hn probably my opinion will not be very popular. But I feel obliged to add a few lines about WhatsApp.
In a worrying technological landscape, it has been for a long time an application with a good tradeoff between privacy and convenience.
I have always respected and praised this application, due to its philosophy: Acton and Koum made millions of dollars without the need of advertising.
> Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.
> These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads.
> Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
> When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”
Like me, many people I know do not use social media (I'm 25 and not all of us use them, it's real), but virtually all of us use WhatsApp to keep in touch, share photos, locations, media, and even to create groups to discuss, meet, organize events.
We use the application in a so pervasive manner that we started considering it as a part of our daily routine: phrases such as "How long do you need to get there? Send me your position." are now regulars.
The reason we use wa, is because wa is not a social media.
Because "At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product, and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it."
Because when my mobile connection exceeds the data limit and my ISP applies a bandwidth throttling (32KBps) it is the only application that is able to send messages without making me worry about additional costs.
Because when loading an image, this is compressed in an automatic way.
Because it allows me to call my relatives and friends easily and simply when I'm abroad.
The problem is not only the integration of wa data without prior permission, but also the recent decisions taken, aka "status".
Status is a social media thing, and nobody wants another useless social media.
All my friends are asking me
- They do not know what to invent to know everything about us, right ?
- Why this after end2end encryption ?
- Do you see how little this is used ?
- The reviews on the store are the worst of all the time ! Why did they do this ?
- Not here ! Can I get the old version ?
- I hope in many are gonna leave, which are the alternatives ?
When I see certain things I ask myself: `who made this decision and why`.
I don't know if I have the answer to this, but I do not like the attitude.
If things are going to get worse, I will uninstall without looking back.
But it's a real shame.
This pattern has been emerging since the FaceBook acquisition,
so I would bet this is intentional, it's an attitude, it's a vision.
The intent is not to "play the evil mega-corp card",
I don't want to take them down,
it's that I would prefer to pay a decent annual fee to a great service rather than being used as a product.
It's fascinating that people find it so pointless to change platforms for the sake of their own privacy. Generally when I suggest to my peers we start chatting via Signal, they think I'm a conspiracy nut or something, it's fascinating and a little disappointing. Strangely, this "why bother" not only seems to apply to passive family users who don't understand what's behind these systems, but people who do.
Signal is too difficult to be used by my relatives, but do not underestimate the issue. Dad uses the app to work and has not uninstalled, while mom, did the upgrade, came to ask "why the gardener of the nearby sends me pictures while he's kissing his girlfriend?", and then uninstalled the whole, she's now using sms again.
> Like me, many people I know do not use social media (...) but virtually all of us use WhatsApp to keep in touch, share photos, locations, media, and even to create groups to discuss, meet, organize events.
>(...)
> The reason we use wa, is because wa is not a social media.
It seems you are confused about what social media is. Social media is whatever you use to socialize. Email is the long standing king of social media even before the term was coined as a marketing ploy. Whatsapp is simply one of the newcomer. So you are indeed using social media by using whatsapp.
Another hint that whatsapp is social media is the fact that they got bought by facebook for a hefty sum.
Thanks for your clarification, not a native english speaker here.
I hope the concept, as a whole, is clear.
Is "social network" the right term?
A simple "that's the wrong word" would have made your point: I've always found HN a great website, please say "sorry if I burst you bubble" someone else.
Quoting as another user replies to your inflammatory tone
> Phew lad. You're a bit far gone aren't you.
I don't think the point is so much about taking them down, as not letting them decide the future. From a larger perspective 2005-2015 is almost like a lost decade of companies implmenting things on new platforms under properitery ownership. Like many other things, the discussion about social networks and reliable information is sort of early 00s. So I would say the goal is to get back to a less short term outlook on development of the Internet.
The web wasn't stolen we gave it to them. You didn't have to sign up for Facebook. You don't have to sign up for googles services. Look how people like RMS use the web .
It shows the problem with short-term vs long-term interests. For people it made a lot of sense to use these services individually. But collectively, it leads to undesirable outcomes.
Clearly, there have been very desirable outcomes for most people using these services. Otherwise, no one would use them. I don't think the short-term vs long-term tipping point has been reached quite yet.
My problem is that the "collective" would vote in favor of their new corporate overlords and retort "what undesirable outcomes?"
While you and I fear the power corporations like Google have amassed through surveillance, most people don't, and I'm afraid they won't until they get burned.
Sounds like just-world fallacy. There's plenty of examples of people who take actions that do not lead to desirable outcomes. The idea that people choosing something in itself proves its value is nonsense.
I should have been clearer. I'm terrified of the power corporation's have amassed through surveillance, but no one I know outside of the tech community sees a problem. Most see Google and Facebook as "benevolent overlords"[0]. How can we convince people that danger lurks in the future given their love affair with the free, life-changing services of the "benevolent?"
[0]: Quote from my roommate at Duke: "I, for one, welcome our benevolent overlords."
I'd bet the majority of people have no clue exactly how much data they collect, how much other info they're able to derive from that, and what they do with it. If you described what they're actually doing as a hypothetical, I bet many of those people would assume it's already illegal, because much of it sure smells like something that ought to be illegal.
On the positive side, I can report that I know many people completely outside of tech who are extremely concerned about these problems. They tend to be older generation incidentally…
I'd say what's described in the post is an undesirable outcome.
"Otherwise, no one would use them."
Cigarette smokers also find value in what they do (opportunity to contemplate, enjoyment, socialize) - yet the cost (for the individual and the society at large) is much bigger than the benefit. So just looking at the perceived value alone is not the best measure to evaluate the overall impact.
While I'm personally all for regulating data use, I don’t see any negative outcomes presented in this opinion. Just a lot of empty, fiery attacks at Surveillance Capitalists who have apparently “robbed us of our welfare, agency, and freedom.”
Even the premise of the piece, that “we've lost control of our personal data”, isn’t a negative outcome. It's a restatement of the problem: people give away their short-sightedly in exchange for services.
And this gets to my point precisely. Collectively, we're still very distant from the pains of corporate surveillance. The clearest violation I know of is employee data abuse but that noise died ~2010.[0][1] I feel the chilling effects of social media the most--worrying that someone will record me acting like a fool at a party--but frankly, that's something the internet we champion still facilitates. Nothing stops my friend from posting that video on his personal blog. Maybe polarization due to filter bubbles? Still, I've got a hunch people have always consumed info inline with their beliefs and mingled with the like-minded. Also, I'm not sure how a democratized internet is supposed to handle the spread of misinformation and shady political advertising.
It could just be a network effect you know. Standard startup idea these days is to do whatever it takes to hook people in and then use network effects. Seed some social service in whatever way it takes, at some tipping point, people who don't like your service still need to participate because it's where the other people are.
There was quite a significant amount of social pressure and manipulation to achieve this "we gave it to them". Voluntary servitude has been going on for centuries.
How do you not notice the lack of sense in what you say ?
If everyone was browsing the web the way RMS does it, not only there would be a web (what would everyone be browsing otherwise) but there would a full blown market catering to it.
Of course this web would be different to the one we currently have and given the current state and direction, it would probably be an improvement.
I've been thinking of closing my Facebook account, but I'd lose contact with so many friends and family. They don't use email or any kind of instant messenger any more, and nobody makes phone calls any more. If you're not on Facebook you might as well not exist.
Then don't exist. My wife and I dropped our accounts. Been great. We don't get involved in the SJW or the almost alt-right furors. We text our immediate loved ones. I call my mom.
In their place we have actual friends. Real people that we play Cards Against Humanity with. Who understand that IBS means me dashing off and having my wife play my hands for a few hours. Then we go out and have a good time.
If it's a choice between virtual existence and not-existing virtually, but living, as Moses said, "Choose life."
I do these things while also having a Facebook account that I check on occasionally to see how old friends and distant relatives are getting on. I don't really understand why the two would be mutually exclusive.
They're not mutually exclusive. The point is that you can leave facebook and still have a social life, friends and relationships.
But the point of leaving facebook is to stop fueling their power and control over our lives, so having an account to check occasionally is self-defeating here, both for you and us.
I created and deleted several Facebook (and Twitter) accounts until I finally got off the treadmill, and deleted the last ones over a year ago.
This sentiment -- that there are people with whom you "need" to stay in contact with, through social media, alone -- comes up in every one of these discussions. The question I have to ask is: if you have relationships that are ONLY facilitated by Facebook, how much can they really mean?
What I realized, only after several months of going without Facebook, was that I was spending a non-zero amount of energy thinking about people that I had only a residual Facebook relationship with. I would occasionally look in on people who I went to college with (25 years ago) to see what they were up to, even though we haven't spoken for 23 or 24 years. And far from being deviant, I realized that this use case is a large part of the attractiveness of the service.
There are still moments I think, "I should share this on... Oh," but they're becoming more and more rare. The upside is that I find that my mind is much more calm since finally getting out of the social media game. The lives of people I have no other contact with no longer concern me, and this is the way it should be.
If you haven't spoken to someone for 10 or 20 years (and have no intention of resuming a real relationship), isn't it appropriate to stop spending time and energy keeping up with their lives? This "feature" of society has only been possible within the past 10 years, with ubiquitous smart phones and internet access. I find it's a burden that I think people just haven't realized they're lugging around.
I still exist without Facebook. The people in my life I care about know that they can email me (to a non-Gmail account).
It's not that impossible to be "off the grid" so to speak. The vast majority of Facebook interaction I see is pretty banal anyway. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
It's funny -- the different perspectives among the generations. I never got an account and don't feel like I'm missing much (though my wife has one). But I suppose if I'd gotten used to sharing the minutiae of my life and seeing my friends'/family's, switching to life without it might be hard.
Well, it's not that, not for me. It's that event planning and invitations now happen exclusively via FB.
FB already separated the messenger from the main service. I'd love to see them spin off the event invitations into a separate service, too. That I would happily use.
Argh, this is one of our problems. Evite is a perfectly good system for invitations and event planning, in many ways better than Facebook events, but it is difficult to get all the Facebook-only people to use it. It sends invites, updates, and reminders over email, which is apparently Not Done these days.
^This. I know people who use FB, but I'm not friends with anyone who's using it as a tool in their daily lives. I've never seen the strong appeal, and always seen many downsides.
I cancelled mine this week and it's been great. I still reflexively try to open it some...it's that ingrained.
What I realized is that it's a social crutch. I've live in the same town for 13 years and I don't know nearly as many people here as I should by now...largely because I could fall back on people I've known since college.
It gives you an out to avoid forming new friendships because your distant friends are so accessible. At least for me I realized it was.
I'm in college right now and oscillate between having one and not having one, but most of the social life is organized through Facebook and I end up looking very odd for ritualistically avoiding it (well and Google Docs but that's a different kettle of fish).
I got on Facebook for the exact same reason when I was in university, and it was necessary as a way to know about events and art openings from acquaintances.
The key is just limiting how much time you spend on there. Not installing the mobile app or Messenger helps.
I've had a Facebook account for 9 years now. When I first joined all my friends were on there if you wanted to go out for drinks you'd create an event. Party this weekend? Create an event.
Sometime around when I turned 30 people just stopped posting anything. Nowadays my feed is people I once knew in high school posting photos of their kids and my teenage cousin posting memes.
I can go weeks without checking the feed and miss nothing. I'm not going to shut down my account, a huge part of my 20's are stored there (holiday photos from multiple overseas trips etc) but I'm a very infrequent user nowadays.
I don't really trust Google not to index stuff I put in Docs, there's no canonical open format for them the way there is with MS Office these days, and as an extension of not trusting Google, I try to avoid depending on their services more generally.
Convince them to install Whatsapp? If they have a phone its an easy way to keep in contact and send text/image/videos without all the FB BS. I wished I used it sooner!
I cacn't imagine the problem with Facebook being the things my loved ones care about rather than the aggressive data collection of the ad agency itself
Just like the Newton and the Palm Pilot -- the solutions to this problem came too soon. Diaspora, GNU social, Ello (?) probably others. Perhaps in ten or twenty years a breaking point will come along.
That said, I think there's a real market for closed content like FB's. And even though I find a decentralized system more appealing, I can imagine a new, closed/centralized system taking FB's place in the future.
The original, open, non-privacy-invading web is still there. There are many sites sharing and hyperlinking academic research and relevant practitioner information that do not have advertising and do not track you.
We are the ones who voted with our clicks to use the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google.
Is there some kind of search engine that limits itself to the "ancient"-style web, as it existed from its beginning to ~10-12 years ago, though not necessarily confined to older sites when newer ones fit the style and content of that period?
I'd use the hell out of something like that. I'd take enthusiastic amateurs with their web-rings and guest books, and academic sites over the modern advertising-centric web any day. Very little of that bubbles to the top of searches as it is (Wikipedia being easily the most prominent).
I really like the comment at the bottom which mentions the structural flaws in attempting to democratise the web while client-server architecture is still king.
Have any visionaries written what an alternative web looks like I.e we still need the services of Google and Facebook but done in a privacy conscious way.
I would still use Usenet if my ISP hadn't shut down their NNTP server around 2005. I can't bring myself to pay extra for a third-party NNTP server, mainly because it was something I had gotten used to having as part of my internet service.
I don't think we really need more regulations in this area. There is already a bunch of privacy related laws on the books.
Plus using data to improve the user experience, recommendations(YouTube, Netflix), targeted ads seems pretty neat(I prefer ads about tech products, my interests compared to makeup or pads). The products get better and improve. Facebook doesn't sell your information, they let advertisers use it to target you. Probably more profitable to let companies use the data instead of selling it.
Companies like LexisNexis and Acxiom are the ones I'd be really worried about. Some states DMV's even sell databases. I'd be more worried about them, Google and Facebook are way better corporate citizens than these mega databroker companies would be. At least Google and Facebook you can opt-out of. LexisNexis, good luck opting-out. Last time I checked only law enforcement who fear they are in danger can opt-out.
Regulations are what kills innovation. Probably since the government has mainly left the internet alone is probably why it's one of the most innovative industries. Imagine having to read a 300 page 2 column paged document and wait on a lengthly process before you are even allowed to put up even a blog.
Then all of this talk lately about "fake news" just seems like censorship. I am worried that some day the internet will be over regulated and censored it will be just like cable television at some point.
The argument is an angry version of "if it's free, you're the product," which at this stage is very uncontroversial, and only comments on the "we've lost control of our data" point made in the original post. The link between what author calls "people farming" and "surveillance" is not compelling.
That said, I personally agree with the author in identifying the main problem of the web as people tracking. In my opinion, Tim Bernes-Lee points about misinformation and political advertising are not specific to the medium, but rather to the times we live in. People are pissed, people are scared, they need something to blame, they need some fantasy to believe in, they make up scary news, they vote for the guy that gives them a dream.
What's specific to the web though, (and that is starting to spread out of the web) is the data tracking. Whether for advertising ends or for surveillance purposes, data tracking creates a power imbalance between people and systems that is unbearable.
That power imbalance is the weirdness you felt the first time you saw a gmail ad related to the email you were reading. It's the anger that heats up your cheeks when the sales guy asks for your email address when you just want to buy shoes. It's the 2-hour phone call to the customer service that ends in "I'm sorry there is nothing I can do for you". It's the "late fee" mails you automatically receive for a service that you cancelled. It's realizing that the app your employer installed on your phone can tell them your location at all times. It's the swatting that reminds you not to shop for pressure cookers online. It's the cameras. It's the cars. It's the lightbulbs.
We as people are weak. I don't think Silicon Valley intended it that way. I think they genuinely wanted to improve the world. And in order to keep it cheap, they found money where they could, and in the process, they undermined people's privacy in a way that is making the world a lot worse than it was.
I personally feel hopeful. Countries are made of people. And I think that people are starting to get it. We need rules to prevent this. Laws that force companies to automatically give you the option not to track you. The same laws that forced mailing list senders to have the unsubscribe button (thank god for the unsubscribe button!). For this to happen, we need lobbying, we need awareness. We need a "this website is not tracking you" label. We need privacy checks.
> What's specific to the web though, (and that is starting to spread out of the web) is the data tracking.
No it's not. Tracking is as old as marketing. And Taylorism comes to mind in the workplace for even older form a of systematic tracking.
The scale is vaguely novel, but this is becquse meatspace is catching up with the number of data points that get tracked (IoT) and tools to analyze all of this data.
Take something as innocuous-looking as video surveillance in a grocery store. The next thing you know, it'll use face recognition to systematically profile shoppers based on other data sources and send you a text message with a custom promo automatically, all while giving store owner the aggregated analytics they need to test store layouts that might increase profit.
At least Google cares for the web because of the revenue it gets from the Google search engine. Google wants everything to be a web app, while Facebook wants everything to be a Facebook app, and Microsoft wants everything to be a dot.net app.
When TV was the main mass communication system you needed a single antenna or a single satellite to project to unlimited people in the projected area. While that was one-way and the internet is two-way, the internet introduced the requirement for the projector to have the infrastructure to support millions of users individually. That means the main technological reason Google and Facebook took over was that you need money to take over the internet, you can't just do it for free, and those like Wikipedia that did it in a less profitable way had to be very proficient in collecting donations.
The older Web wasn't much harder to use, but it was overrun with spam and content farms and the threats of anonymous communication were far more visible.
Web becoming much like the economy where there are big players who control the web and others who are shouting for equality. There is another group, largest amongst these three, almost 90% of general population, who don't bother/understand and go with the wind.
With big data come into the scene, things get out of hands as these "big guns" are on a spree to collect more and more of our personal details. IOT is another thing that will surely make situation much worse, as they are meant to be our personal assistance, we are allowing them to learn our behavior and act accordingly.
When we see an advertisement related to our 3days earlier search, it's not the ad that is get promoted instead we are getting sold.
Google doesn't exist. There are only people who work under an umbrella termed "Google". Those people do not agree with each others on everything. So, Yes, we can work with some of them. After all, wasn't Snowden 'The NSA' !?
The worst part is that if you're employed, it's probably a job requirement to use at least one of these surveillance capitalism platforms.
Most people I know in tech have to be on Slack. Most people I know in advertising and PR have to be on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For some jobs, like journalism, even the "troops on the ground" are required to post and tweet. Even for jobs without the social media taint, a lot of companies use corporate gmail, so now Google is way up in your business.
In 2007, you could probably just chalk it all up to poor personal choices. In 2017, I don't know if that's entirely true. We're in a situation that cries out for regulation, although that will probably not happen in the US until after a calamity, since regulation is seen as one of the heads of the beast in our money religion.
edit: Slightly off-topic, but both mainstream mobile platforms have chilling surveillance and control aspects that make most of the web seem benign in comparison.
Air conditioners using Freon cooled far more quickly than air conditioners using modern hydrofluorocarbons.
Leaded gas burns better than unleaded (this is why aviation gasoline is still leaded).
In both of those cases, we recognized that it was okay to accept a modest loss in efficiency in order to eliminate some pretty massive externalities. I think the same principle applies here. Yes, your team communication may have never been better prior to Slack. But is the marginal improvement in communication for you worth the externality of Slack, Facebook, Google, etc. harvesting all of our personal data and making it available to those who do not have our best interests in mind? I maintain that it is not. The world, as a whole, would be better off without Slack, Facebook and Google, even if some individual users would be worse off.
EDIT: changed "aviation fuel" to read "aviation gasoline"
Just in case anyone is alarmed, only Avgas is leaded. That's used in ICE / piston engines, generally installed on private aircraft and small regional airliners up to 10 seats or so. It is hoped that alternatives to leaded Avgas will be approved in 2018 or soon thereafter.
The vast, vast majority of passenger-kilometres flown each day use Avtur ( kerosene ) which is not leaded.
By using either you disclose your network of friends, location, the content of your communication, and -- if you didn't take steps to counter it, essentially the majority of web pages you visit.
Well, to some extent they could get a good deal of this information from being in bed with the phone company and the mail service. The difference nowadays is that making things digital has drastically reduced the cost of operating a surveillance dragnet (e.g. cost of copying / storage).
Facebook has web bugs on a significant percentage of web pages, perhaps the majority by visits. They have, in effect, recruited the entire web to spy on users. For reference, the Stasi had at some point 30% of citizens filing surveillance reports on the lives of others.
The fact is merely using these services is enough to grant them a wealth of information that would have required stasi-like organisation not 30years back.
You don't even have to use Facebook to grant them that. Not using Adblock/disconnect is enough to tell them about your virtual whereabouts, and your RL friends will update geotagged pictures of you.
> Are we forced to share anything (really) personal though?
Some would argue having access to pictures of your face (that will be processed by powerful facial analysis software), your phone number, your location and your friends (which often overshare information, perhaps even data about you) is more than enough.
Liking something doesn't mean it's not part of the problem (see google).
You don't like facebook messenger, you like having all your acquaintances in one place (same could be done with federated xmpp).
You don't have to share anything personal to be profiled with a stockpile of data (see metadata), actually you have to take active counter measures to limit that. But even though you are not forced at gunpoint you are manipulated into being part of the mess (be part of the walled garden or be separated from your acquaintances, be online or lose some of your social interactions).
I recommend anyone interested in this to read Open Standards and the Digital Age, by Andrew Russel. The book is a partial refutation of the idea of an 'open web' using historical examples, the most shocking being the failure of open and democratic methods to build an open Internet standard versus the success of Serf and Kahn inventing TCP/IP in a closed and corporate environment, funded by the military. The reality is that some systems critical to the operation of the Internet, such as DNS, are highly centralized, un-open, un-private and un-free, or at least when compared with cyberlibertarian expectations of how the Internet should be. It also addresses other perversions of 'open', such as the irony that some of FLOSS's biggest customers are megacorps like Apple and Microsoft, who up until recently contributed way less back than what they took.
I don't think the web was 'stolen' from 'us', I think people just don't realize how controlling it was before. They're mistaking an epiphany for an actual loss of freedom that may or may not have been there in the first place. We need to fight for a free and open Internet, but let's not kid ourselves with inaccurate and misleading language.