Riff: Use Protocols, Not Services
Good spirited post from notnotp about how protocols are by nature more resilient than services, he touches of the latest Discord news of implementing ID-to-play mechanics.
Somehow I just realised that we have been here before, in the 2000s, the government of half the world and their corporations were on the war path with the Internet, specifically file-sharing, torrent-ing, piracy, you name it.
Why it’s similar
At the core is the same problem: people sharing freely with other people, where freely means free from the control of anyone, including law enforcement.
In the 2000s it was bad quality cam recordings from a movie theatre seat (you wouldn’t believe what people were willing to watch back then!) today is… well I don’t even know what the children must be protect from today, it will be the usual suspects I’m sure…
Anyway the government didn’t know what to do, so it tried everything, scare tactics, lawsuits to the software developers, lawsuits to the admins of famous forum and sites, seizure of websites… did it work?
Spoilers(?): it didn’t work
Piracy has survived, even thrived, since then, it embraced better sec-ops, protocols maturity and obfuscating tech to give plausible deniability, just make it that much harder for local law enforcement to do anything to a single user.
But piracy did not win, it got replaced by a commercial model: Netflix.
Again people might be quick to forget how revolutionary it was to be able to pay a small fee and get legal working streams of big Hollywood productions - it was a market cornered by no one, price insensitive people would buy $20 movies on iTunes, price sensitive and tech savvy people would let their computer run at night to download and seed files, sometimes for days at the time, to get a similar experience - the silent majority was not part of the conversation until Netflix.
The forces of evil will retreat
It’s a hope for now, but a certainty in the long run, the Internet is the protocols, as long as we have those, more interface will be build to serve the same needs under different names.
Kids, it will be fine.