The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't really discussed all too often I find, or are often flagged for a variety of reasons and shutdown.
As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines - programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers, product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.
Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.
No, it isn't just you. I didn't get it either. I never understood why some people use obscure acronyms and assume everyone's going to understand that. It's like complete lack of empathy for the reader.
I was really confused too so I had assumed it was related to something written in the article as I had just opened up the comments
Now that I know CTA means Call to action, its okay but lets be honest that they could have atleast said either CTA (call to action) or just skip the abbreviation itself since I assume a very significant proportion of people were confused so what's exactly the point of an abbreviation like CTA is certainly up to debate and people are definitely debating it so I am waiting for what the overall consensus on the whole thing is :)
At the University of Michigan many moons ago CTA stood for Central Tripping Authority, a largely imaginary collective devoted to taking hallucinogens. (Regularly.) There was CTA graffiti all over East Quadrangle dormitory when I lived there. The meaning was well-understood.
I don't think that is necessarily the case. If you use certain words all the time, shortening them makes sense. They might just forget which abbreviations are and aren't common knowledge. You wouldn't get mad if people use PC, CPU, ATM and RAM, right? Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN. (neither would using "HN")
> Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN.
The set of people who know the term "solid state drive" is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB" and many other terms that have entered the mainstream primarily as an abbreviation.
So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or spell out the full term as a matter of principle; the question is whether it's the abbreviation or the full term that's more commonly known. I'd argue that way fewer people recognize "CTA" than know the term "call to action". I personally have done some front-end development, and didn't know the abbreviation either.
I don't know why people can't take 0.3 seconds to type "what does CTA stand for?" into their favorite search engine/LLM/text-message-to-a-friend. This is "Hacker" News, yes? What do hackers know how to do? Learn things, yes?
Oh, and I also don't know why this needs to come up on approximately every single post that has an abbreviation that someone doesn't know.
It stands for "Chicago transit authority". I don't know about you, but search engines have become useless since last year, I'm talking downright unusable.
The Chicago Transit Authority has existed for only about 70 years despite transit in Chicago being around for 125+ years.
Legislation the governor signed last week all but guarantees that it won’t see its hundredth birthday except possibly as a sticker on the side of the busses and trains. Within 5 years the agency will only have the duty to plan routes within the city limits, and maybe do some of the driver hiring.
It's nice for writing to be sufficiently self-contained for the reader to get the basic meaning without research. How does it affect your sense of perspicacity when a sentence forces you to consult a dictionary just to keep up?
I'm still not sure why this is the author's problem. If a piece of writing is too challenging, you are welcome to disengage from it, and not demand more from the author.
A search engine can tell you what some people mean by the acronym. It can't tell you what this particular author meant. It's like asking an LLM where you left your car keys, or asking Google what your spouse wants for dinner.
Arguably CTA isn't exactly an obscure acronym. It's multi-disciplinary - quite common in UI/UX design and marketing; and also decently common in any branched of software engineering that interact with these topics, like... web development.
CTA is very obscure. As a mobile dev I refuse to call CTA as anything other than click or tap to action in which case it should be TPA. Also many folks (esp. PMs confuse CTAs with button clicks). Anyway, CTA in this context didn’t even ring a distant bell either for call or click and I am glad it didn’t.
I think in UI design it usually is intended to refer to the main thing you want/expect a user to do in any given situation, i.e. having multiple CTAs is a bit of an oxymoron while having multiple buttons is not.
Nah, I meant to type TTA but now that I have mistyped TPA I should make that Tap Pour Action - Tap for Action (I am not trying the double meaning here, just to clarify).
I’ve worked with marketer types for over a decade and had them use the initialism “CTA” hundreds of times, understood it, and yet still in this comment I had no idea that they were referencing that term. If this was a UI diagram I’d have had no problem. This seems to me like a case where using an initialism in a different context than it usually appears confuses readers. It would kind of be like saying “I plan to GTM for a few things after work today.” You may recognize that as Go-To-Market if I said “the GTM team” at work, but it is strange outside that context. Outside a marketing or UI context I don’t think people usually initialize “CTA.”
How many industries can prosper by defining what the customer should get and have an endless stream of demand in response?
Isn’t GTM just “business 101”? I really don’t understand how people can use the term and not realize they are screaming “we’re going to do the basics of what we should have been doing all along”.
Imagine if software developers championed a “logic” based approach.
If said like "let's GTM" it usually means getting on a call. Stands for Go-To-Meeting, the main business videoconference software before Zoom took over.
It might not be obscure in an environment that lives on 'social activity', but I can assure you -- and I am saying this as a person, who survives daily barrages of acronyms, CTA is not common.
It's specific to marketing and it's a term I've only seen used when you are trying to sell a product. In my mind, CTA means "the button we are trying to make you click on by any means necessary because we make money when you click on it"
The one that sticks in my craw is "ofc," especially when it's buried in a wall of text written by someone evidently capable of typing lots of characters in one sitting.
I have deduced that it means "of course," but of course since that expression could of course be sprinkled almost anywhere in a sentence without changing its meaning much, it's of course hard to be sure.
I really don't know why people refuse to look things up. And I don't understand how the parent's comment isn't off-topic and unnecessary and pedantic and mine apparently is. This place is a goddamn cesspool.
They could also write the comment in French, and by the same argument people should need to go out of their way to copy-paste that into google translate.
Thousands of people are going to read this thing. The writer could spare thousands of people spending tens of seconds (totaling days of human life), by simply spending less than a second spelling out the obscure term.
Boy are you going to be surprised when you find out that there is an entire French literary tradition that doesn't concern itself with who does and does not speak the language.
"In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military.[3][5] The satellite service has been employed for humanitarian purposes as well as defense and counterattacks on Russian positions.[6]"
"In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20]"
“ According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim.”
— https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...
It is a fascinating thought. War being against TOS. And enforced thusly. As an abstract idea that is not connected to reality on the ground it offers a.. view into today's mind and what it can be compelled with.
If Starlink does not enforce its TOS, it is a weapon used in the war (guidance system for drones), and its satellites are legitimate targets for air defence.
West uses the same logic to bomb neutral tankers, because they may carry weapon or stuff!
My relatively mild amusement comes from war being against TOS, where war is effectively ultimate break of local level TOS. The only reason it is even discussed in this way is because, as war goes, it is contained. 'Real wars have no terms of service' is my subtle point.
edit: I accept I am a somewhat horrible person to even be able to articulate those thoughts.
It’s hard to be a better advocate without diving into the politics of why we’re in the situation we are, which also doesn’t address the amount of political power you and I have relative to the interests that want said technological consolidation to exist.
And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not sure how you begin to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.
Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any technology, each successive generation inevitably requires larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments should do more to preserve competition but when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the timing wrong that can leave them too financially weak to survive.
> when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support.
Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten?
Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some companies make the fabs and other ones operate them, causing them each to require less capital and be easier to compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate company?
"It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.
I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything. Given that there's the financial incentive to do it, how would you prevent companies from growing vertically? If you declared a legal limit, how would you prevent a single entity from forming a chain of companies, effectively producing one huge vertical company as well?
> I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything.
In general it's the opposite: Internal politics destroys value and a single point of failure is a business risk even if you own it because failure is rarely intentional.
As an example of the first, Kodak invented digital cameras but then failed to capitalize on them because it would have cannibalized their film business, and now their film business is dead anyway but so is the entire company. As an example of the second, Intel has vertically integrated fabs but now that their fabs are behind it's sinking the rest of the company. You could tell a similar story about AMD a decade and a half ago and spinning off their fabs is a big part of what saved them. IBM was also a big vertically integrated monster back in the day and they got out-competed by, well, everybody, and now they're a hollowed out consultancy.
The way out of this for a large conglomerate is to not take internal dependencies. So for example, Samsung makes both DRAM and devices, and they typically use their own DRAM in their own devices. But it's industry standard DRAM that they sell to anyone who is willing to pay them for it, and if Samsung's DRAM fabs all got destroyed by a natural disaster or their technology fell behind for some reason, their device units could immediately switch to a competitor until their DRAM unit got their house back in order. Likewise, if their consumer devices became uncompetitive their DRAM unit could still sell to the rest of the market because they're not fully beholden to a single internal customer. And having that serves as a canary; Intel didn't have external fab customers so it didn't notice them switching to TSMC, which would otherwise have been a red flag.
The "problem" is that you need to have some foresight. Everything's great until it isn't. If a company waits until one of the internal units has a problem before realizing that it's a single point of failure for other business units, it's too late to redesign the ship after you've already hit the iceberg.
Mostly the reason that these things are so capital intensive is due to market consolidation. If you want to do something useful and stay small, you have 2 choices: get crushed by a bigco or get absorbed.
Economics (allocation of scarce resources) is mostly defined by politics. For instance how you said that companies have to shut down if they take one bad risk and they don't get another chance - there was an explicit political decision that companies should work that way.
This piece could be infinitely long trying to address every single angle that is relevant, big or small. Or it could just cut to the heart of the matter and ask us all to fill in the rest. I’m fine with the latter, personally, as the “why” is not really what they’re debating. Whatever the cause(s), the end result is currently undesirable and necessitates action. We can unpack the “why” as we try to fix it.
> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
> We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time.
There are already groups for these things (W3C, ICANN, IEEE, etc.), so how I interpret what you’re saying is that we need to abandon large corporations and go with... what exactly?
I’m not going rally behind a government administration that seeks dictatorial power over everything. That’s much worse than power spread over FAANG.
Most of those groups were co-opted by Big Tech. I can tell from personal experience 20 years ago. In my case Microsoft and Cisco put people dedicated to the standard and we actual coders lost just out of ballooning time required for meetings and pointless complexity.
You can probably say the same for most of STEM academia. That's why I respect the Berkeley people. They are often insane far-far-left zealots, but they are the least corrupted by corporations. That's why you can see great open things like RISC-V come out of "The People's Republic of Berkeley".
Yep. For instance, the linux foundation is just a shadow of its former self, full of CV-stuffing people from global corporations.
Look no further than to corona times, when the LF wanted to develop a global digital vaccine passport. That's basically helping authoritarians, and completely against the open source and decentralization spirit.
A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global corporations from participating. If not, after a few years, due to their power, money and influence, they will have taken over (again).
> A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global corporations from participating. If not, after a few years, due to their power, money and influence, they will have taken over
No amount of ban or rules will prevent those corporations from carrying out a coup on any foundation or even the society itself. They have enough power, money and influence to find loopholes around them and exploit them.
The only way to stop them is to be eternally vigilant, actively recognize their sleazy tactics and push back together as a determined team. That can be achieved only by a smart population whose basic instincts cannot be easily predicted and manipulated by those corporations.
Take the example of the web. When the bigtech hijacked it and went on their bloat-up rampage, the rest of the community should have just forked the standards, cut out the excess fat and extended it with sane, light and orthogonal designs. Instead, we foolishly let chrome extend their monopoly in web development, market share and future designs of the web.
But the rot extends much deeper. Modern educational system teaches us just enough values and advanced knowledge to be the obedient and productive slaves to these corporations, but never enough to question their motives. It misleads us into believing that we and the world economy owe them our survival. It glorifies personal achievements and hyper-individualism to the extend that we suffer major emotional trauma as a result. Yet, are we even compensated appropriately in return for prioritizing our careers? They programmed us to sacrifice our happiness and relationships to enrich some remorseless and obscenely wealthy strangers.
Replying to myself probably breaks some sort of rule somewhere (ye olde double-posting), but I think it's warranted here given the volume of responses this comment of mine has received.
I deliberately left out specific guidance because I wanted exactly the kind of responses we've seen here: a healthy mixture of takes from different backgrounds and perspectives, as well as the opportunity for fatalists to out themselves with the well-tread "just how it is"/"nothing we can do" schtick these sorts of posts tend to encourage. The discussion was the point, and I love seeing the back-and-forth folks have engaged with here over a very broad opinion of mine.
What I'll leave everyone here with is something that's kept me afloat during my own dark times, far, far darker times than we see now:
Just because everything works that way today, doesn't mean it'll work that way tomorrow. None of today was inevitable yesterday, and none of tomorrow is written in stone today. One individual can't fix the world, but enough of us together, focused on a glut of smaller changes, targeting specific problems, acting in concert despite being individuals? That is what drives meaningful change. That is what defines tomorrow.
Don't fret that you can't overturn colossal problems alone. Stop worrying that things have grown too complicated to fix easily. Focus instead on building a community, a movement, an orchestra of change towards causes you believe in. Build more things and share them with others. Do things specifically because you find value in them, even - and especially - if "free markets" or VCs don't. The more you build that you can share, the wider the audience you can reach with your passions, the easier it is to change things for the better.
Immiseration, complexity, monopoly, centralization: they're choices, not inevitabilities.
> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
Part of the reason why we have seen this absurd centralization is complexity. It used to be possible for third parties to tape out an x86-compatible CPU and in fact there were multiple vendors doing this - but it's impossible these days, mostly from a financial viewpoint (you'll probably need a few billion dollars in R&D plus the licensing cost), but also from a technological viewpoint - you'd need to have feature parity with Intel/AMD x86 CPUs and some material improvement actually enticing people to buy your new CPU.
In the end the "free market" will always lead to such concentration effects and, most importantly, to de facto standards because the dominant actor(s) will always be the cross-section of "offers the most features, is used everywhere else, is affordable".
The fix requires governmental intervention (be it anti-trust legislation, mandatory sharing of resources/access for dominant entities or whatever), but sadly we can't even do regime changes to get rid of kleptocrats like the Taliban any more...
Exactly... In fact this realisation has been the main reason why I shifted my views (in my teenage years) from libertarian to more centrist.
Having grown up in a falling communist state full of state sanctioned monopolies I thought free market will sort it out. Later I realised you need a balance between free market and interventionism, but for the latter to work you need a way to prevent corruption and a good justice system. Things that are very hard to come by in many parts of the world
It didn't help that the fall of Yugoslavia and the USSR coincided with Thatcherism/neoliberalism. People widely mistook correlation for causation, although particularly in former pseudo-communist nations that was understandable given how fast progress came in...
But the nasty awakening? That came crashing hard and painful, once the dust settled, a lot of assets got looted and progress mostly stopped.
We should require adherence to US regulatory policy at a minimum for any country that wants to connect to the US internet, and any attempt to circumvent, restrict, or infringe on that will result in a hard disconnect with that state for some period, like a weeklong blackout after each instance of overreach.
Imagine the political revolutions if the petty tyrants take away the circuses.
Do unions work against corporate mergers? I’d imagine they do as they tend to work against corporate interests in general but I’m not that well versed in this sort of history.
I wrote a really long post and pardon me for that if so may be and so I decided to have the tldr on the top of my comment rather than the bottom. I sometimes write long to give people an prospect into my thinking process so I am not sure but just read the TLDR too perhaps and if someone finds long posts enjoyful then buckle up!
TLDR: There are movements like clippy and projects like scaleway and so so many others with forums like lowendtalks etc. to give value on the fact that there are alternatives with open source softwares so we need people who have the knowledge to spark that knowledge in a way understandable by the normal people and that is okay because normal people cant be expected to be all techie like us for the same reason I or you cant be expected to know all about ping pong.
Most of these websites come from Lowendtalk culture and most/some of these cloud providers were themselves users (I talked to one owner of a vps provider) / power users
Let me try to be clear as to what I am saying here: The issue is convenience. Choosing these three global scale public scales, so if something falls down, its convenient/easy to put the blame on AWS for falling down. Nobody would get fired for picking AWS whereas something can definitely be said if they were other providers aside from these three
Now you can read my other comments where people say that there are not enough offerings and yes there are and please read those comments in sake of not repeating contents.
So basically the issues are incentives/convenience and other issues which can be fixed
If you really want you can colocate on datacenters.
This may not be the comment you might want and even now after saying this, the fact still stands that AWS contains a huge traffic and half the internet basically goes down when US-East-1 falls
But what does CTA mean? CTA in my opinion means giving business to other than these few restricted companies. To be honest, there really isn't a reason for having on them in my opinion both in terms of pricing and many other things.
I long have this opinion that your wallet decides the CTA. Who you fund etc. can be the easiest way to generate momentum and CTA. If you are referring to something like a political agitation/movement, these sound nice (and maybe we should have it) but they suffer from plethora of issues.
There are two ways of going through, either convincing the masses to have political voting and then create laws which try to protect their consumers only for nothing to quite happen on that front (germany has some of the highest protection laws but I am not sure how that prevents the fact that even now AWS exists and the triopoly of cloud for most websites)
These companies have malicious compliance and they have billions of dollars for every loophole so they always move faster than the speed of laws/ their revisions.
A personal movement where we try to shame companies is good but in the end if businesses/people still use them, then there exactly isn't a point of it then, do they?
So basically a movement where awareness is raised about corporations doing good deeds and giving them business seems the best way moving forward.
But there is a fault where I don't really want to associate with Scaleway (as the example I gave) but rather the idea of similar possibilities (hetzner,netcup,contabo,ovh,upcloud,reliablesite I can go all day long :) )
So in my opinion the best call to action is giving people the notion/possibilities that there are other options
Edit: I think that homelabbing genuinely helps, in a way I see all of these communites, VPS hosting, these hosting providers themselves and homelabbing to even homelabbing some raspberry pi's to homelabbing over that old pc that is scraping dust to even Saas providers who run on vercel all on a spectrum of varying degrees
In my opinion, there are some solid software available too and I had thought about compiling my own list of niche softwares/services/knowledge I know about but the thing is, most people aren't interested exactly per se and with the recent ram price increase, I am kind of left out so I am probably going to be hosting stuff on a VPS but the market is thinking of raising prices too so the barrier to entry in these markets might increase. One of the reasons I am unable to tinker with a rasp pi is that although its cheap, I live in third world country and I still need to genuinely think through it as an investment and so I just ran termux on an android tab lying around or even my phone for somedays but having to constantly power them
The point I am trying to make is that somehow if you want call to action, you want to convince the masses and I have seen this happen but it needs to happen effectively with the message and not have to mess with the details within which I constantly see happen here and I am guilty of it because my comment here has a high noise:signal ratio but I hope that people are able to make effective slogans/things which stick with people about it
Admittedly, the Clippy Movement by rouis lossman is the only one of such "movements" which has gotten movement and I still see clippy heads (lmao) and I have found that basically clippy heads and I and potentially you and other people reading this on hackernews too.
I don't think that we should seperate movements/spin many tho, that seems antithetical to me personally and I am an idealist in many cases so If the new movements get so detached from average person it can be hard to gain base/support in the first place so movements like clippy are good enough to spread our messages too
I was a clippy head on discord and many places but I slowly removed it from discord but I still have it on YT but I think that there are ways to really condense a lot of information for the average clippy protestor / helping them install linux and many other things
There is no catharsis of the whole situation if you want me to have. The world both looks good and bad at the same time and its mixed.
I think that the only thing we can do is be a realist and still try because we must live and trying is the only thing we can do but I (try?) but sometimes we live in our own bubbles so detached from reality and this is something I am going to work on (on how to communicate to the normal population like jeff geerling is a really good example at it too for homelab nerds, hi jeff if you are reading this)
Little of Russia's mass consumption internet is actual free opinion though. While I do prefer freedom, free speech and people making up their own minds, then if the state is not democratic and if it's propaganda by that it produces, perhaps there is basis to block it?
How convenient is to label opinion you do not agree with as propaganda and ban it in the name of free speech. Hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of so called liberal crowd never ceases to amaze me.
Guess what, by large Russian media is no different to any Western media in terms of propaganda and the "us good, them bad" narrative. Russian media advances Russian interests, American media advances American interests and so on. Take any media openly hostile to the state's foreign policy and it will prosecuted no matter the country. Wikileaks, The Intercept, Junge Welt to name a few.
Yes, this is really my opinion. And unlike yourself, I am well familiar with Russian media first hand and not the distilled version presented by Western propaganda.
The normalization of internet shutdowns as a "riot control" tool is deeply concerning, especially given how technically unsophisticated most implementations are. In many cases, governments aren't doing surgical BGP manipulation - they're literally ordering ISPs to turn off infrastructure or block DNS at the national level. This is the equivalent of cutting power to an entire city to stop a protest in one neighborhood.
What's particularly insidious is the asymmetry: governments can coordinate offline through military/police radio while citizens lose all communication infrastructure. The $1.5B average economic impact cited in the article is conservative - it doesn't account for destroyed business relationships, lost international contracts, or long-term reputation damage from being seen as "internet shutdown country."
The technical countermeasures are evolving but limited. Mesh networks like Briar or Bridgefy work peer-to-peer over Bluetooth but have tiny range. Satellite internet (Starlink) requires hardware that's easy to detect/confiscate. eSIM switching only works if neighboring countries' towers reach across borders. The hardest problem is the "last mile" - even if you can get data out via satellite/mesh, how do you distribute it locally when cellular is down?
We need international frameworks treating internet access as critical infrastructure with humanitarian protections, similar to water/electricity during conflicts. The ITU could mandate technical transparency - requiring governments to publicly log shutdown orders with specific geographic/temporal scope rather than blanket national blackouts. That wouldn't prevent shutdowns but would create accountability records.
I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.
would it be better to start the intentional shutdown at say a couple of minutes before midnight so you know the shutdown wasn't perhaps caused by the leap day bug?
In general I agree, but too much resilience can lead to worse infrastructure. Where I live, a couple hours of unannounced electricity outage every week is a non-event, so wires are patched in more and more points. And there's little motivation to invest significant money and time once to replace them by something more robust.
Centralized infrastructure is fragile and to the extent that the internet has become centralized unscheduled Internet shutdowns are bound to happen. The benefit of scheduled Internet shutdown is that people can prepare for it while at the same time gaining experience which helps with dealing with an unscheduled Internet shutdown.
On the other hand, if we force all systems to be resilient to an internet shutdown then we'd end up regressing society by a lot. Think about how much more work a single doctor is able to handle more efficiently by having internet access (eg. charts, patient history, access to all the world's libraries) that would be lost without the internet.
That's because the unannounced firedrills don't involve setting the building on fire. A "drill" equivalent would be if we all pretended the internet is down sometimes, and in some cases that still might be impossible to do without negative consequences.
It's strange to read so many countries listed in an article about deliberate internet shutdowns, and even India called out as the world's shutdown capitol, and not one mention of China. Internet shutdowns during important political events, or even just national holidays, are common practice in China, have been for decades, and this is widely known. How is it not China that wins the great prize here?
I just recently learned of Meshtastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic) and MeshCore (https://meshcore.nz/), which provide a platform for private and group messaging over P2P LoRa. They don't depend on internet, rely on the community to provide routing nodes, and thus harder to block for governments. It's gaining steam in Europe and can already be used for messaging across wide distances. It's slow though, so forget streaming videos or images. It can only carry messages. But that's often enough to coordinate or spread news.
In my area there are now just enough Meshtastic nodes that I can (somewhat unreliably) talk between my office and home, about 5 miles.
However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git clone, pnpm install, etc.)
I've been working on a virtual machine with all the dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off gridness" of it is touted.
Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.
The bad part is that it cannot create a world wide mesh, as has a low max hop limit (7), and the nodes need lines of sight. So more than 200 km in a mostly flat city is almost imposible.
I wish we had an HF ISM band that could be used for this purposes without needing a license, combined with LoRa radios would yield great results
While it may not be practical from a technical perspective, the current US president has suggested shutting down parts of the Internet to ostensibly combat terrorist recruiting.
Lets be honest about it. There is no political power on this planet that does not see information flow as a vector that needs to be controlled ( and if they don't, sadly, they likely will not remain in power for long.. ). If true, we are just very lucky, it did not happen sooner. In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
> In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet - was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a military objective. But that design was actually useful to the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire internet.
I'm sure that many people will object to this notion with multiple potential problems and several anecdotes. This is something that the corporate world always does. They choose and popularize inferior or suboptimal designs that serve their interests and then insist that it is the only way to do it. But we have numerous individual experiments and projects that demonstrate how effective the original mesh design was - bittorrent, wireless meshnets, IPv6 overlay networks, etc. We just had to put enough effort into it to create a singular cohesive resilient network.
We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
You are right. I am not trying to rewrite history, but I also wonder if, had the planners thought the internet would become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained as it was at the beginning?
<< We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
Separately, it does open an interesting question. Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose ( solar system internet -- assuming private space exploration takes off). I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite ( I am assuming a lot now ) communication standard.
> had the planners thought the internet would become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained as it was at the beginning?
Interesting question. I think that the arpanet took that design because it started as a research project. The corporations today are unlikely to have ever adopted such a design. I don't know how the corporations back in the day were. And as for the actual planners, the relevant question is if they had any reason to believe that it wouldn't grow so big so fast. We know so many examples where research labs and academia came up with products that are revolutionary. Perhaps they did imagine the possibility and were generous enough?
> Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose. I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite communication standard.
That's a very tricky question too. Here's what I think. They would probably cooperate and create an open standard - but only because they want to compete with the dominant player with the first-mover advantage. And that standard would also be so complex that it defeats the purpose of being open, and only they can practically setup anything with it. This is trend that we see widely today - the web standards, kubernetes, bios (or equivalent) firmware, many parts of the Linux software ecosystem, etc. They don't go for the simplest, most logical, orthogonal and easy-to-implement designs, ever.
They succeeded. You're linking to something from 2015 so it was about "ISIS", but in 2025 he did manage to censor TikTok so people wouldn't be "recruited" to "Hamas".
multiple satellite operators are coming on line. what are the odds all of them coordinate to shut down in one region invalidating using the other providers as fail over?
I might be mistaken, but as far as I know there is currently no other LEO broadband provider that is meaningfully comparable at a global scale.
Starlink is often treated as the reference point not because it is perfect or fully resilient,
but because there is no second network at a similar scale that could realistically serve as a failover today.
If we imagine a hypothetical future where three mature operators exist, then yes — absent coordinated political or geopolitical action, at least one network might remain online.
However, even that surviving operator would not necessarily provide full coverage of the affected region.
Global redundancy is extremely hard in practice, because maintaining continuous, worldwide LEO coverage is not free — it requires massive capex and opex, ground stations, regulatory permissions, and local political approval.
True worldwide failover remains more of a theoretical construct than an operational reality.
That particular section I have to Wikipedia article seems to have gone through a bunch of anonymous edits back and forth around the content of this citation
Probably because it's not actually a truthful characterization of what happened! I know it's popular to find every possible reason to bag on Musk, but you don't need to resort to disinformation to do it.
Can't talk for the USA, but it's widely acknowledged that the spread of broadband in Europe was driven by P2P and tools like Emule/eDonkey or BitTorrent.
We need some similar killer application for satellite connectivity and mesh networking. Something that makes the technology so requested and so ubiquitous in such a short time that it couldn't be banned even if they tried.
In Tanzania they went around to hotels during the ban to make sure they didn't have starlink. It's illegal here but many have it. During that time some enterprising individuals charged tourists to access theirs.
The beam forming used by Starlink (and Starshield) is highly resistant to jamming. But Starlink doesn't offer service in some countries. And the ground terminals can be detected.
The US hasn't really won any war for the long term since WW2. It turns out it's hard to change people's opinion by bombing them. Equipment is good at destroying the other sides's factories, and making people afraid of you (though even that's usually done with on-the-ground police boots) but it can't actually make people agree with your side, and in fact, seems to usually have the opposite effect. They can only hold control temporarily as long as they apply massive military pressure. As soon as they let up the pressure, they lose.
It probably has something to do with the strict top-down control structure. It's a Linux vs Microsoft situation. Large organisations, regardless of type, cannot innovate.
The recently released One Battle After Another reinforces the impotence of legal rights against a corrupt government entity. In the situations Schneier envisions, corruption will almost certainly be at play.
According to Gigazine (Osaka, est. 2000), "In 2024, there were 296 internet shutdowns in 54 countries around the world, with Myanmar, India, Pakistan and Russia accounting for about 70% of the total."
Its become clear that the axiom “The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It” as no longer true. It hasnt been since before 2010 anecdotely but the data Schneier presents here is undeniable
This is still somewhat true. For example, Russia is now frequently shutting down mobile Internet. Ostensibly for protection against drone attacks, but even it had to relent a bit and allow at least some whitelisted services to work.
So immediately local VPN companies started providing the unrestricted access through proxies at these services.
India doesn’t do any of this. This is all propaganda by CIA, Ford Foundation, and George Soros. India is the biggest democracy and we had autonomous and conscious flying air-things when the world barely even existed in this form i.e. millennia ago. This is the best UNESCO certified country in the world led by a non-biological (in His own words) head of state. Now, bow!
PS. Don’t forget the zero! You still owe us that much.
One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable.
Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.
I also think that you should be able to do stuff without requiring internet access, and also should be able to do stuff without requiring electrical power, etc. You should not be overly reliance on technology. They can be useful (in many ways), but should not be mandatory to rely on, and furthermore should avoid damaging the natural environments for such technology, and also avoid damaging the possibility of working without them.
why is this flagged? (maybe Theo? I don’t know this person).
Its absolutely a good argument against fragile IoT devices that have no local/offline mode and the ever increasing lurch of internet requirements for our daily life.
I’m not sure my phone does much of anything without an internet connection. Yet it is my primary banking and authentication method (via BankID).
EDIT: Theodore Kaczynski is the unabomber… well, thats an odd name to drop and maybe not an ideal candidate for life advice.
It's getting downvoted because (1) this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating (2) he's giving life advice from a terrorist mass murderer.
Yes, you're not at risk from being cut off from the world if you're not connected to it in the first place. That's not a state most of us want to exist in. Ted Kaczynski lived in a small cabin in the woods away from humanity.
The solutions requiring constant internet connection are pushed by states and companies because they help cutting costs and gathering information. However, the users are often more vulnerable to the risks if the technology fails but have relatively little say.
The solutions that do much the same but require internet connection only once a day or even once an hour would be much more resilient and safe but currently there are few incentives for providers to develop and offer them.
The extreme situations like war or dictatorship are good awakening calls but it is easy to see there are lots of risks involved even if things would go rather smoothly otherwise.
No one in their right mind believes that you can accomplish widespread, high speed communication via "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet. It has become a very important way that we share information broadly, deal with emergencies, and stay informed. Going back to the stone age is not a good option at this point. But you know that, and you're just posting nonsense to have an argument.
> No one in their right mind believes that you can accomplish widespread, high speed communication via "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet.
Nobody claimed that. I'm not sure whether this sort of comms is meaningful at all or whether "staying informed" is just the dopamine thing in effect.
> Going back to the stone age
Its actually 20 years ago. That's less than the median age.
Living without the Internet is still doable.
Just a little bit harder.
You gonna lose some time and money (buying bus tickets physically and not buying cheap junk over the internet, BUT you're gonna gain like literally 6h per day :)
Been there, done that. Its net positive experience.
Just like going back to 1999.
We used to carry paper pieces called 'bank notes' or 'bills' and round metal disks called 'coins' in a small leather pouch in our pockets called wallets. They were pretty effective for payments without much of an infrastructure. Even banks worked using paper documents and books.
I know this sounds a bit too condescending. But that's honestly not my intention. I just couldn't help it! Jokes aside, it's true that we often forget that these things can be done and were done without the internet. But more importantly, there are 2 dangerous implications for our over reliance on the internet for our financial activities. The first is that the government or a non-state actor can easily disrupt our commercial and personal activity unintentionally or as a retribution. We have effectively surrendered our financial autonomy to multiple powerful players.
The second major problem is if we ever face a post-apocalyptic situation with regards to modern technology. We already have only a few fabs that can meet the global demand for advanced ICs. We have already seen our vulnerability to one of them when a flood there caused supply chain disruptions and a slump in even automobile markets. HDD and SSD manufacturers have similar weaknesses. Meanwhile, DRAM manufacturers are placing all their (gambling) chips in the AI hyperscaler market, threatening to disrupt every market from smartphones, laptops and consumer appliances to military and commercial jets, ATC, shipping, railway signalling, telecom infrastructure, etc. The technology apocalypse isn't that farfetched and we are extremely vulnerable to it.
Depends where one lives. In my location there is zero dependency on the internet. It's just a convenience thing and the growing number of miscreants on the internet is negating that balance for me personally. Sooner than later I am going back to a landline and ditching the cell phone.
> I suspect most can guess where this mess will end up, and it’s not good.
What I read from this is going to sound conspiratorial, but I think it’s a valid “read between the lines” of an insider. I think they’re saying that they’re alarmed that Silicon Valley is supporting the current U.S. administration assuming he’s doing what’s best for their welfare, while it’s clear based on the activities of Iran and others that are practicing working without internet that they are planning on losing internet, which could either be because Iran, Russia, China, or the U.S. itself may plan to sever or disable internet connections (while unsure what would be isolated or disabled) as an act of war or extreme and dangerously naive nationalism.
Worship of the eternal steady-state. Whoever speaks against any intervention to preserve it is a heretic, and must be excommunicated.
Whether it’s ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe people will host more information offline, and become less dependent on cloud services…
The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't really discussed all too often I find, or are often flagged for a variety of reasons and shutdown.
As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines - programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers, product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.
== Call To Action
Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.
> Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet
No, it isn't just you. I didn't get it either. I never understood why some people use obscure acronyms and assume everyone's going to understand that. It's like complete lack of empathy for the reader.
I was really confused too so I had assumed it was related to something written in the article as I had just opened up the comments
Now that I know CTA means Call to action, its okay but lets be honest that they could have atleast said either CTA (call to action) or just skip the abbreviation itself since I assume a very significant proportion of people were confused so what's exactly the point of an abbreviation like CTA is certainly up to debate and people are definitely debating it so I am waiting for what the overall consensus on the whole thing is :)
At the University of Michigan many moons ago CTA stood for Central Tripping Authority, a largely imaginary collective devoted to taking hallucinogens. (Regularly.) There was CTA graffiti all over East Quadrangle dormitory when I lived there. The meaning was well-understood.
Moral: A good TLA can be surprisingly memorable.
(edited)
Thanks. I don’t know why people use obscure abbreviations and acronyms.
There is absolutely no issue with using obscure abbreviations or acronyms as long as it is defined in the first use.
In scientific papers (where acronyms are common) this is definitely the rule.
IA (I agree).
IAOTM (I approve of this message)
They think it makes them sound knowledgable.
I don't think that is necessarily the case. If you use certain words all the time, shortening them makes sense. They might just forget which abbreviations are and aren't common knowledge. You wouldn't get mad if people use PC, CPU, ATM and RAM, right? Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN. (neither would using "HN")
> Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN.
The set of people who know the term "solid state drive" is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB" and many other terms that have entered the mainstream primarily as an abbreviation.
So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or spell out the full term as a matter of principle; the question is whether it's the abbreviation or the full term that's more commonly known. I'd argue that way fewer people recognize "CTA" than know the term "call to action". I personally have done some front-end development, and didn't know the abbreviation either.
And "ATM machine" tells me most people think the acronym is the name instead of an acronym.
Without context ATM could be Asynchronous Transfer Mode or automated teller machine.
At the moment
No, they're just not pandering to children who can't help themselves.
I don't know why people can't take 0.3 seconds to type "what does CTA stand for?" into their favorite search engine/LLM/text-message-to-a-friend. This is "Hacker" News, yes? What do hackers know how to do? Learn things, yes?
Oh, and I also don't know why this needs to come up on approximately every single post that has an abbreviation that someone doesn't know.
It stands for "Chicago transit authority". I don't know about you, but search engines have become useless since last year, I'm talking downright unusable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTA
The Chicago Transit Authority has existed for only about 70 years despite transit in Chicago being around for 125+ years.
Legislation the governor signed last week all but guarantees that it won’t see its hundredth birthday except possibly as a sticker on the side of the busses and trains. Within 5 years the agency will only have the duty to plan routes within the city limits, and maybe do some of the driver hiring.
I googled it and it was defined as a marketing term, so I figured that can’t be the right one in a comment about freedom of speech.
To be exact, it takes more time than 0.3s to type it, even for a fast typer.
I don't know why people can't not exaggerate things? Doing it is certainly making their message less reliable, not more
It's nice for writing to be sufficiently self-contained for the reader to get the basic meaning without research. How does it affect your sense of perspicacity when a sentence forces you to consult a dictionary just to keep up?
I'm still not sure why this is the author's problem. If a piece of writing is too challenging, you are welcome to disengage from it, and not demand more from the author.
You are absolutely right that communication need not be effective.
A search engine can tell you what some people mean by the acronym. It can't tell you what this particular author meant. It's like asking an LLM where you left your car keys, or asking Google what your spouse wants for dinner.
I don't see why that's the author's responsibility to manage this for you.
Arguably CTA isn't exactly an obscure acronym. It's multi-disciplinary - quite common in UI/UX design and marketing; and also decently common in any branched of software engineering that interact with these topics, like... web development.
CTA is very obscure. As a mobile dev I refuse to call CTA as anything other than click or tap to action in which case it should be TPA. Also many folks (esp. PMs confuse CTAs with button clicks). Anyway, CTA in this context didn’t even ring a distant bell either for call or click and I am glad it didn’t.
I think in UI design it usually is intended to refer to the main thing you want/expect a user to do in any given situation, i.e. having multiple CTAs is a bit of an oxymoron while having multiple buttons is not.
Wait, the acronym for "Tap To Action" is "TPA"?
Nah, I meant to type TTA but now that I have mistyped TPA I should make that Tap Pour Action - Tap for Action (I am not trying the double meaning here, just to clarify).
I’ve worked with marketer types for over a decade and had them use the initialism “CTA” hundreds of times, understood it, and yet still in this comment I had no idea that they were referencing that term. If this was a UI diagram I’d have had no problem. This seems to me like a case where using an initialism in a different context than it usually appears confuses readers. It would kind of be like saying “I plan to GTM for a few things after work today.” You may recognize that as Go-To-Market if I said “the GTM team” at work, but it is strange outside that context. Outside a marketing or UI context I don’t think people usually initialize “CTA.”
What the hell does GTM even mean?
How many industries can prosper by defining what the customer should get and have an endless stream of demand in response?
Isn’t GTM just “business 101”? I really don’t understand how people can use the term and not realize they are screaming “we’re going to do the basics of what we should have been doing all along”.
Imagine if software developers championed a “logic” based approach.
If said like "let's GTM" it usually means getting on a call. Stands for Go-To-Meeting, the main business videoconference software before Zoom took over.
It might not be obscure in an environment that lives on 'social activity', but I can assure you -- and I am saying this as a person, who survives daily barrages of acronyms, CTA is not common.
“Call to Action” is common. CTA instead of call to action is not common.
I've worked in software engineering on Internet things for decades and I have not once heard or seen this abbreviated before.
It's specific to marketing and it's a term I've only seen used when you are trying to sell a product. In my mind, CTA means "the button we are trying to make you click on by any means necessary because we make money when you click on it"
The one that sticks in my craw is "ofc," especially when it's buried in a wall of text written by someone evidently capable of typing lots of characters in one sitting.
I have deduced that it means "of course," but of course since that expression could of course be sprinkled almost anywhere in a sentence without changing its meaning much, it's of course hard to be sure.
I really don't know why people refuse to look things up. And I don't understand how the parent's comment isn't off-topic and unnecessary and pedantic and mine apparently is. This place is a goddamn cesspool.
[flagged]
They could also write the comment in French, and by the same argument people should need to go out of their way to copy-paste that into google translate.
Thousands of people are going to read this thing. The writer could spare thousands of people spending tens of seconds (totaling days of human life), by simply spending less than a second spelling out the obscure term.
Boy are you going to be surprised when you find out that there is an entire French literary tradition that doesn't concern itself with who does and does not speak the language.
Who's going all the way to Google translate to copy and paste? You just select the text and right click/long press and select translate.
I'm not sure what you are attempting to add by being pedantic while not affecting the conclusion in any what whatsoever.
Call to Arms! ^_^
>> Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine
"In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military.[3][5] The satellite service has been employed for humanitarian purposes as well as defense and counterattacks on Russian positions.[6]"
"In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
“ According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim.” — https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...
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I am sure it is against Terms of Service to use Starlink to bomb people!
Last time starlink was used to sank tanker near Turkey. It was miracle tanker was empty, and there was no ecological catastrophe!
IIRC, that tanker was chosen preciselybecause it was empty and would not cause an ecological disaster. Not much of a miracle.
“It is a crime to commit crimes using our product or service”
Yeah… crimes are crimes.
It is a fascinating thought. War being against TOS. And enforced thusly. As an abstract idea that is not connected to reality on the ground it offers a.. view into today's mind and what it can be compelled with.
If Starlink does not enforce its TOS, it is a weapon used in the war (guidance system for drones), and its satellites are legitimate targets for air defence.
West uses the same logic to bomb neutral tankers, because they may carry weapon or stuff!
My relatively mild amusement comes from war being against TOS, where war is effectively ultimate break of local level TOS. The only reason it is even discussed in this way is because, as war goes, it is contained. 'Real wars have no terms of service' is my subtle point.
edit: I accept I am a somewhat horrible person to even be able to articulate those thoughts.
> accept I am a somewhat horrible person to even be able to articulate those thoughts.
No, you’re simply thoughtful and a realist. To acknowledge something doesn’t mean you agree with or endorse it.
It’s hard to be a better advocate without diving into the politics of why we’re in the situation we are, which also doesn’t address the amount of political power you and I have relative to the interests that want said technological consolidation to exist.
And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not sure how you begin to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.
Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any technology, each successive generation inevitably requires larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments should do more to preserve competition but when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the timing wrong that can leave them too financially weak to survive.
> when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support.
Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten?
Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some companies make the fabs and other ones operate them, causing them each to require less capital and be easier to compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate company?
"It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.
I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything. Given that there's the financial incentive to do it, how would you prevent companies from growing vertically? If you declared a legal limit, how would you prevent a single entity from forming a chain of companies, effectively producing one huge vertical company as well?
> I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything.
In general it's the opposite: Internal politics destroys value and a single point of failure is a business risk even if you own it because failure is rarely intentional.
As an example of the first, Kodak invented digital cameras but then failed to capitalize on them because it would have cannibalized their film business, and now their film business is dead anyway but so is the entire company. As an example of the second, Intel has vertically integrated fabs but now that their fabs are behind it's sinking the rest of the company. You could tell a similar story about AMD a decade and a half ago and spinning off their fabs is a big part of what saved them. IBM was also a big vertically integrated monster back in the day and they got out-competed by, well, everybody, and now they're a hollowed out consultancy.
The way out of this for a large conglomerate is to not take internal dependencies. So for example, Samsung makes both DRAM and devices, and they typically use their own DRAM in their own devices. But it's industry standard DRAM that they sell to anyone who is willing to pay them for it, and if Samsung's DRAM fabs all got destroyed by a natural disaster or their technology fell behind for some reason, their device units could immediately switch to a competitor until their DRAM unit got their house back in order. Likewise, if their consumer devices became uncompetitive their DRAM unit could still sell to the rest of the market because they're not fully beholden to a single internal customer. And having that serves as a canary; Intel didn't have external fab customers so it didn't notice them switching to TSMC, which would otherwise have been a red flag.
The "problem" is that you need to have some foresight. Everything's great until it isn't. If a company waits until one of the internal units has a problem before realizing that it's a single point of failure for other business units, it's too late to redesign the ship after you've already hit the iceberg.
By enforcing antitrust laws, like it has been done many times in history?
Mostly the reason that these things are so capital intensive is due to market consolidation. If you want to do something useful and stay small, you have 2 choices: get crushed by a bigco or get absorbed.
That's politics.
Economics (allocation of scarce resources) is mostly defined by politics. For instance how you said that companies have to shut down if they take one bad risk and they don't get another chance - there was an explicit political decision that companies should work that way.
This piece could be infinitely long trying to address every single angle that is relevant, big or small. Or it could just cut to the heart of the matter and ask us all to fill in the rest. I’m fine with the latter, personally, as the “why” is not really what they’re debating. Whatever the cause(s), the end result is currently undesirable and necessitates action. We can unpack the “why” as we try to fix it.
> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
> We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time.
There are already groups for these things (W3C, ICANN, IEEE, etc.), so how I interpret what you’re saying is that we need to abandon large corporations and go with... what exactly?
I’m not going rally behind a government administration that seeks dictatorial power over everything. That’s much worse than power spread over FAANG.
Most of those groups were co-opted by Big Tech. I can tell from personal experience 20 years ago. In my case Microsoft and Cisco put people dedicated to the standard and we actual coders lost just out of ballooning time required for meetings and pointless complexity.
You can probably say the same for most of STEM academia. That's why I respect the Berkeley people. They are often insane far-far-left zealots, but they are the least corrupted by corporations. That's why you can see great open things like RISC-V come out of "The People's Republic of Berkeley".
Yep. For instance, the linux foundation is just a shadow of its former self, full of CV-stuffing people from global corporations.
Look no further than to corona times, when the LF wanted to develop a global digital vaccine passport. That's basically helping authoritarians, and completely against the open source and decentralization spirit.
A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global corporations from participating. If not, after a few years, due to their power, money and influence, they will have taken over (again).
> A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global corporations from participating. If not, after a few years, due to their power, money and influence, they will have taken over
No amount of ban or rules will prevent those corporations from carrying out a coup on any foundation or even the society itself. They have enough power, money and influence to find loopholes around them and exploit them.
The only way to stop them is to be eternally vigilant, actively recognize their sleazy tactics and push back together as a determined team. That can be achieved only by a smart population whose basic instincts cannot be easily predicted and manipulated by those corporations.
Take the example of the web. When the bigtech hijacked it and went on their bloat-up rampage, the rest of the community should have just forked the standards, cut out the excess fat and extended it with sane, light and orthogonal designs. Instead, we foolishly let chrome extend their monopoly in web development, market share and future designs of the web.
But the rot extends much deeper. Modern educational system teaches us just enough values and advanced knowledge to be the obedient and productive slaves to these corporations, but never enough to question their motives. It misleads us into believing that we and the world economy owe them our survival. It glorifies personal achievements and hyper-individualism to the extend that we suffer major emotional trauma as a result. Yet, are we even compensated appropriately in return for prioritizing our careers? They programmed us to sacrifice our happiness and relationships to enrich some remorseless and obscenely wealthy strangers.
How passionately do you feel about that position every time AWS us-east-1 goes down?
I'll admit that my early morning eyes saw "CYA". Which I'll admit had me scratching my head...
Replying to myself probably breaks some sort of rule somewhere (ye olde double-posting), but I think it's warranted here given the volume of responses this comment of mine has received.
I deliberately left out specific guidance because I wanted exactly the kind of responses we've seen here: a healthy mixture of takes from different backgrounds and perspectives, as well as the opportunity for fatalists to out themselves with the well-tread "just how it is"/"nothing we can do" schtick these sorts of posts tend to encourage. The discussion was the point, and I love seeing the back-and-forth folks have engaged with here over a very broad opinion of mine.
What I'll leave everyone here with is something that's kept me afloat during my own dark times, far, far darker times than we see now:
Just because everything works that way today, doesn't mean it'll work that way tomorrow. None of today was inevitable yesterday, and none of tomorrow is written in stone today. One individual can't fix the world, but enough of us together, focused on a glut of smaller changes, targeting specific problems, acting in concert despite being individuals? That is what drives meaningful change. That is what defines tomorrow.
Don't fret that you can't overturn colossal problems alone. Stop worrying that things have grown too complicated to fix easily. Focus instead on building a community, a movement, an orchestra of change towards causes you believe in. Build more things and share them with others. Do things specifically because you find value in them, even - and especially - if "free markets" or VCs don't. The more you build that you can share, the wider the audience you can reach with your passions, the easier it is to change things for the better.
Immiseration, complexity, monopoly, centralization: they're choices, not inevitabilities.
> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
Part of the reason why we have seen this absurd centralization is complexity. It used to be possible for third parties to tape out an x86-compatible CPU and in fact there were multiple vendors doing this - but it's impossible these days, mostly from a financial viewpoint (you'll probably need a few billion dollars in R&D plus the licensing cost), but also from a technological viewpoint - you'd need to have feature parity with Intel/AMD x86 CPUs and some material improvement actually enticing people to buy your new CPU.
In the end the "free market" will always lead to such concentration effects and, most importantly, to de facto standards because the dominant actor(s) will always be the cross-section of "offers the most features, is used everywhere else, is affordable".
The fix requires governmental intervention (be it anti-trust legislation, mandatory sharing of resources/access for dominant entities or whatever), but sadly we can't even do regime changes to get rid of kleptocrats like the Taliban any more...
Exactly... In fact this realisation has been the main reason why I shifted my views (in my teenage years) from libertarian to more centrist.
Having grown up in a falling communist state full of state sanctioned monopolies I thought free market will sort it out. Later I realised you need a balance between free market and interventionism, but for the latter to work you need a way to prevent corruption and a good justice system. Things that are very hard to come by in many parts of the world
It didn't help that the fall of Yugoslavia and the USSR coincided with Thatcherism/neoliberalism. People widely mistook correlation for causation, although particularly in former pseudo-communist nations that was understandable given how fast progress came in...
But the nasty awakening? That came crashing hard and painful, once the dust settled, a lot of assets got looted and progress mostly stopped.
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We should require adherence to US regulatory policy at a minimum for any country that wants to connect to the US internet, and any attempt to circumvent, restrict, or infringe on that will result in a hard disconnect with that state for some period, like a weeklong blackout after each instance of overreach.
Imagine the political revolutions if the petty tyrants take away the circuses.
Do unions work against corporate mergers? I’d imagine they do as they tend to work against corporate interests in general but I’m not that well versed in this sort of history.
Unions tend to work for people.
If you think that working for people is against corporate interests then I think we should just be dine with corporations.
I like people!
It probably depends on the corporations. If a merger would result in all of the union’s employees being laid off, of course the union would fight it.
Depends on the union and the laws under which they operate.
Antitrust law does. That requires a government that cares to enforce the law.
I wrote a really long post and pardon me for that if so may be and so I decided to have the tldr on the top of my comment rather than the bottom. I sometimes write long to give people an prospect into my thinking process so I am not sure but just read the TLDR too perhaps and if someone finds long posts enjoyful then buckle up!
TLDR: There are movements like clippy and projects like scaleway and so so many others with forums like lowendtalks etc. to give value on the fact that there are alternatives with open source softwares so we need people who have the knowledge to spark that knowledge in a way understandable by the normal people and that is okay because normal people cant be expected to be all techie like us for the same reason I or you cant be expected to know all about ping pong.
https://www.scaleway.com/en/news/scaleway-launches-its-risc-...
> Featuring the T-HEAD TH1520 SoC, 16GB RAM and 128GB storage at a price of €15.99 per month, Elastic Metal RV1 is accessible to all budgets
Scaleway :- a non three global-scale public clouds offering riscv from a custom manufacturer from a list might be something of your interest then :)
Sir, I understand that the world is getting centralized since that is the fact but I have started to frequent more on https://vpspricetracker.com/ , https://serverdeals.cc/ , https://serververify.com/ , https://lowendtalk.com/ etc. (sorry for sending more links but I have a whole list of awesome stuff on a yopad/etherpad instance)
Most of these websites come from Lowendtalk culture and most/some of these cloud providers were themselves users (I talked to one owner of a vps provider) / power users
Let me try to be clear as to what I am saying here: The issue is convenience. Choosing these three global scale public scales, so if something falls down, its convenient/easy to put the blame on AWS for falling down. Nobody would get fired for picking AWS whereas something can definitely be said if they were other providers aside from these three
Now you can read my other comments where people say that there are not enough offerings and yes there are and please read those comments in sake of not repeating contents.
So basically the issues are incentives/convenience and other issues which can be fixed
If you really want you can colocate on datacenters.
This may not be the comment you might want and even now after saying this, the fact still stands that AWS contains a huge traffic and half the internet basically goes down when US-East-1 falls
But what does CTA mean? CTA in my opinion means giving business to other than these few restricted companies. To be honest, there really isn't a reason for having on them in my opinion both in terms of pricing and many other things.
I long have this opinion that your wallet decides the CTA. Who you fund etc. can be the easiest way to generate momentum and CTA. If you are referring to something like a political agitation/movement, these sound nice (and maybe we should have it) but they suffer from plethora of issues.
There are two ways of going through, either convincing the masses to have political voting and then create laws which try to protect their consumers only for nothing to quite happen on that front (germany has some of the highest protection laws but I am not sure how that prevents the fact that even now AWS exists and the triopoly of cloud for most websites)
These companies have malicious compliance and they have billions of dollars for every loophole so they always move faster than the speed of laws/ their revisions.
A personal movement where we try to shame companies is good but in the end if businesses/people still use them, then there exactly isn't a point of it then, do they?
So basically a movement where awareness is raised about corporations doing good deeds and giving them business seems the best way moving forward.
But there is a fault where I don't really want to associate with Scaleway (as the example I gave) but rather the idea of similar possibilities (hetzner,netcup,contabo,ovh,upcloud,reliablesite I can go all day long :) )
So in my opinion the best call to action is giving people the notion/possibilities that there are other options
Edit: I think that homelabbing genuinely helps, in a way I see all of these communites, VPS hosting, these hosting providers themselves and homelabbing to even homelabbing some raspberry pi's to homelabbing over that old pc that is scraping dust to even Saas providers who run on vercel all on a spectrum of varying degrees
In my opinion, there are some solid software available too and I had thought about compiling my own list of niche softwares/services/knowledge I know about but the thing is, most people aren't interested exactly per se and with the recent ram price increase, I am kind of left out so I am probably going to be hosting stuff on a VPS but the market is thinking of raising prices too so the barrier to entry in these markets might increase. One of the reasons I am unable to tinker with a rasp pi is that although its cheap, I live in third world country and I still need to genuinely think through it as an investment and so I just ran termux on an android tab lying around or even my phone for somedays but having to constantly power them
The point I am trying to make is that somehow if you want call to action, you want to convince the masses and I have seen this happen but it needs to happen effectively with the message and not have to mess with the details within which I constantly see happen here and I am guilty of it because my comment here has a high noise:signal ratio but I hope that people are able to make effective slogans/things which stick with people about it
Admittedly, the Clippy Movement by rouis lossman is the only one of such "movements" which has gotten movement and I still see clippy heads (lmao) and I have found that basically clippy heads and I and potentially you and other people reading this on hackernews too.
I don't think that we should seperate movements/spin many tho, that seems antithetical to me personally and I am an idealist in many cases so If the new movements get so detached from average person it can be hard to gain base/support in the first place so movements like clippy are good enough to spread our messages too
I was a clippy head on discord and many places but I slowly removed it from discord but I still have it on YT but I think that there are ways to really condense a lot of information for the average clippy protestor / helping them install linux and many other things
There is no catharsis of the whole situation if you want me to have. The world both looks good and bad at the same time and its mixed.
I think that the only thing we can do is be a realist and still try because we must live and trying is the only thing we can do but I (try?) but sometimes we live in our own bubbles so detached from reality and this is something I am going to work on (on how to communicate to the normal population like jeff geerling is a really good example at it too for homelab nerds, hi jeff if you are reading this)
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One of these things is not like the others..
Little of Russia's mass consumption internet is actual free opinion though. While I do prefer freedom, free speech and people making up their own minds, then if the state is not democratic and if it's propaganda by that it produces, perhaps there is basis to block it?
How convenient is to label opinion you do not agree with as propaganda and ban it in the name of free speech. Hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of so called liberal crowd never ceases to amaze me.
Guess what, by large Russian media is no different to any Western media in terms of propaganda and the "us good, them bad" narrative. Russian media advances Russian interests, American media advances American interests and so on. Take any media openly hostile to the state's foreign policy and it will prosecuted no matter the country. Wikileaks, The Intercept, Junge Welt to name a few.
Yes, this is really my opinion. And unlike yourself, I am well familiar with Russian media first hand and not the distilled version presented by Western propaganda.
How convenient it is to label troll-farm propaganda as "opinions you do not agree with"
Is it really your opinion if you're paid to pretend to hold it?
The normalization of internet shutdowns as a "riot control" tool is deeply concerning, especially given how technically unsophisticated most implementations are. In many cases, governments aren't doing surgical BGP manipulation - they're literally ordering ISPs to turn off infrastructure or block DNS at the national level. This is the equivalent of cutting power to an entire city to stop a protest in one neighborhood.
What's particularly insidious is the asymmetry: governments can coordinate offline through military/police radio while citizens lose all communication infrastructure. The $1.5B average economic impact cited in the article is conservative - it doesn't account for destroyed business relationships, lost international contracts, or long-term reputation damage from being seen as "internet shutdown country."
The technical countermeasures are evolving but limited. Mesh networks like Briar or Bridgefy work peer-to-peer over Bluetooth but have tiny range. Satellite internet (Starlink) requires hardware that's easy to detect/confiscate. eSIM switching only works if neighboring countries' towers reach across borders. The hardest problem is the "last mile" - even if you can get data out via satellite/mesh, how do you distribute it locally when cellular is down?
We need international frameworks treating internet access as critical infrastructure with humanitarian protections, similar to water/electricity during conflicts. The ITU could mandate technical transparency - requiring governments to publicly log shutdown orders with specific geographic/temporal scope rather than blanket national blackouts. That wouldn't prevent shutdowns but would create accountability records.
I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.
> Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.
Advantage: You no longer need to fix that leap day bug on your website.
would it be better to start the intentional shutdown at say a couple of minutes before midnight so you know the shutdown wasn't perhaps caused by the leap day bug?
In general I agree, but too much resilience can lead to worse infrastructure. Where I live, a couple hours of unannounced electricity outage every week is a non-event, so wires are patched in more and more points. And there's little motivation to invest significant money and time once to replace them by something more robust.
It would leave most developed countries in chaos, people would die because of it.
Centralized infrastructure is fragile and to the extent that the internet has become centralized unscheduled Internet shutdowns are bound to happen. The benefit of scheduled Internet shutdown is that people can prepare for it while at the same time gaining experience which helps with dealing with an unscheduled Internet shutdown.
On the other hand, if we force all systems to be resilient to an internet shutdown then we'd end up regressing society by a lot. Think about how much more work a single doctor is able to handle more efficiently by having internet access (eg. charts, patient history, access to all the world's libraries) that would be lost without the internet.
If we don't force critical systems to be resilient to an internet shutdown, we'll be doing the meme. Specifically:
Weinberg’s 2nd Law:
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
we do annual unannounced firedrills and now one dies as a consequence.
That's because the unannounced firedrills don't involve setting the building on fire. A "drill" equivalent would be if we all pretended the internet is down sometimes, and in some cases that still might be impossible to do without negative consequences.
Fire drills do involve denying access, though. We wouldn't need to bomb the datacenters but we would need to make them inaccessible.
It's strange to read so many countries listed in an article about deliberate internet shutdowns, and even India called out as the world's shutdown capitol, and not one mention of China. Internet shutdowns during important political events, or even just national holidays, are common practice in China, have been for decades, and this is widely known. How is it not China that wins the great prize here?
I just recently learned of Meshtastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic) and MeshCore (https://meshcore.nz/), which provide a platform for private and group messaging over P2P LoRa. They don't depend on internet, rely on the community to provide routing nodes, and thus harder to block for governments. It's gaining steam in Europe and can already be used for messaging across wide distances. It's slow though, so forget streaming videos or images. It can only carry messages. But that's often enough to coordinate or spread news.
In my area there are now just enough Meshtastic nodes that I can (somewhat unreliably) talk between my office and home, about 5 miles.
However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git clone, pnpm install, etc.)
I've been working on a virtual machine with all the dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off gridness" of it is touted.
Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.
The bad part is that it cannot create a world wide mesh, as has a low max hop limit (7), and the nodes need lines of sight. So more than 200 km in a mostly flat city is almost imposible.
I wish we had an HF ISM band that could be used for this purposes without needing a license, combined with LoRa radios would yield great results
While it may not be practical from a technical perspective, the current US president has suggested shutting down parts of the Internet to ostensibly combat terrorist recruiting.
https://time.com/4150891/republican-debate-donald-trump-inte...
Lets be honest about it. There is no political power on this planet that does not see information flow as a vector that needs to be controlled ( and if they don't, sadly, they likely will not remain in power for long.. ). If true, we are just very lucky, it did not happen sooner. In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
> In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet - was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a military objective. But that design was actually useful to the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire internet.
I'm sure that many people will object to this notion with multiple potential problems and several anecdotes. This is something that the corporate world always does. They choose and popularize inferior or suboptimal designs that serve their interests and then insist that it is the only way to do it. But we have numerous individual experiments and projects that demonstrate how effective the original mesh design was - bittorrent, wireless meshnets, IPv6 overlay networks, etc. We just had to put enough effort into it to create a singular cohesive resilient network.
We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
You are right. I am not trying to rewrite history, but I also wonder if, had the planners thought the internet would become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained as it was at the beginning?
<< We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
Separately, it does open an interesting question. Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose ( solar system internet -- assuming private space exploration takes off). I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite ( I am assuming a lot now ) communication standard.
> had the planners thought the internet would become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained as it was at the beginning?
Interesting question. I think that the arpanet took that design because it started as a research project. The corporations today are unlikely to have ever adopted such a design. I don't know how the corporations back in the day were. And as for the actual planners, the relevant question is if they had any reason to believe that it wouldn't grow so big so fast. We know so many examples where research labs and academia came up with products that are revolutionary. Perhaps they did imagine the possibility and were generous enough?
> Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose. I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite communication standard.
That's a very tricky question too. Here's what I think. They would probably cooperate and create an open standard - but only because they want to compete with the dominant player with the first-mover advantage. And that standard would also be so complex that it defeats the purpose of being open, and only they can practically setup anything with it. This is trend that we see widely today - the web standards, kubernetes, bios (or equivalent) firmware, many parts of the Linux software ecosystem, etc. They don't go for the simplest, most logical, orthogonal and easy-to-implement designs, ever.
They succeeded. You're linking to something from 2015 so it was about "ISIS", but in 2025 he did manage to censor TikTok so people wouldn't be "recruited" to "Hamas".
If anything, this just highlights the need for Starlink-style connectivity and off-grid power.
Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline disappears.
> Starlink-style connectivity
Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet connectivity in Ukraine.
Ultimately it just becomes a question of where you want the choke point to live — in a state actor, or in a private operator.
Neither option is risk-free; the failure modes simply differ.
A government can shut you off for political reasons, a corporation can shut you off for contractual or geopolitical ones.
As long as the system assumes centralized stewardship for safety or reliability, someone will inevitably hold the switch — the only variable is who.
> in a state actor, or in a private operator.
multiple satellite operators are coming on line. what are the odds all of them coordinate to shut down in one region invalidating using the other providers as fail over?
I might be mistaken, but as far as I know there is currently no other LEO broadband provider that is meaningfully comparable at a global scale.
Starlink is often treated as the reference point not because it is perfect or fully resilient, but because there is no second network at a similar scale that could realistically serve as a failover today.
If we imagine a hypothetical future where three mature operators exist, then yes — absent coordinated political or geopolitical action, at least one network might remain online.
However, even that surviving operator would not necessarily provide full coverage of the affected region. Global redundancy is extremely hard in practice, because maintaining continuous, worldwide LEO coverage is not free — it requires massive capex and opex, ground stations, regulatory permissions, and local political approval.
True worldwide failover remains more of a theoretical construct than an operational reality.
== Low Earth Orbit
Is that true? This comment suggests otherwise, with citations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46351511
That particular section I have to Wikipedia article seems to have gone through a bunch of anonymous edits back and forth around the content of this citation
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk...
Notably absent from TFA...
Probably because it's not actually a truthful characterization of what happened! I know it's popular to find every possible reason to bag on Musk, but you don't need to resort to disinformation to do it.
Are you trying to argue that Starlink isn't cut off Ukrainian access? Because they did and it was well documented.
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Can't talk for the USA, but it's widely acknowledged that the spread of broadband in Europe was driven by P2P and tools like Emule/eDonkey or BitTorrent.
We need some similar killer application for satellite connectivity and mesh networking. Something that makes the technology so requested and so ubiquitous in such a short time that it couldn't be banned even if they tried.
In Tanzania they went around to hotels during the ban to make sure they didn't have starlink. It's illegal here but many have it. During that time some enterprising individuals charged tourists to access theirs.
The beam forming used by Starlink (and Starshield) is highly resistant to jamming. But Starlink doesn't offer service in some countries. And the ground terminals can be detected.
> In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce.
Is that really? US government has tanks, bombers, missiles and tactical nukes while "a well regulated Militia" have petty rifles and motolovs.
It's very easy for US government to cause state-wide power blackout, effectively shutdown Internet.
Tactical nukes are a big no-go, so don't expect them to be ever used for something like this.
Oh! You don't need any of those. I'm sure that they have enough tactical EMP devices to do the job.
PS: ElectroMagnetic Pulse weapons for the TLA-haters here.
The US hasn't really won any war for the long term since WW2. It turns out it's hard to change people's opinion by bombing them. Equipment is good at destroying the other sides's factories, and making people afraid of you (though even that's usually done with on-the-ground police boots) but it can't actually make people agree with your side, and in fact, seems to usually have the opposite effect. They can only hold control temporarily as long as they apply massive military pressure. As soon as they let up the pressure, they lose.
It probably has something to do with the strict top-down control structure. It's a Linux vs Microsoft situation. Large organisations, regardless of type, cannot innovate.
Its been happening a lot and its becoming more prevalent. This coverage from 2022 is still highly relevant and digs into some details:
https://restofworld.org/2022/blackouts/
The recently released One Battle After Another reinforces the impotence of legal rights against a corrupt government entity. In the situations Schneier envisions, corruption will almost certainly be at play.
Which reminds me that I've let my connection to this group lapse for... about a decade: https://air-stream.org/
Covering Adelaide, South Australia. Such communities should exist in most cities.
According to Gigazine (Osaka, est. 2000), "In 2024, there were 296 internet shutdowns in 54 countries around the world, with Myanmar, India, Pakistan and Russia accounting for about 70% of the total."
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20250228-internet-shutdowns...
I’m against internet shutdowns, but I cringe at the phrase “international community.” Who does that even include?
Related: this is an interesting case study https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/world/asia/15china.html
Its become clear that the axiom “The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It” as no longer true. It hasnt been since before 2010 anecdotely but the data Schneier presents here is undeniable
This is still somewhat true. For example, Russia is now frequently shutting down mobile Internet. Ostensibly for protection against drone attacks, but even it had to relent a bit and allow at least some whitelisted services to work.
So immediately local VPN companies started providing the unrestricted access through proxies at these services.
It hasn't been true since 9/11 when the US name servers were "shut down" and traffic was dropped ftom level3 nodes.
What name server / level3 event was this?
fun anecdote about Ethiopia doing this to prevent cheating in national exams --- https://x.com/benkuhn/status/1339016975494811649?s=20
did you see the data i posted earlier on how many shutdowns have happened this year across the world? https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/zach.rosson/viz/STOP_...
its really crazy how much internet shutdowns india has done
India doesn’t do any of this. This is all propaganda by CIA, Ford Foundation, and George Soros. India is the biggest democracy and we had autonomous and conscious flying air-things when the world barely even existed in this form i.e. millennia ago. This is the best UNESCO certified country in the world led by a non-biological (in His own words) head of state. Now, bow!
PS. Don’t forget the zero! You still owe us that much.
I was confused for a minute after reading this, until I remembered that I'm on HN.
One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable.
Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.
I also think that you should be able to do stuff without requiring internet access, and also should be able to do stuff without requiring electrical power, etc. You should not be overly reliance on technology. They can be useful (in many ways), but should not be mandatory to rely on, and furthermore should avoid damaging the natural environments for such technology, and also avoid damaging the possibility of working without them.
why is this flagged? (maybe Theo? I don’t know this person).
Its absolutely a good argument against fragile IoT devices that have no local/offline mode and the ever increasing lurch of internet requirements for our daily life.
I’m not sure my phone does much of anything without an internet connection. Yet it is my primary banking and authentication method (via BankID).
EDIT: Theodore Kaczynski is the unabomber… well, thats an odd name to drop and maybe not an ideal candidate for life advice.
It's getting downvoted because (1) this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating (2) he's giving life advice from a terrorist mass murderer.
Yes, you're not at risk from being cut off from the world if you're not connected to it in the first place. That's not a state most of us want to exist in. Ted Kaczynski lived in a small cabin in the woods away from humanity.
The solutions requiring constant internet connection are pushed by states and companies because they help cutting costs and gathering information. However, the users are often more vulnerable to the risks if the technology fails but have relatively little say.
The solutions that do much the same but require internet connection only once a day or even once an hour would be much more resilient and safe but currently there are few incentives for providers to develop and offer them.
The extreme situations like war or dictatorship are good awakening calls but it is easy to see there are lots of risks involved even if things would go rather smoothly otherwise.
> this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating
You equate comms with internet. Maybe you should talk to people IRL more often.
No one in their right mind believes that you can accomplish widespread, high speed communication via "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet. It has become a very important way that we share information broadly, deal with emergencies, and stay informed. Going back to the stone age is not a good option at this point. But you know that, and you're just posting nonsense to have an argument.
> No one in their right mind believes that you can accomplish widespread, high speed communication via "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet.
Nobody claimed that. I'm not sure whether this sort of comms is meaningful at all or whether "staying informed" is just the dopamine thing in effect.
> Going back to the stone age
Its actually 20 years ago. That's less than the median age.
You think the internet started in 2005? Are you sure you belong here?
Ted has some interesting ideas but I personally would not accept any life advice from him
Living without the Internet is still doable. Just a little bit harder.
You gonna lose some time and money (buying bus tickets physically and not buying cheap junk over the internet, BUT you're gonna gain like literally 6h per day :)
Been there, done that. Its net positive experience. Just like going back to 1999.
You are aware of the fact that a lot of the payment infrastructure relies on the internet today?
We used to carry paper pieces called 'bank notes' or 'bills' and round metal disks called 'coins' in a small leather pouch in our pockets called wallets. They were pretty effective for payments without much of an infrastructure. Even banks worked using paper documents and books.
I know this sounds a bit too condescending. But that's honestly not my intention. I just couldn't help it! Jokes aside, it's true that we often forget that these things can be done and were done without the internet. But more importantly, there are 2 dangerous implications for our over reliance on the internet for our financial activities. The first is that the government or a non-state actor can easily disrupt our commercial and personal activity unintentionally or as a retribution. We have effectively surrendered our financial autonomy to multiple powerful players.
The second major problem is if we ever face a post-apocalyptic situation with regards to modern technology. We already have only a few fabs that can meet the global demand for advanced ICs. We have already seen our vulnerability to one of them when a flood there caused supply chain disruptions and a slump in even automobile markets. HDD and SSD manufacturers have similar weaknesses. Meanwhile, DRAM manufacturers are placing all their (gambling) chips in the AI hyperscaler market, threatening to disrupt every market from smartphones, laptops and consumer appliances to military and commercial jets, ATC, shipping, railway signalling, telecom infrastructure, etc. The technology apocalypse isn't that farfetched and we are extremely vulnerable to it.
Depends where one lives. In my location there is zero dependency on the internet. It's just a convenience thing and the growing number of miscreants on the internet is negating that balance for me personally. Sooner than later I am going back to a landline and ditching the cell phone.
Sure, but it does not mean it is not possible as OP notes.
More to your point though, even if it does, maybe it should not realy on it.
This is concerning in the comments:
> I suspect most can guess where this mess will end up, and it’s not good.
What I read from this is going to sound conspiratorial, but I think it’s a valid “read between the lines” of an insider. I think they’re saying that they’re alarmed that Silicon Valley is supporting the current U.S. administration assuming he’s doing what’s best for their welfare, while it’s clear based on the activities of Iran and others that are practicing working without internet that they are planning on losing internet, which could either be because Iran, Russia, China, or the U.S. itself may plan to sever or disable internet connections (while unsure what would be isolated or disabled) as an act of war or extreme and dangerously naive nationalism.
Ha
Worship of the eternal steady-state. Whoever speaks against any intervention to preserve it is a heretic, and must be excommunicated.
Whether it’s ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe people will host more information offline, and become less dependent on cloud services…
> Surprise internet shutdowns are good
I'll correct that to: Surprise internet outages are good
For the same outcomes though. More and varied methods of contingency.
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Ahh I just wanted to host my website in Afghanistan.
(there are actual web hosting companies in Kabul, and it seems its not illegal to send money there)