I'd give anything for the internet to go back to how it was in the early/mid 90s.
Back before it was corporatized, monetized and before all the gardens started building their walls.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Talk to Mark Andreesen.
“The internet” should just be dumb pipes that transport bits. Period.
A series of tubes, if you will. Not a big truck.
I don't know, the thing about the internet is that it does bring a ton of value, and operating it does have costs in turn. Maybe Sir Tim is right about DNS being the point where it got commercial, but it was going to happen somehow. Arxiv and Wikipedia still exist, but how do you do Amazon non-commercially? Even YouTube is a challenge.
There used to be a sort of mantra that technology was neutral and people are good and bad. But actually, that’s not true of things on the web
Arguably, that's not the distinction. Technologies can be explicitly of control or of chaos. And then that relative structure or freedom can itself be used for good or for evil.
A central platform is of control, Lemmy or Linux is of chaos. And obviously we lean towards the latter a lot, but for some things, even Lemmy wants central control and monitoring, so it's not evil, exactly.
I would make a somewhat controversial case that one of the main ruiners of the internet and our entire social contract has been the "free with marketing" model that replaced subscriptions.
If we're going to live in a goods/services/money climate, I'm fine with different companies or media distributors charging subscription fees to pay for their costs. It makes sense, it's been a working model since the early days of the internet.
What started to become a problem is when more and more services went to "free" models. Now the revenue comes from advertisers, so that comes with a train of baggage. Now producers of content are incentivized to make everything a race to see who gets user attention first and fastest for those sweet, sweet clicks. It is the main contributing factor to public attention-span erosion and the way most people have become willfully ignorant about the outside world. Additionally, content has to be moderated and censored because we wouldn't want to scare off the precious advertisers. It's enough to make you want to roblox yourself in minecraft.
Imagine if Youtube broadly was a paid service. You pay premium and there's no algorithm. No "feed based on your marketing preferences." No 20-mile long list of AI slop videos with sensational titles to get you to click on them, because the creators aren't making money from clicks but real subscribers who want to see more of the actual content.
Same with many other huge media sites, even social media. If they weren't beholdened to attention-spans and sensationalism, we would see far less outright propaganda and lies.
I feel like this model has ruined a lot of gaming too, and has allowed publishers to release shitty, unfinished games for free with no moderation for MMO's and no real care or passion for making a game people want to come back to, and instead just make slop games with skins for impulse shoppers.
"The internet should be for everyone, except the people I don't like." - average modern internet user
Glad he's able to call out the domain name system for the crock of shit that it is.
It's always the fucking DNS. .__.
The internet isn't broken... Humanity is.
*web inventor
They kind of fix this in the lede, but dude did not invent the internet, he invented the World Wide Web. The internet is a superset of a whole bunch of things that includes the World Wide Web, but dude wasn’t out there inventing TCP/IP and routers and whatnot.
People say wifi when they mean the Internet, somehow one cannot expect accuracy. Articles always get written by professional clueless people also.
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