I agree that there is a problem here but it is not the cost of membership.
The real problem is that the Internet has grown so big and the companies that provide the bulk of Internet apps and services have grown so large that there are no institutions that have much influence over them.
We saw this early in the development of Internet payment schemes, the original goal was to manage credit card payments from a secure wallet, SSL was supposed to be a stopgap. But by the time schemes like SEPP were getting going, the big Internet retail outlets saw no need to support any technology that would level the playing field for smaller players.
Rather bizarrely, employees of the provider of the largest Web browser by market share participate in discussions of new features for its main competitor and is also the main source of funding.
I expect we will soon be seeing another ridiculous book from The 'Independent' Institute telling us network effects don't exist but bought and paid for by a different sponsor this time.
The only way out of the current situation is to face up to the issues that led to centralization in the first place. For email, it was spam. A protocol in which authentication of messages is optional and lacking access control on message receipt will inevitably face a very high level of abuse and the only way to deal with that abuse is going to be expensive heuristics.
If people want to have a decentralized Internet, we have to design the systems for social scaling. We also have to look for opportunities. Currently, the markets for messaging and email are entirely and artificially disjointed. While voice and video are loosely tied to messaging, the balkanization of messaging provision makes them very much less useful than they could be.
On Sun, Oct 1, 2023 at 10:44 PM Dave Cridland <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'd actually settle for just replying to this with "Me too", really, and perhaps I should have - but one additional comment:On Sun, 1 Oct 2023 at 19:40, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:On 10/1/23 14:21, S Moonesamy wrote:
> From what I recall, the IESG members disclose the name of their
> employers. It should be possible for figure out whether an IESG
> member is primarily focused on their employer's interests.
It's not only participants' employers' interests that I'm concerned
about. The normalization of corporate culture in IETF has done
tremendous harm to IETF and its ability to serve the Internet
community. For example very many people have abandoned the concept of
interoperability (at least at layers above transport) and vendor
independence, in favor of the idea that the Internet exists to support
proprietary applications.Further, those applications which are supposedly interoperable - like mail - are extremely difficult to host without using ${BIGCORP}'s services if you want to interoperate with the same few large providers.Most of the recent changes to SMTP hosting requirements (going back to DMARC at least) seem to be entirely driven by the needs of a few mass hosting providers, rather than massive numbers of smaller hosting providers. If the IETF objects at all it is ignored. Interoperability is of less importance if you've only got a small handful of providers. I'm not yet sure what the equivalent will be for the Web, but I'm sure it'll come - already, as far as I can tell you're only allowed to have an opinion on the browser side if you happen also to have a browser with significant share of the market; the hosting side will probably go the same way at some stage.The outcome of this is that although there are thousands upon thousands of smaller internet-related companies, very few of these will see the IETF (or W3C) as even remotely relevant to their actions - despite being entirely reliant on its output - because hosting will be done by IETF "members". So these voices are unheard at the IETF, because the membership fee - sorry, attendance costs - are simply too high to warrant the (irrelevant) expenditure.There is a circle here, and I doubt it's virtuous.Dave.
