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

>> 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...

I'll admit that my early morning eyes saw "CYA". Which I'll admit had me scratching my head...

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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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