[rmrm]

People seem to like Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, eBay, Youtube, etc.

They haven't stopped the internet from the 1990s from existing, its still there and available. Most people just seem to like this other corporate internet a lot more.

It seems to me that in many arguments, it isn't about whether it's possible for people to have their non-corporate, idealized internet (because it is), it's about not allowing others to also have the internet they want (Hulu, iTunes, Facebook, etc), because ultimately people aren't visiting the idealized, non corporate internet, and aren't going to -- because the majority of people prefer the other one.

Ultimately, it seems to be a disappointment rooted in the behaviors and wants of the majority, tho its rarely ever framed as such.

[kragen]

People don't always choose the things that make them happy, especially collectively. If we step back a bit from the internet, this point is obvious: the people of the US, for example, collectively chose to have the Civil War and then abolish slavery, when abolishing slavery without the war would have been a much better choice; and alcoholics who die of exposure in the street would probably have preferred, in retrospect, to never start drinking. Some of them will tell you that explicitly even before dying.

So it's not really disappointment. It's advocacy: there is a better way, a brighter future. And I have a selfish interest in telling people about it, because despite what you say, it's not a choice I can make entirely on my own.

> They haven't stopped the internet from the 1990s from existing; it's still there and available.

In the 1990s, I could email my mother from the mail server in my house; I could walk to the local bookstore and browse the books on the shelves; I could chat online with my friends without giving Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook minute-by-minute updates on when I'm at my computer; I could read and post to Usenet, which had useful discussions on it, without broadcasting my reading habits to whoever was wiretapping (because my ISP had a local news server); and I could run years-old software on my computer without becoming a victim of the latest worm.

So the two internets you're talking about do not exist independently of each other. They interact in a lot of ways. Sometimes the interference is constructive (internet access is available in a lot more places now, and bandwidth is cheaper), and sometimes it's destructive (Usenet is dead.)

I don't think the problem is really even the wants of the majority. I think the problem is that the majority of people are getting tricked into choosing things they don't want, both because they aren't aware of the implications of their choices and because there are prisoner's-dilemma games going on. (Recruit all your friends to Farmville and your farm will be bigger!)