[flangola7]

I say we need basic universal internet infrastructure in the same way we have roads, libraries, hospitals, mail service, etc. Fundamental services like email, image and video hosting, backup storage, small cloud nodes, and so on. All partially or fully publicly funded, with no bloat or wasted overhead trying to commercialize it into an advertising platform filled with spyware and dark patterns.

[myself248]

It's sad to me that we went away from everyone just having their personal web space as part of their ISP package. Ditto email. It meant more smaller providers had to play nice and we didn't have a few major companies arbitrarily deciding what to host and what to drop.

I don't believe it should be government funded, but I wish there was a protocol that would let my ISP allocate a few GB of resources on my behalf that stay online even when my PC is powered down, and then I could reference them anywhere, and there's be a succession protocol in case I move to a different ISP so links don't break, etc.

[groby_b]

You can't because some people hosted extremely popular files (often starting with p- and ending in -orn) on the few GB that your local ISP gave you. And your local ISP suddenly needed to serve hundreds of terabytes they didn't have in their peering budget.

So now you need caps. And enforcement. And exceptions. And suddenly, you have a cloud service provider. And they've invested a ton into making the place nice, and there are teams drawing salaries keeping this running, and "succession protocols" aren't making them any money.

What you're asking for is infrastructure. Humanity to date has not found a way to finance long-term working infrastructure that doesn't involve a government, because that's the only body that invests in the commons. (Yeah, sometimes we pretend we can privatize, and then you get PG&E, and everybody suffers)

[myself248]

Yeah, so we'd need something sort of like bittorrent-with-web-seeds for any file more than a certain size, and maybe some pre-concatenated optimization where the whole page and its assets become a single file under such a system. Maybe IPFS might be a useful layer?

Anyway, "hosting" would mean two things: 1: "I attach my name to this content and it's always locatable as a tag under my name", and 2: "I dedicate some static resources to always host this content, whether or not it's popular enough to also propagate to other nodes in the swarm, I will always seed it".

Then simply having that seed-box allocate a certain amount of its space to each subscriber would be all you'd need.

Succession protocol would have internal uses too; they could say "Hey this subscriber has some really popular content, let's move it to a faster node", and the same primitives would track that move.

I feel like most of these pieces already exist, the trouble is there's no longer an expectation for an ISP to provide hosting to customers, so providing better hosting isn't a differentiating factor. (Not that there's meaningful competition in many places anyway, which may be the root of the problem.)

Which all adds up to people not realizing there is or even could be an alternative to hosting their images on perpetually-unprofitable-and-thus-inevitably-transient services like photobucket, imgur, and their ilk.

[wincy]

Sorry what is PG&E? I googled it, is this a reference to the power company in California? I don’t live in California so am not sure. I thought initially maybe it was some acronym for Privatize Gains and Externalize losses?

[groby_b]

Yep, the California power company. There's a whole long saga, but the short of it is that California decided to privatize electricity companies, that horribly imploded, and in the long run we ended up with a quasi-monopoly for a horrible company that's so bad at maintenance, they set the state on fire on a regular basis.

But sure, privatize gains and externalize losses works too :)

[Dylan16807]

Shouldn't a whole bunch of upload bandwidth even out the traffic flows and make such an ISP a better candidate for peering?

[groby_b]

Yes, but it's still not free. It's especially not free if it's unexpected load.

[flangola7]

Doing it without government is unviable. You missed my entire point.

[Ekaros]

Why shouldn't image and video hosting be a paid service?

I don't think there ever was any free method of mass distributing information. Or storing it if someone didn't find it interesting. If you need to share something, you should burden the cost. Just because some idiots thought they had a model that didn't work doesn't mean there isn't real costs involved. And those should be paid. In free market they should approach margin.

[Dylan16807]

The world lacks a good system for microtransactions to make paying the actual costs feasible.

Also I'm already paying my ISP for a connection, and so is everyone that views the things I host, so personally I hope for advances in P2P to leverage that existing already-paid-for bandwidth for distribution instead of having to toss more money on top.

[carlosjobim]

Or people could pay the pittance that it would be if just a fraction of users chipped in. Why is "the government should pay for it" always a comment in every thread on HN? Is there something I haven't understood about this community.

[flangola7]

> Or people could pay the pittance that it would be if just a fraction of users chipped in.

If only there was some way to gather and organize this rich fraction of users' contributions. Maybe we could create some kind of assembly where we discuss and vote on how to do so.

>Why is "the government should pay for it" always a comment in every thread on HN? Is there something I haven't understood about this community.

Because the purpose of government is to organize and manage society and that requires funds to do so? I'm not sure how to answer such a simple question with such a self-evident answer. How old are you?

[eviks]

No way do we want the internet to suck even more like those other services

[Dalewyn]

You're going to need to do a lot more than that to convince me that the internet is a human right and public need.

And yes, you do need to convince me: If it's "publicly funded" then I (and everyone else) am/are paying for it. Personally, I would sooner pay for another US navy aircraft carrier.

[quickthrower2]

I would say connectivity to the internet is a public need. Since so many government services are online, bank branches and post offices will keep closing and so on and so internet connectivity is to society what trains and buses are. So the government needs to ensure everyone can connect. It may be that 99% of the time there is nothing to do: John pays ISP or Telco and gets connected. But for rural or poor people they need to help people who can’t connect for whatever reason.

In terms of a government funded imgur backup: nah not convinced!

[seabass-labrax]

But would you pay for a another, say, French Navy or Turkish Navy aircraft carrier? There are few things which western democracies spend taxes on which don't benefit at least some proportion of the tax-paying population, and most of the cost of running those public services also goes back into private industry of the same country. A private internet company can employ foreign workers, pay foreign taxes, award dividends to foreign owners, and after all that, can be just as corrupt and expensive as a tax-funded service!

[squeaky-clean]

> then I (and everyone else) am/are paying for it

Don't you already pay for it?