> Two deficiencies have determined the course the Web has taken: lack of native search and lack of native payments.
What exactly is the expectation here, that there is one integrated protocols stack that covers all of this? I don't see why.
Nothing is stopping someone from building P2P distributed search engines, and nothing is stopping someone from building "safe and easy way of exchanging funds".
Given that we still don't have good solutions to either of these problems it seems the right answer according to this person would be to just skip the internet.
This feels like a gripe without substance, yes we know these are hard problems, saying that Google's dominance is a consequence of the IETF not integrating these into HTTP is absurd and baseless.
Just read it as an interesting counter-factual: if the web had had search/payments via some native protocol, then it would have developed without google.
There is also a reasonable argument to saying that search/payments are so fundamental to what the web became that a solution at the protocol-layer would be appropriate.
Well I would agree if those things were easy to solve universally, and were solved universally, it would be nice, but nothing in the development of the web has been easily solved universally, and there is no central committee choosing to solve these problems or to not solve them. IETF has an open process, open to everyone.
If the author wants to integrate it into HTTP, well they can actually try and make that case through the open standards process.
The questions of what does native suppoert imply and in what protocol should it be integrated are still unanswered. It seems very low effort to me, at least give a high level rundown of what that practically means and what he expects to see.
Bitcoin runs on open standard protocols, why is it not native? Is it because it is not ratfied by the IETF? Same question goes for existing P2P search engines. And even with protocols, you still need infrastructure. HTTP being an open protocol does not give me free HTTP hosting, and search indexing and lookup similarly won't be free.
I think if it was easy to solve these problems and integrate them into HTTP it would be easy to solve them outside HTTP and it is not clear why the solutions must be integrated into some existing protocol like TCP, IP or HTTP.
I still expect them to make a more coherent case, I still don't know what native means here, still don't know why existing solutions are different from what native means.
It is not stated as a counterfactual either, it is stated as direct criticism, e.g.
> The Web’s orignal architects were off base on hyperlinks; it turns out people just want to skip right to the answer they’re looking for.
Who are the original architects? Should we remove hyperlinks? Who suggested hyperlinks as an alternative to search, or even "native search".
Author here. The article is making a case that Google has in fact captured the Web, and secondarily that there are some clear reasons for it. I had no intention of writing a dissertation on the history of the Internet. Also, filling in the missing technical gaps would be several RFCs.
As for what would native payments look like:
1. I put the element <pay-me>$1.00</pay-me> in my HTML
2. User clicks on Pay Me button in any browser and I get $1.00
Something like that. Anything more complicated and for most people it might as well not exist. Grandma isn't loading up a Bitcoin wallet.
> 1. I put the element <pay-me>$1.00</pay-me> in my HTML 2. User clicks on Pay Me button in any browser and I get $1.00
And then what? If all that is needed is a tag support then why is the problem not yet solved? I mean if it is so simple to add support in HTML, why not just add it outside HTML?
I'm not asking for the actual final RFCs, but just some idea of what everyone except you is missing which makes this an easy problem to solve for you. Just broad strokes will be awesome. At the moment all you are saying is that the architects did not know what they were doing, but can't explain what they missed.
Having an html tag, and even a browser that interprets it and connects to grandma's saved credit card is not the problem. But where does the money go to? It has to be a central body that holds all accounts and the page can specify their wallet id in another tag. How do you create that in the spirit of the open web?
What exactly is the expectation here, that there is one integrated protocols stack that covers all of this? I don't see why.
Nothing is stopping someone from building P2P distributed search engines, and nothing is stopping someone from building "safe and easy way of exchanging funds".
Given that we still don't have good solutions to either of these problems it seems the right answer according to this person would be to just skip the internet.
This feels like a gripe without substance, yes we know these are hard problems, saying that Google's dominance is a consequence of the IETF not integrating these into HTTP is absurd and baseless.