HTTP originally didn't have credentials. If your site had a WWW server installed, you just put a file in your ~/public_html/ directory, and there it was on the WWW. Like, you could literally put HTML on the web by typing two lines of text into your shell:
mkdir ~/public_html/
echo 'My Samoyed is <b>really</b> hairy.' > ~/public_html/index.html
There were no headers and thus nowhere to put credentials in an HTTP request. We trusted the network because we didn't give root to people we didn't trust.
If the people steering the dominant browser projects think that allowing everyone to author and distribute creative work is important, they'll keep supporting HTTP, and they might also direct effort to supporting dat, zeronet, ipfs, onion sites, and so on. If they don't think that's important, they probably won't do any of those things, even though, yes, the tradeoffs are a little different.
Since most of them are at Apple and Google, I think the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store probably represent the future of the web. I think that sucks but I don't know how to stop it.
As for adobe, it's pretty labor-intensive and slow as a way of doing your own house, and it doesn't work that well in very damp climates like Seattle. But there's no difficulty at all in scaling it up to 10 billion people, and indeed with compressed-earth brick presses, it might work better with modern industrial machinery than with the traditional North African craft processes that we now use all over the New World. There's plenty of suitable dirt and hay out there.
> If the people steering the dominant browser projects think that allowing everyone to author and distribute creative work is important
The answer is in the question: they're building _browsers_, to consume content but certainly not to create it or spread it. The last mainstream browser that did that (Opera) vanished a few years ago.
In fact, thinking about the problem a little bit more I realized that the heart of the article is kind of true but isn't articulated to show it clearly: Internet, while it was still young, was pretty symmetric because every node could be a producer and/or a consumer, and it seems everyone was. Today things are really different, because while there still are producers, the important gap is that they're not distributors anymore, and they're far fewer than consumers anyway.
The article states that the switch to HTTPS has somehow "changed" things, because you can't start a super basic HTTP process and expect it to run for a long time. This conversation has shown that while it's technically true it's very easy today to run an HTTPS reverse proxy to mitigate the situation, so from the point of view of TLS the point is mostly theoretical. However there's something that is very important today, it's that people who want to produce mostly can't also be distributors: NATs and firewalls and the complexity of configuration has in practice prevented everyone but the most tech-savvy of us from self-hosting. I think this point is more detrimental to the initial promise of the WWW than the technicalities of the encryption that has allowed us to make this protocol more viable at the scale we're at right now.
The answer is, as I've said before, the decentralized web: I personally believe that dat is the right model, but I might be wrong and the details don't matter that much because the important point is that they all allow us to get past connectivity issues and be both a producer _and_ a distributor. Hopefully that's where we're going to be headed in the coming years.
Regarding adobe, there's no question it _can_ be used if we just want to; what I had in mind (and I did not express it, my bad) is that this kind of material usually comes with the associated manual process that's so prevalent in the communities working with it. Scaling it to 10 billion people, all using this method, will definitely change the way our societies are built: tall buildings aren't possible anymore, at least not the way we're used to. Structures take decades, not years or months to be built. I doubt this can scale to 10 billion people.
When I joined the internet in 1992, it was pretty symmetric among machines but not among people; I typically used a DECstation that had another 50 or so people using it at any given time, and we didn't have root. We couldn't set up an FTP server, and although we could run an HTTP server on port 8000 or something, we couldn't run it on port 80. And if we started up a long-running process, it was liable to get shut down for loading down the machine. We didn't have access to cron; I don't think we even had access to at.
I didn't have root then, I didn't have root a couple of years later when I was doing sysadmin intern tasks on the math department's machines, and I didn't even have root on my desktop SPARC 5 in 1996 when I was working at a company, although I did on my roommate's Linux box at home and, later that year, my own. But IIRC our internet access was through Slirp on a shell account: we didn't have our own public IP address. (My workplace SPARC did.)
That was about the time the unwashed AOL colonist hordes started thinking they owned the internet and remaking it in the image of the world they knew, giving primacy to commerce rather than knowledge and sharing; but, of course, they didn't have public IP addresses either, or I think even private ones.
I'd say that the internet was still young then because it was only 23 in 1992 and only 25 in 1996, and now it's 51. But I think it's actually easier for people to put things online now, despite the NAT growth and HTTPS churn and whatnot, because an awful lot of people at the time had some kind of internet access but no distribution capabilities and no usable software. I don't know how long it would take an average internet user to learn to spin up a DigitalOcean droplet and start running nginx on it with LetsEncrypt, but I imagine it's on the order of a day or two, and the startup cost is like US$5 or something.
But however much easier it may be to initially put something online today, it's enormously harder to keep it online, and I think that's a terrible price to pay. And we're increasingly vulnerable to arbitrary censorship decisions made by Google, Apple, etc., even if currently that is more a potential risk than an active catastrophe — much like the next pandemic was a year go.
Today the menace is not so much commerce — though it continues to be a pervasive corrupting influence on our discourse and a frequent excuse for political censorship, it is also the underpinning of the internet since the beginning — as it is partisanship. Want to distribute health "misinformation", such as advocacy of wearing face masks (a month and a half ago, anyway, when this contradicted official guidance from the CDC)? Better hope Google and Fecebutt don't find out.
If the people steering the dominant browser projects think that allowing everyone to author and distribute creative work is important, they'll keep supporting HTTP, and they might also direct effort to supporting dat, zeronet, ipfs, onion sites, and so on. If they don't think that's important, they probably won't do any of those things, even though, yes, the tradeoffs are a little different.
Since most of them are at Apple and Google, I think the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store probably represent the future of the web. I think that sucks but I don't know how to stop it.
As for adobe, it's pretty labor-intensive and slow as a way of doing your own house, and it doesn't work that well in very damp climates like Seattle. But there's no difficulty at all in scaling it up to 10 billion people, and indeed with compressed-earth brick presses, it might work better with modern industrial machinery than with the traditional North African craft processes that we now use all over the New World. There's plenty of suitable dirt and hay out there.