The Net beyond the Web (LibrePlanet 2022)
Sun, 20 Mar 2022 16:20:00 -0400

Today I gave a talk at [LibrePlanet 2022][1] about the internet and
the web, giving a brief account of the web's past, its current
state, and ideas for better futures.

In this talk I go over the old web (of 1990s and early 2000s) and
how websites looked back then, fast-forwarding to the present day
and the sad current state of the web, and some possibilities on
where we could go from here if we would like to have a better
net/web in the future for user freedom, privacy, and control.

Here is the abstract for my talk, also available on the
[LibrePlanet 2022's speakers][2] page:

> The modern web is filled to the brim with complexity, no
> shortage of nonfree software, and malware.  Many, many people
> have written and spoken at length on these issues and their
> implications and negative effects on users' freedom, privacy,
> and digital autonomy.  With the advent of technologies like
> WebAssembly, the modern day web browser has effectively become
> an operating system of its own, along with all the issues and
> complexities of operating systems and then some.  Opening
> arbitrary websites with a typical web browser amounts to
> downloading an executing [mostly nonfree] software on your
> machine.  But is all of this complexity really necessary?
> Is all of this needed to achieve the web's original purpose,
> an information system for relaying documents (and now media)?
> What if there was a way to do away with all of these
> complexities and go back to the basics?
>
> In this talk we will examine the Internet beyond the modern web,
> some possibilities of what that might look like with concrete
> examples from protocols like Gopher from time immemorial, and
> more recent experiments and reimaginations of it in today's
> world, such as Gemini and Spartan.  The talk will give a brief
> tour of these protocols and their histories, what they have to
> offer, and why one might want to use them in the 21st century.

**Presentation slides:** [txt][3] | [pdf][4] | [bib][5]\
**Speaker notes:** [txt][6]\
**Video:** [webm][7]

~~I'll add the presentation video once conference recordings have
been processed and published by the Free Software Foundation.~~
You can watch the presentation video below:

<div><video preload="metadata" controls="controls" width="720"
src="https://archive.org/download/libreplanet-2022-net-beyond-web-bandali/saturn-sunday-1620.webm"
poster="net-beyond-web-poster.jpg">
<source
src="https://archive.org/download/libreplanet-2022-net-beyond-web-bandali/saturn-sunday-1620.webm"
type='video/webm; codecs="vp8, vorbis"'>
<p>Sorry, this embedded video will not work,
because your web browser does not support HTML5 video.<br>
<a href="https://archive.org/download/libreplanet-2022-net-beyond-web-bandali/saturn-sunday-1620.webm">[
please watch the video in your favourite streaming media player
]</a></p></video></div>

> LibrePlanet is a conference about software freedom, happening
> on March 19-20, 2022.  The event is hosted by the Free Software
> Foundation (FSF), and brings together software developers, law
> and policy experts, activists, students, and computer users to
> learn skills, celebrate free software accomplishments, and face
> upcoming challenges.  Newcomers are always welcome, and
> LibrePlanet 2022 will feature programming for all ages and
> experience levels.

[1]: https://libreplanet.org/2022/
[2]: https://libreplanet.org/2022/speakers/#5853
[3]: net-beyond-web-slides.txt
[4]: net-beyond-web-slides.pdf
[5]: net-beyond-web.bib
[6]: net-beyond-web-notes.txt
[7]: https://archive.org/download/libreplanet-2022-net-beyond-web-bandali/saturn-sunday-1620.webm
[7-broken]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220530060528if_/https://media.libreplanet.org/mgoblin_media/media_entries/2711/saturn-sunday-1620.webm
[7-working]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220605085701if_/https://media.libreplanet.org/mgoblin_media/media_entries/2711/saturn-sunday-1620.webm

Presentation slides and speaker notes are marked
with [CC0 1.0 Universal](COPYING.CC0) and are
dedicated to the public domain.  Presentation video is
Copyright (c) 2022 Amin Bandali, and is licensed under
[CC BY-SA 4.0](COPYING.CC-BY-SA).