The Net beyond the web (LibrePlanet 2022)
20 March 2022; updated 2 April 2022

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 using the above webm[7] link.

 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] https://kelar.org/~bandali/talks/net-beyond-web-slides.txt
   gopher://kelar.org/0/~bandali/talks/net-beyond-web-slides.txt
[4] https://kelar.org/~bandali/talks/net-beyond-web-slides.pdf
   gopher://kelar.org/d/~bandali/talks/net-beyond-web-slides.pdf
[5] https://kelar.org/~bandali/talks/net-beyond-web.bib
   gopher://kelar.org/0/~bandali/talks/net-beyond-web.bib
[6] https://kelar.org/~bandali/talks/net-beyond-web-notes.txt
   gopher://kelar.org/0/~bandali/talks/net-beyond-web-notes.txt
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20220530060528if_/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 and are dedicated to the public domain.
Presentation video is Copyright (c) 2022 Amin Bandali, and
is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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