alt.hn

7/30/2026 at 1:07:53 PM

RFC 8890 – The Internet is for End Users (2020)

 https://mnot.net/blog/2020/for_the_users

by notarobot123

7/30/2026 at 2:08:13 PM

Inevitably the internet will have two types of users:

    1. The anti-bot bots that must stop you from proceeding, because they aren't entirely sure you aren't a bot
and

    2. The bots that can get past them, which we all must eventually deploy, if we want a chance to visit a web page

by dlcarrier

7/30/2026 at 2:09:49 PM

Why would anyone ever want to solve 99 Cloudflare captchas a day if you can get a bot to do it instead?

by ACCount37

7/30/2026 at 2:19:10 PM

Literally used an LLM to answer the latest one 20 minutes ago, which was "what can climb a tree".

Cloudflare is a blight on the internet, but HN loves it.

by iso1631

7/30/2026 at 3:46:00 PM

Cloudflare just started blocking Googlebot, so maybe we'll see an exodus away from Cloudflare by people who want their sites indexed? Hopefully?

by pocksuppet

7/30/2026 at 3:58:42 PM

I thought Google Search is dead, everyone is using ChatGPT now to find information.

by warkdarrior

7/30/2026 at 4:37:02 PM

but how does chatGPT find information?

by fl4regun

7/30/2026 at 4:52:12 PM

With bots that break through cloudflare captchas. As a human, I immediately close the browser tab when I see one. If you make your site inaccessible for humans, only the bots remain.

by tempodox

7/30/2026 at 5:08:24 PM

I was more so asking how does it know where to look to find information, if things are no longer being indexed.

by fl4regun

7/30/2026 at 8:41:32 PM

I assume they have their own index of the web. Or perhaps there are companies where you can buy such indices. And then mix and match those, perhaps with your own too.

Data is basically their business.

by smallnix

7/30/2026 at 4:36:20 PM

Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things. It is akin to a disease.

The question is, what is the alternative to cloudflare? We've tried (to various degrees) user id, micropayments, device attestation... I'm not hopeful we can actually solve this. Maybe if there was a neutral, "NGO-like" cloudflare of some sort?

by dormento

7/30/2026 at 4:56:54 PM

> Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things.

How about an internet where we don't need CloudFlare?

One without zillions of AI crawlers and script kiddies with Terabit DDoS capability… (the latter being the harder problem)

by eqvinox

7/30/2026 at 8:30:11 PM

Bittorent grinds on undisturbed.

Imagine archives with static content and user friendly file selection. Like those old world printed product catalogs mixed with content more like books and magazine. One can still have interactive headless websites/api and checkout pages.(Updated) torrents can share folder and file names but you have to force re-check. Could automate that too.

They can be many TBs large, no need to download the entite thing.

by theendisney

7/30/2026 at 5:58:27 PM

Not any kind of original work.

But

The llm thing started to change me in a sense that I no longer really feel obligated to use everybody else's solutions. It may be harder and harder to get onto the 'old web', but my new small project put a website from cellphone and is available for as long as I need it to be available.

The short answer to what we can do is 'adjust accordingly'.

by iugtmkbdfil834

7/30/2026 at 8:47:30 PM

It's like the good old joke about a bear-proof trash can.

There is now a considerable overlap between the capabilities of the dumbest users and the smartest AIs.

by ACCount37

7/30/2026 at 4:08:32 PM

> but HN loves it

There is popular sentiment on HN that CF is making internet worse by being a core infrastructure element most websites use.

by ivanjermakov

7/30/2026 at 4:53:42 PM

It’s not the core infrastructure part that makes the internet worse.

by tempodox

7/30/2026 at 8:28:50 PM

yes, but it can be not so grim - we just need to equip everyone with the means to grow their own local webs, and find a way to connect them by p2p. call it Mycelial Web: federation of local webs that grows by processing the dead material of the open web into personal http worlds grown in containers.

by livingsoft

7/30/2026 at 7:54:46 PM

Early 2000’s they turned of PUBLIC tv here. To receive public funded TV you now need a digital subscription. I never thought this would happen to the internet, as in… its becoming more of an intranet everyday.

by thenthenthen

7/30/2026 at 1:34:15 PM

The internet is for whoever wants to send bits to each other and is willing to pay for transit to do it. The WWW might be for end users, though that seems less obvious by the day.

by aftbit

7/30/2026 at 3:46:37 PM

Right. The RFC is attempting to clarify the IETF's official position. The IETF is not the internet police, and can't make other actors obey.

We can make our own internet though - with blackhack and jookers.

by pocksuppet

7/30/2026 at 4:35:50 PM

Honestly, I feel like your draft could dispense with the internet part of the proposal.

by lenerdenator

7/30/2026 at 2:01:33 PM

what you write is excactly the problem the RFC tries to address. And not only for http but for the whole internet protocol family.

by supermaurio2000

7/30/2026 at 2:08:24 PM

sorry but that ship has sailed.

by reactordev

7/30/2026 at 6:17:52 PM

I think fighting for a purpose-based ideology of the internet is actually doomed to fail because the form of the technology will dictate how its used and regulation and efforts will only slightly affect that.

E.g. If the internet is super-fast and has the capability to deliver video ads, it will be used for that. If everyone just had a connection with the speed of a 56K modem, that video-based ad model wouldn't work.

If we really want the internet to be a certain way, we have to change the underlying technology used, not the ideology behind it. Because if an technology has a capability, it will be used to do whatever is most successful in the capitalistic system, not what's best for 'end users'.

Regulation sometimes be effective, but...the model of regulation in a world of freely-evolving technology is a broken system most of the time.

by vouaobrasil

7/30/2026 at 7:49:57 PM

Regulation is on average stunning effective. You simply complely fail to notice all the times it works, notice whenever it doesn't, and profess that it doesn't. There is no meaningful alternatives.

by michaelmrose

7/30/2026 at 4:21:39 PM

This is why ideology is so important.

Is the end user viewed as an ISPs client? a consumer of tech companies?

The idealistic language is fine but isnt based on any scientific approach to society. Its neutral at best.

The internet is for end users, but how if its not "by end users"?

If most protocols and standard implementations depend on adoption by ISPs and tech companies what does it mean to be "for the end user"?

Is prison architecture "for the prisoners"?

So how do we solve the "by end users" dilemma?

by Atlas667

7/30/2026 at 1:28:00 PM

Who's an end user.

Unless you own your hardware, you aren't the end user. When your phone, tv, camera, or even laptop on a non-free OS is on your network, you can get some semblance of control by controlling what network services it uses.

Things like DoH are part of the removal of my control as a home user and give it to Sony, or Apple, or TPLink

The most obvious thing is it becomes harder to block adverts.

Throw in internet-centralisation through HN darlings like cloudflare and you're screwed. You have no idea what anything is talking to, as it's the same destination IPs, so the choice is either block it completely, or allow it with no control.

by iso1631

7/30/2026 at 1:51:18 PM

I do share your actual concern, but I think the term 'end user' applies to any human sitting in front of a computer, trying to achieve something, independently of whether the effective sysadmin works against his interests or not.

by 1718627440

7/30/2026 at 2:22:01 PM

Right, it's not about property, it's just about whether the computer is helpful to the immediately available human or whether it serves some remote one.

by __MatrixMan__

7/30/2026 at 6:17:58 PM

Every technology has both pros and cons. Those who develop standards must weigh both sides rather than considering only one of them.

In countries where the internet is subject to censorship, as well as in regions with underdeveloped infrastructure, DNS queries are highly likely to be deliberately tampered with, poisoned, or hijacked. DoH is a very practical way to mitigate this problem, and I do not believe that the ability to block advertisements is more important than that.

Moreover, advanced users can still run their own DNS services for ad blocking, and, at least for the foreseeable future, DoH will not prevent them from continuing to use traditional DNS. You cannot criticize an important improvement in security merely because it makes ad blocking less convenient. Other people may face threat models that are a hundred times more serious than yours.

by Sha1rholder

7/30/2026 at 1:37:01 PM

> Who's an end user.

I think in this context it'd be any netizen who does not hold a significant amount of power to influence other [unrelated to them] netizens?

by remix2000

7/30/2026 at 2:18:03 PM

So me. The only influence I have over what "my" phone does is monitoring and blocking what it connects to when it's connected to my network.

DoH works against that

by iso1631

7/30/2026 at 4:34:35 PM

[flagged]

by murzynalbinos

7/30/2026 at 2:19:17 PM

This is an awkward read, the result of trying to convey an idea while couched in other language.

That idea being that AI is less important than humans.

by paulddraper