Google and HTTP:

The web is a miracle

Google has spent a lot of effort to convince you that HTTP is not good. Let me have the floor for a moment to tell you why HTTP is the best thing ever.

Its simplicity is what made the web work. It created an explosion of new applications. It may be hard to believe that there was a time when Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter etc didn’t exist. That was because the networking standards prior to the web were complicated and not well documented. The explosion happened because the web is simple. Where earlier protocols were hard to build on, the web is easy.

I don’t think the explosion is over. I want to make it easier and easier for people to run their own web servers. Google is doing what the programming priesthood always does, building the barrier to entry higher, making things more complicated, giving themselves an exclusive. This means only super nerds will be able to put up sites. And we will lose a lot of sites that were quickly posted on a whim, over the 25 years the web has existed, by people that didn’t fully understand what they were doing. That’s also the glory of the web. Fumbling around in the dark actually gets you somewhere. In worlds created by corporate programmers, it’s often impossible to find your way around, by design.

The web is a social agreement not to break things. It’s served us for 25 years. I don’t want to give it up because a bunch of nerds at Google think they know best.

The web is like the Grand Canyon. It’s a big natural thing, a resource, an inspiration, and like the canyon it deserves our protection. It’s a place of experimentation and learning. It’s also useful for big corporate websites like Google. All views of the web are important, especially ones that big companies don’t understand or respect. It’s how progress happens in technology.

Keeping the web running simple is as important as net neutrality.