Hi, I’m Mark Nottingham. I write about the Web, protocol design, HTTP, Internet governance, and more. This is a personal blog, it does not represent any institution I'm affiliated with. Find out more.
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Sunday, 21 April 2024
Creating a Large Language Model (LLM) requires a lot of content – as implied by the name, LLMs need voluminous input data to be able to function well. Much of that content comes from the Internet, and early models have been seeded by crawling the whole Web.Wednesday, 13 March 2024
It happens fairly often. Someone brings a proposal to a technical standards body like the IETF and expects that just because it becomes an RFC, people will adopt it. Or they’ll come across a requirement in an RFC and expect it to be enforced, perhaps with some kind of punishment. Or they’ll get angry that people don’t pay attention to an existing standard and do their own thing. This is so common that there’s a ready response widely used by IETF people in these situations:Tuesday, 19 December 2023
RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards has been published, after more than two years of review, discussion, and revision.Wednesday, 1 November 2023
There are lots of ways to view what Internet standards bodies like the IETF and W3C do. They are horizontal agreements between competitors as well as mission-driven public-good charities. One might believe they’re the homes of innovation that brought us the Internet and the Web, or that they’re boring, ineffective and slow committee talking shops. Some see them as vibrant, diverse communities, while others believe they’re completely dominated by big tech.Sunday, 19 February 2023
I’m fascinated by the Metaverse. Not because I want to use that steaming pile of legless avatars, but because it’s the latest prominent attempt to establish a new platform. As Mark Zuckerberg said in internal emails about it:Thursday, 5 January 2023
In the last decade or so, it’s become increasingly apparent that the Internet is going to be subject to more legal regulation. Because it’s a global network, this is tricky; fragmentation risk grows if regulation isn’t consistent between jurisdictions. And of course, there are all the other pitfalls of regulation — it’s difficult to agree on societal goals, much less change working systems to meet those goals without ill effect.Sunday, 11 September 2022
There are many potential criticisms of the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth)1. While my own concerns are mostly about whether there are appropriate checks and balances on the eSafety Commissioner’s powers, I will give credit where due; the current Commissioner’s implementation of it has – so far – demonstrated nuance and thoughtful balancing of the legislation’s goals with the preservation and enhancement of the unique properties that make the Internet so valuable to society. See, eg, ‘Explainer: The Online Safety Bill’, Digital Rights Watch. ↩Monday, 21 June 2021
A big change in how the Internet is defined - and who defines it - is underway.