July 30, 2026
User-friendly? Comment-war says maybe not
RFC 8890 – The Internet is for End Users (2020)
Internet bosses say it’s all for users — commenters immediately start fighting over who that is
TLDR: The Internet’s rule-makers released a statement saying online systems should serve ordinary people first. Commenters were not buying the feel-good framing, arguing over who really has control online and joking that bots now have an easier time than humans.
A major Internet standards body just published RFC 8890, a formal statement saying the Internet should be designed around what’s good for the people actually using it. On paper, that sounds sweet, obvious, and maybe even overdue. In practice? The comment section turned into a mini cage match over a deceptively simple question: who even counts as an “end user”?
That was the big spark. One camp basically said, “Nice slogan, but if your devices and software are controlled by giant companies, are you really the one in charge?” That fed into a broader anxiety that “for users” can quietly become “for Apple, Sony, internet providers, and whoever owns the pipeline.” Another commenter went full cold-shower realism: the Internet isn’t for users, it’s for whoever can pay to move data around — and maybe the Web, the part ordinary people see, isn’t looking so user-friendly anymore.
Then came the sharpest hot takes. One reader called the whole thing an awkward way of saying humans should matter more than AI, while another rolled their eyes at the lofty language and demanded something more concrete than ideals. And yes, the jokes arrived too: the funniest, bleakest line imagined the future Internet split into two species — anti-bot systems that block humans, and the bots smart enough to get through. So while the official message was “the Internet is for people,” the crowd response was more like: prove it.
Key Points
- •RFC 8890 was published by the Internet Architecture Board and argues that Internet standards decisions should be guided by what benefits end users.
- •Mark Nottingham wrote the article as the RFC’s author and as a member of the IAB that approved it.
- •The article describes the IETF as the primary venue for documenting the Internet’s technical design and cites TCP, IP, DNS, and HTTP as examples of protocols it has overseen.
- •According to the article, the IETF has no formal membership and makes decisions through rough consensus rather than formal voting.
- •The article argues that Internet protocol design has effects beyond technical implementation, because standards choices can enable or discourage particular uses and shift power among people.