Moving to a better digital infrastructure
For some years now, I’ve been thinking about the issues with our current infrastructure for the Internet, and more specifically, the Web. They have become very apparent, and have appeared on headlines in the mainstream media with the different leaks about mass surveillance, or how companies our making use of the data we’re giving them to try to “manipulate” us. What was supposed to be a liberating technology that opened up the world’s knowledge to everyone has become a powerful and dangerous tool for those who are looking to control it.
I’d say there are 4 types of organizations that have too much power over the Internet:
- Telecommunication companies. They control the wire that connects us all together. They’re the ones fighting against Net Neutrality again and again. That’s also why Google and Facebook are trying to get into this business, giving less control over to other companies.
- Hosting companies. When AWS goes down, many popular websites go down as many services are dependant on very few hosting companies. It’s worrying that we’ve ended up putting so many apples on the same baskets.
- Data greedy services. Most large Web companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon…) are very famous for collecting vast amount of data about us. They use this data to offer us better services and serving better ads. The issue is that they end up controlling our data, and sharing it with 3rd parties.
- Governments. There are two main issues with governments. The first is that they’re able to stop Internet Providers from offering their services, like it has happened in Turkey and Egypt several times, or even stopping specific websites, like Facebook in China. The second issue is them using their power for mass surveillance, trying to grab all the data that different services are collecting and owning about us.
Neither the Internet nor the Web were conceived expecting these negative effects, and many different projects have been worked on for decades to improve these amazing technologies. A critical one that’s been gaining mass adoption is https, which encrypts the data sent from your computer to a server, avoiding man-in-the-middle attacks.
For the first issue, we’ve seen many projects like Althea, and projects based on cjdns, that want to build mesh networks. Home routers like Google’s or Eero now use mesh networks to improve home Wi-Fis. Mesh networks lets us depend less on telecommunication companies by connecting all our devices directly with each other. This has already been used in emergency situations, where the light went out, so people couldn’t access the Internet in a conventional manner.
Other projects have been focused on decentralisation. We now have initiatives like IPFS, Swarm or DAT to decentralize files, avoiding the hosting companies issue. This means that all our devices act as hosting services, and if one of us goes down, others are still up and can keep on serving a file. This decentralized Internet is reaching the mainstream with its appearance as the main topic of Silicon Valley Season 4.
We’ve seen projects focused on identity and how you can control your data. There’s a very interesting article about the path to a self-sovereign identity that’s definitely worth a read. Web based APIs have come up like the Solid project lead by Tim Berners-Lee, or WebFinger (which is what Mastodon uses). Now that blockchains have gotten popular, we have solutions like Uport. We need to avoid third parties as necessary intermediaries to verify an identity. The identity itself should be able to hold verifiable claims, like a driver’s license or a passport. Uport supports this, and there’s also a Web initiative to solve this.
Lastly, I wanted to mention projects focused on finding new business models for the Web. There are basically 2 main ideas. One is services paying others to host their content on decentralized Webs, so if you let these services use your devices, you can get some money from them. The other is to avoid ads, and instead pay websites directly with subscriptions, or with some micro payment based model. Some are built on top of a blockchain as well, Filecoin for hosting content, and the Basic Attention Token for micro payments.
I’ve mentioned some projects, but there are dozens and dozens more, and each of them are generally focused on very specific issues. They also don’t speak to each other, so we end up with a very fragmented decentralized Web with no clear winners. I think it’s about time, specially with the serious political issues happening around the globe, that we all get together and start working on a more universal solution. Last year we saw the first Decentralized Web Summit, hosted by the Internet Archive, where many of these great projects got together. It’s a great first step, but there’s a lot more work to do.
