Can We Decentralize the Web? (computing.co.uk) 131
This week the Internet Archive hosted an amazing Decentralized Web Summit, which united the makers who want to build a web "that's locked open for good." [Watch the videos here.] Vint Cerf was there, as was the technical product development leader for Microsoft's own decentralized identity efforts, several companies building the so-called punk rock Internet, "along with a handful of venture capitalists looking for opportunities." One talk even included Mike Judge, the creator of HBO's Silicon Valley, which recently included the decentralized web in its ongoing storyline.
Computing highlighted remarks by Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, and Mitchell Baker, the chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation. The ideology of the web's early pioneers, according to Baker, was free software and open source. "Money was considered evil," she said. So when companies came in to commercialize the internet, the original architects were unprepared. "Advertising is the internet's original sin," Kahle told the packed room. "Advertising is winner-take-all, and that's how we've ended up with centralization and monopolies."
At the conference, attendees presented utopian visions of how the future of the internet could look. Civil, a new media startup, proposed crowd-supported journalism using cryptocurrency micro-payments. Mastodon, a decentralized and encrypted social network, was commonly referenced as an alternative to Twitter. As Facebook and Google continue to monopolize the digital advertising ecosystem -- recent estimates say that the two companies control over 70% of digital advertising spending globally -- the promise of a decentralized web, free from the shackles of advertiser demands is fun to imagine.
Tristan Harris, who leads the Center for Humane Technology, "just hopes the pioneers of the new internet turn around to face the potential negative externalities of their products before it's too late," arguing that "If we decentralize the systems we already have without an honest recognition of the social harms that are being created -- mental health [issues], loneliness, addiction, polarization, conspiracy theories... then we've decentralized social harms and we can't even track them." But Tim Berners-Lee "remains hopeful".
"There's massive public awareness of the effects of social networks and the unintended consequences," he told Computing. "There's a huge backlash from people wanting to control their own data"... Meanwhile, there's the rise of "companies which respect user privacy and do not do anything at all with user data" (he namechecks social network MeWe to which he acts as an advisor), open-source collaborations like the data portability project (DTP) led by tech giants, and his own project Solid which is "turning from an experiment into a platform and the start of a movement".
"These are exciting times," said Berners-Lee.
Computing highlighted remarks by Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, and Mitchell Baker, the chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation. The ideology of the web's early pioneers, according to Baker, was free software and open source. "Money was considered evil," she said. So when companies came in to commercialize the internet, the original architects were unprepared. "Advertising is the internet's original sin," Kahle told the packed room. "Advertising is winner-take-all, and that's how we've ended up with centralization and monopolies."
At the conference, attendees presented utopian visions of how the future of the internet could look. Civil, a new media startup, proposed crowd-supported journalism using cryptocurrency micro-payments. Mastodon, a decentralized and encrypted social network, was commonly referenced as an alternative to Twitter. As Facebook and Google continue to monopolize the digital advertising ecosystem -- recent estimates say that the two companies control over 70% of digital advertising spending globally -- the promise of a decentralized web, free from the shackles of advertiser demands is fun to imagine.
Tristan Harris, who leads the Center for Humane Technology, "just hopes the pioneers of the new internet turn around to face the potential negative externalities of their products before it's too late," arguing that "If we decentralize the systems we already have without an honest recognition of the social harms that are being created -- mental health [issues], loneliness, addiction, polarization, conspiracy theories... then we've decentralized social harms and we can't even track them." But Tim Berners-Lee "remains hopeful".
"There's massive public awareness of the effects of social networks and the unintended consequences," he told Computing. "There's a huge backlash from people wanting to control their own data"... Meanwhile, there's the rise of "companies which respect user privacy and do not do anything at all with user data" (he namechecks social network MeWe to which he acts as an advisor), open-source collaborations like the data portability project (DTP) led by tech giants, and his own project Solid which is "turning from an experiment into a platform and the start of a movement".
"These are exciting times," said Berners-Lee.
Re: Berners Lee (Score:1)
It's called Tor (Score:3, Interesting)
Tor is already a decentralized web, and it needs a central list of initial nodes (either from the website or included in the download) to start up.
It's also harder to use then simply going to google.com, slashdot.org, or some other website which can be easily remembered.
I thought of trying to fix Tor... (Score:2)
I can get alone fine with people so long as there's nothing at stake I care about. But having a few beers together is not at all the same thing as working on a project together.
I could maybe go solo and see how much I can fix things with just a forked implementation and maximum interoperability. But I don't have the know-how to head up an open source project.
Behind every t
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Tor isn't decentralized, onion sites work just like normal websites, just with more layers of encryption and anonymity.
Freenet is decentralized.
Community Planning (Score:1)
If we decentralize the systems we already have without an honest
recognition of the social harms that are being created -- mental health
[issues], loneliness, addiction, polarization, conspiracy theories... then we've
decentralized social harms and we can't even track them.
Do we need to track them? We do want to measure mental health issues, but that should happen on the real word for real people. Loneliness, addiction, polarization and conspiracy theories are also properties of modern cities, and that is all seeping into the net with the users. Could it be that the anti-decentralization arguments have a touch of opium of the people, or in this case of the government? Issues of property and control are hidden behind other issues that should have been dealt with by other means
Advertising may be evil (Score:1)
But the web certainly wouldn't be as widespread as it is today without all these "services" that keep people addicted. Such services wouldn't have self funded without advertising.
Just a shame advertising turned into an arms race of who could be more annoying and intrusive.
Eddie Bernays started that... (Score:2, Insightful)
Allowing deep cross-linking of images was the fatal mistake. If they hadn't done that, probably no one would ever have come up with all the abuses that followed.
It's so damn simple. Keep ads on the same server as the site. Make them part of the site, under control of the site owner, who will lose his users if he doesn't police the ads. Don't support anything else in the protocol. Don't even put th
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"But the web certainly wouldn't be as widespread as it is today without all these "services" that keep people addicted. Such services wouldn't have self funded without advertising."
I agree addicting 'services' wouldn't be so pervasive without so much advertising driving investment, but if we're assuming a less profit driven internet then the web could very well have spread as much as it has today through other means like an increase in user friendliness, content relevance, efficiency, and the spread of publ
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Yes, so you can pay a lot less for internet access, and because the pipes are a natural fit for a publicly owned corporation.
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"It's much easier that way sadly."
Not sure it's much easier that way but I agree politicians are favoring private profits too much, and are lying about it or too naive to realize that's what they're doing.
We need -centralization- (Score:1, Insightful)
With all the terrorists and pedos coming out of the woodwork (the LGBT-P fiasco), might it be a good idea for more centralized monitoring? If it saves just one kid, this is worth it. Plus, decentralization brings fragmentation. Look at the Android versus iOS ecosystems. You want centralization. Really, you do.
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I wouldn't say the P in LGBTP is coming out of the woodwork. They've been around for decades. They used to even march in pride parades here in Seattle in the mid-70s. NAMBLA is even nearly forty years old. They're mainly based in NYC and SF, but they also have a presence in Seattle.
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(the LGBT-P fiasco)
Oh I see, so some bullshit that is completely made up is justification for centralizing the web? Thanks for contributing to the discussion.
Short answer: no. (Score:5, Interesting)
Long answer, the same: no, we can't. Everybody who matters wants centralization. Centralization means better efficiency and shareholders love that. Centralization means better control, and governments love that. Centralization means simplicity, and the overwhelming majority of users love that. If you could build a decentralized system, only a minority would go there and the government would stop you, if big money doesn't sue you into the gutter first. We lost the internet, and it's time we accept that and move on.
Re:Short answer: no. (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue isn't technical. But cultural and political.
The old days of the Wild West Web is gone or nearly out. Freedom is at a cost of safety. Every new control that makes us safer chews up a Little bit of freedom. Any new freedom we obtain can adversely affect our safety.
Freedom is good. But so is Safety. There are some things at a small cost of freedom we can get a lot of safety. their are other that at a large cost of freedom we only get a little safety. So normally there should be a happy balance.
However freedom once given is much harder to regain then safety lost. And cultures and people in general when have their safety threaten will more likely react without fully measuring their decision, as they feel the need to protect themselves.
Back in the 1990's the Web was free, there was all kinds of stuff that you can get anonymously and without much consequences. But early on reputable institutions avoided it AOL/Prodigy/MSN because it was too unsafe, and if they were going to have people pay for service they needed a closed garden to protect themselves. However the Web Caught on and Institutions were mostly forced to get in, and the every man started using it.
The 1990's web had an average level of education of a Jr. in College. Then with average Joe getting in it went down to an 8th grade education. This meant we couldn't trust common sense to protect people. So people ended up downloading viruses/spyware and just general crap that killed their $2,000 computers. So they got angry and then went to more centralized locations Google that weeded out the "Dark Web" then to Facebook which was a self contained ecosystem. In general people are much safe now. I am no longer getting called in a panic because someone had corrupted their PC with millions of popup adds.
This happened at a cost of our safety. Now with a few key site hubs, like Facebook information about us is never easier to get to.
If we want a decentralized web again, we need our culture to realize it will no longer be as safe and accept that.
Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces (Score:2)
by Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me... [t0.or.at]
The conclusion: "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimenta
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It's an old triad that we are having to balance in new ways.
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We lost the internet, and it's time we accept that and move on.
We didn't lose anything, "We" never had it to begin with. De-centralization conflicts with the private ownership model of capitalism. Don't think so? Think of all the games that are now drm infested and the software and hardware is slowly being removed from users control due to the technological illiteracy of the masses. Game software has literally been stolen but the masses are too stupid and illiterate to care... while the elite educated minority can't hold these companies accountable from 100's of mi
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I have no idea what video games has to do with anything.
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Was it ever really ours? Does anyone really believe that it wasn't seen as a mechanism of control and surveillance from the very beginning? I'm thinking back to the Usenet days, and there were definitely cops hanging around there from the beginning. I know this because I've met some of them.
If you're on the internet and have created some dim corner where you think nobody's watching, you can be sure you're being watched.
We never lost the inte
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Well, that's a reason, the bigger reason is more fundamental.
How do you find anything?
The web was decentralized, but unless you knew where to go, you were stuck. Web sites had "links" sections that helped bring you to related sites and other interesting things, but unless you knew where to start, it's hard.
It's why we have search engines - but that centralizes the web. Instead of linking to websites and getting information, we evolved into searching for information directly.
You could say something like "Wik
hello? didn't the web start that way? (Score:1)
as an old geezer, the web from long ago was decentralized - even if it was decentralized again, it would just go back to how it is now in a few years - the only way to stop it is to ban people from using it, which is an interesting idea by itself, but as long as the same public that gave us three tv channels, cable tv, and so on are using the web, it will inevitably be centralized by gatekeepers ... what would work is to completely ignore paywalls - google and all of them would never link to anything behind
Usenet! (Score:1)
I just wanted to say Usenet.
Got a few things that might actually do the trick (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Decentralised DNS. The DNS crew have shown they cannot be trusted to 100%, which is a really bad thing when it comes to free speech online. Perhaps a bitcoin style ledger could be of help here.
2. A decentralised social network solution with monetisation options. Think about it, Youtube and Facebook rolled into one for all sorts of content imaginable, a pay-as-you-go buffet where you can choose whether to pay with your eyeballs, your time, or your money. Awesome stuff if it ever get started.
3. The realisation that the web of the nineties, where everyone and their grandma could make a website, is pretty much dead. And no, I do not mourn those Geocities webpages, I rather mourn the fact that it is way too hard to get stuff online without selling your firstborn son to one of the big dragons (Google, Facebook etc).
Guess I'll keep dreaming of these things forever though...
The good and the bad (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Decentralised DNS. The DNS crew have shown they cannot be trusted to 100%, which is a really bad thing when it comes to free speech online. Perhaps a bitcoin style ledger could be of help here.
2. A decentralised social network solution with monetisation options. Think about it, Youtube and Facebook rolled into one for all sorts of content imaginable, a pay-as-you-go buffet where you can choose whether to pay with your eyeballs, your time, or your money. Awesome stuff if it ever get started.
3. The realisation that the web of the nineties, where everyone and their grandma could make a website, is pretty much dead. And no, I do not mourn those Geocities webpages, I rather mourn the fact that it is way too hard to get stuff online without selling your firstborn son to one of the big dragons (Google, Facebook etc).
Guess I'll keep dreaming of these things forever though...
All fine and good.
In an attempt to start a meaningful dialogue, how do you feel about The Daily Stormer [dailystormer.name] having a website available on the internet, having a site name entry in the distributed DNS system, and having a home page and videos on your decentralized social network?(*)
This is the choice you will have to make when implementing the next internet: in order to make it truly open for everyone, you will have to accept that there are people whose opinion you don't agree to and who have just as much right
I'll gladly take the bad with the good, because.. (Score:1)
2. There's no one out there I trust to decide on my behalf what's bad and what's good.
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The very fact that no one would be able to remove the content of the Daily Stormer would hearten me because then in some bizarre world where their fantasies put them in charge, there would be no way for them to remove content challenging a neonazi regime. The internet would be as much for them as for the resistance. You would have to compete in the market of ideas.
Shutting down bad ideas by removing them from sight is no way to fight them. This puts them in the position of a victim (an act was intentionally
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So I'll raise your nazis a "think of the children".
Specifically, think of your underage daughter who was convinced to take some nudes. Nudes that someone has decided to spread all over. Now, what do you as a parent do? What do you do about the deep fakes which involve you personally?
If this is the current censored web, you have some recompense, and you can be sure that the FBI will be looking for the people who are making, hosting and sharing those images. In the decentralized anon web, the solutions are li
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Why do you keep conflating technical availability and consumption preferences? No information network is of much use without a discovery mechanism, which can be either curated (webring / portal) or automated to some extent (search engine). People who are interested in a topic will find a way to create such an mechanism, and use it as long as it suits their goals; it's entirely opt-in and demand driven, so no single person or company gets to decide what qualifies as "wallowing in the filth" and what doesn't
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Because people tend to use the defaults of their software. Many tech companies have systems to measure how many of their users ever change default options settings... it's pretty small. Whatever the settings are when the software ships out, that's the settings most people will use, even when those settings are suboptimal or undesirable for a particular user. Therefore, however we [software writers] set up the initial prefe
Challenges of decentralization (Score:2, Interesting)
Decentralization also means running your own hardware and software. Hardware is a small expense. Software is a big challenge for the vast majority of the population (let's call them our friends & family). Our challenge is to make the software so easy that the average facebook user could deploy it as easily as installing the facebook app on their iPhone/android.
As far as software goes, there's plenty:
Cloud storage (nextcloud, owncloud, etc)
Collaboration platform (rocketchat)
Mail (dovecot/postfix, kolab,
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Redecentralize (Score:3)
I thought this interview [hou2600.org] with Francis Irving of Redecentralize.org said a lot about the benefits of a decentralized internet.
eCommerce protocols? That ship has sailed. (Score:1)
The time to solve a design problem is long before it becomes obvious. Or, if you can't manage to spot it early enough...
They say make one system as a prototype and throw it away, then go design a better one. But the existence of a user base makes this advice impractical. The Web was a prototype-quality design that got established as a standard, because people were idiots.
It's probably way too late to do it ri
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Close your computers and meet other people. They would also want to be discovered.
Do you want to be on a terrorist watch list?
Only terrorists meet other people, in public instead of never leaving home and the Internet, /s
WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
The web is already decentralized (if you exclude the browsers' victory in banishing self-signed certs). The fact that tons of websites choose to use one or two services is a business decision, not a technical one. You don't need advertising, you could run your own advertising, and you can manage your own payments and subscriptions. But people don't because it's easier to use whatever's popular at the moment. They could choose to include a free plug-in advertising framework which they self-host and manage on their own, but instead they choose to use a 3rd party service and pay them instead. The sites don't care about you, they only care about making money. Thus none of this is a problem for them.
The biggest obstacle is greed and people too lazy to learn. The others are ISP port blocking, ISPs banning servers, and most ISPs having tiny upload speeds. Business class net service isn't required for personal site, so don't tell me you have to upgrade to business service, which isn't even available in a lot of residential zoned areas.
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The web is already decentralized (if you exclude the browsers' victory in banishing self-signed certs). The fact that tons of websites choose to use one or two services is a business decision, not a technical one. You don't need advertising, you could run your own advertising, and you can manage your own payments and subscriptions. But people don't because it's easier to use whatever's popular at the moment. They could choose to include a free plug-in advertising framework which they self-host and manage on their own, but instead they choose to use a 3rd party service and pay them instead. The sites don't care about you, they only care about making money. Thus none of this is a problem for them.
The biggest obstacle is greed and people too lazy to learn. The others are ISP port blocking, ISPs banning servers, and most ISPs having tiny upload speeds. Business class net service isn't required for personal site, so don't tell me you have to upgrade to business service, which isn't even available in a lot of residential zoned areas.
At last, common sense in this distributed web argument.
The number one legal reason why most people cannot participate in the "Decentralized Web", if that web means using P2P protocols like IPFS, or other tunnels built using blockchain, is that the Terms of Service of *MOST* ISP's include a paragraph that customers agree to when they contract for Internet service: they cannot host an Internet server.
Becoming a server for the web content of other sites is exactly what IPFS, I2P, ZeroNet, and similar block
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My ISP doesn't prevent running servers. I also don't live in the US.
It is not the point however. You can rent a small dedicated server in a datacenter for $10/month or so, which is probably better for your power bill and reliability than running it at home. You can run a web server or whatever you fancy on it.
Decentralization doesn't mean every user should be on their own. I mean you can got to your local farmer and buy a milk bottle and still call thats a decentralized model. You don't need to milk the cow
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The fucking Internet is still here.
Any "decentralized" scheme you want can run on the Internet.
If your ISP doesn't let you run servers (or put up a personal page?), buy web hosting from Network Solutions for about $150 per year.
NetSol isn't the cheapest but they are very good. The default free phone support is pretty good. if you have bought enough domains (10?) and such to be a "Gold VIP" member (not joining anything - they just recognize you as a valuable customer) the phone support is extremely
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Starting from this premise rarely leads anywhere good.
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"Who do I need to get in touch with to get this going?"
Please send a $500 cash good faith donation (100 dollar bills only) for membership along with your CV to:
Word Wide Web Decentralization Project
Membership Committee
Attention: Mr. Isaiah Mugambo
PO Box 4714
Ikorodu, Nigeria
104211
NO! (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but this "kum bi ya" internet needs to run on magical unicorn farts crap needs to end with a harsh reality check.
It costs $$$ to run the infrastructure that runs the internet. It takes man power, energy, and an assortment of various other folks with expertise to keep the lights on. And guess what? Advertising pays for all of that. You know what doesn't pay for that? A tip jar. I'm sorry guys, buy FOSS can only do so much and a "tip jar" isn't enough to keep the lights on something this big. Sure
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From https://decentralizedweb.net/ [decentralizedweb.net]
We are convening those who want to build a web that...
Remembers. Forgets. That’s safe. That cares about people. That’s a marketplace. That’s a public square. That learns. That’s magical. That’s fun. A web with many winners. A web that’s locked open for good.
Magical? Woah, they actually DO want a "magical" web. I thought you were kidding.
Never going to happen. (Score:3)
New things get the benefit of being open for a while but as is human nature more than enough of someones are going to come along and decide what you are doing with it must be regulated.
It is the basic nature of humans. adults regulate the children, economics regulate the adults, and government regulates it all. You can slice and dice it up however you like but the end result is NEVER different. It will be regulated.
Even in the ever anti-regulation (is that really a thing or just gas people emit?) state of texas you need to a permit to handle unpackaged food.
https://www.learn2serve.com/te... [learn2serve.com]
There is even a temporary suspension in some areas for training for hurricane relief.
http://dshs.texas.gov/food-han... [texas.gov]
Isn't it nice that your legislators are so busy that you can't even legally carry a tray of food from the kitchen to a table without a license or permit of some kind in some places?
Like I said, stop with these pipe dreams a free and open internet is no longer possible because it is no longer new enough to escape the clutches of human meddling. There are numerous calls to regulation on it by businesses and lay people and it will become just another arm of the bureaucracy. It's not prophecy, it's not politics, it is just flat human reality! Or you could say everybody's religion. Because that is tribalism in it's most basic form. Grouping up to gain power to tell people how to live and is as natural for humans as talking to each other!
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I am not pro Trump, is there a reason you think that I am? Or are you the type of person that assumes anyone not agreeing to your dogma is automatically a Trump supporter?
Here is a news flash for you, there are more than just Democrats and Republics in the world. Perhaps you are not able to view or comprehend the world as more than just either R vs D?
And as far as making sure nothing will happen? You are greatly mistaken, if anything Trump is more likely to cause the same counter stroke effort in the le
All in one place (Score:5, Funny)
"Decentralized Web Summit" - "which united the makers"
Yes, lets bring all the decentralized people into one single centralized place!
Is and Has Been Decentralized (Score:1)
The web has been and still is decentralized from both a physical and logical perspective, it only appears centralized to the noobs who no nothing about it or believe Gor invented the internet.
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eh? very few ways to connect to the web in most places. and some of those providers will restrict content or delivery rate of content.
Obviously not, as Caesar pointed out (Score:2)
No. Because then you would have two (or more) webs.
The problem is where the people are. (Score:3)
These problems didn't start with Google and Facebook, the starting point was more like Eternal September, when AOL met USENET. Back in the "Good old days", things were better because you had to work to get on the Internet, which meant you were skimming off the cream of the crop. Not everyone agreed with each other, but everyone was from the upper part of the distribution, so they could disagree sanely, and they could manage to hold more than one idea in their head at once and thus work together in spite of differences. Nowadays, the Internet is an average over plain old humanity, and not a small human-scale group, it's all of them essentially at once, so of course it sucks. It sucks both because advertisers and other manipulators see that concentration of people and thinks "I can make money off them", but it also sucks BECAUSE THE PEOPLE DEMAND IT. Pewdiepie and Logan Paul were enabled by YouTube, but they were created by consumers. President Trump was enabled by Twitter, but created by voters.
Basically, the original post is discussing a technical solution to a social problem, and it's pissing me off that all of these smart people are focusing on the wrong problems (this general meme is all over the place these days). Yes, we should figure out a way to pare off some of the worst self-reinforcing aspects of Facebook and the like, but that's a materially different problem than "We need to replace Facebook entirely with something which is totally antagonistic to the entire reason Facebook is even successful in the first place." We _could_ manage to modify Facebook, but there is no chance that we'll replace Facebook, unless someone more compelling (and most likely worse) comes along.
So be clear, this isn't a "worse is better" argument. I think people can do better. I just think that all of the incentives are not in that direction, and that ignoring the incentives is the surest route to failure. This is a "perfect is the enemy of good enough" argument, where we're going to suffer with it for another decade until knowledgeable people get off their asses and do _work_ to fix things instead of spending their time on pie-in-the-sky redesigns.
Decentralized ... I must be missing somethng. (Score:1)
Hmm we have myultiple host/compute providers with infrastructure in multiple locations all over the world telcos have multiple pops and peering lcations we have multiple cdns, even multiple ondersee fiber links. I must be missing somerhing, but this seems goute decentralized to me, so what am I missing? Any info is appreciated as Iâ(TM)m shore there is some thing rather basic Iâ(TM)ve missed.
Re: Decentralized ... I must be missing somethng. (Score:1)
Oh yea besides the assignemt of globaly unique resources such as AS numers, and globaly unigue IP space, but I cant see how thus ciuld be adminisrered any other way but Ikm deffenetly not sn exert so I leve thrpe furtgervduscusion to more knowlageble people have a nice day, an pardon me foe commrnting on my own comment, I wish slashdot had a way to edit posts after the fact as, meany it not most forum and commenting system have
Who want to decentralize (Score:2)
I note presence of Microsoft people, who would not be allowed there if the web was Microsoft-centered.
We had it all (Score:2)
Now we have social media, shadow bans, deranking search results, US party political social media removing content and accounts, SJW.
The problem is China (Score:3)
Close to 1bil people are using the internet in China, either on mobile or PC/Mac. All of them are locked into the Chinese intranet that is only partially connected to the outside world. The rest of the internet is mostly blocked or throttled into oblivion.
Politicians in the free world are now heading in the same direction, since China is able to get away with it so easily. Sadly, we created the technology and even sold the hardware the Chinese use to create their internet oppression.
It has to start with Google. If they wanted to (they don't) they could put everything they do on a new internet layer, fully encrypted and anonymous. All major websites and services would have no choice but to use it.
Larry Page, Sergey Brin - if you don't fix the internet, you have failed. Instead, you will be remembered as the ones who screwed us all and did nothing but waste time playing around with boats and airplanes.
It always has been decentralized (Score:2)
My Solution -- Mesh Network (Score:2)
I've been continuously revising a mesh network design. There are two layers: hosts and map servers.
Host's provide:
* Sandbox in which to run Map Servers, each of which may have:
* Ability to swap self with another Map Server, at will
* Network Connectivity
* Memory
* Processing Time
* Optional Resources -- extensible but examples include persistent data storage, user interfacing services, etc.
Each Host will earn "promises" for the resources it provides to others. The promises are a form of currency, redeemable
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I've been continuously revising a mesh network design. There are two layers: hosts and map servers. ...
All of that is all well and good, but until the typical consumer internet connection doesn't just have upstream bandwidth equal to its downstream bandwidth but upstream bandwidth higher than its downstream bandwidth, it's not going to gain any traction at all.
Asymmetrical connections in the ISP's favor will forever prevent a decentralized web.
What?? (Score:2)
The web is decentralised. Go ahead. Make a web site. Done.
What they mean is, can we unseat Facebook and make money off the web instead of them. Oh, and maybe make it not addictive too. Yeah, probably not.