I like what you are saying and I too think this way.
My solution has always been that we need to teach people and make it easy for them to hop onto the darknets and any decentralized networks while also helping smaller companies and indie devs establish their business outside the boundaries of the commercial internet and onto the Deep Web.
This will allow us to reboot back to the early 90s and rip power away from all these present-day corporations who've turned the commercial internet into a money-grubbing mess.
It's time to decentralize and open up the Internet again, as it once was (ie. IRC, NNTP and other open protocols) instead of relying on commercial entities (Google, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon) to control our data and access to it.
It's time to decentralize and open up the Internet again, as it once was (ie. IRC, NNTP and other open protocols) instead of relying on commercial entities (Google, Facebook, Amazon) to control our data and access to it.
Decentralising the Internet is the only way we are going to be able to stop corporations from lobbying (aka bribing) the government to make decisions in their favour.
Check out https://substratum.net/ - they have an idea to do just that. As our computers get more and more powerful then there is no reason why we cant distribute more of what forces the internet to be centralised, if no one controls it then it can be free and open (which also raises a whole new set of problems but one step at a time!)
This isn't the Internet. It may run over the Internet, but it isn't the Internet. It's a government. A more delicate balance of accountability and anonymity is called for.
I'd also observe that nobody is really claiming that we must run out and immediately implement this to replace the US Federal government. Start a house-level government, or a frat-level government, or I suppose more relevantly for this crowd, use it for your open source project's governance. Work your way up, learning from the experience. Anonymity and coercion and a lot of other problems that absolutely must be solved for this to work at large scales need not necessarily be solved at smaller ones. Scale up the security later when we need to, and when we understand the space better. In the future we need better cryptography and P2P and etc etc etc, but let's learn about the space now.
(There's something about the word "government" that just makes engineer's engineering sense go flying out the window and turns them right back into Waterfall designers. It's OK to iterate!)
It sounds like a big part of the problem is that we don't have a truly "public" internet, if the backbone of the internet is a bunch of private entities.
We need a truly decentralized internet that doesn't suck like tor currently does.
Decrentralizing the web's software isn't good enough. We need to decentralize the hardware. Right now, connections to the web look like a tree, where a whole bunch of connections get funneled through an ISP. That ISP has the power. The power to throttle, the power to block, the power to record. And that ISP can be pressured by other powers. We need to decentralize so that instead of looking like a hierarchical tree, the internet looks like a graph. With each building forming a node that connects to its neighbors.
Of course, the amount of work it would take to build such a web and move to it likely rules out the possibility of it ever happening. I mean, how do we go about forming a movement to build this? It only works, really, if everyone's on board.
The way I see it, it looks like the original internet, remember 4chan? the rise of bulletin boards? We can't all be complaining about the current services being exploitative or broken without being a part of a solution. I'm all ears to move away from decentralization if there is a better solution. Currently, there are none.
The internet is already decentralized, another layer of decentralization solves nothing. When the most popular nodes start banning people we're going to hear the exact same complaints from the usual suspects.
I stand up and point my finger again in the direction of decentralization. Here we have this massive societal infrastructure, a huge education tool and a hub for culture, and the whole thing is under the control of a single entity whose primary motive is exclusively profit.
The core infrastructure of the internet (search, social media, archives, etc.) should not be under the influence of single companies. The internet was supposed to be decentralized but we ended up with individual companies taking huge monopolies over our standard internet experiences.
I don't think there is any tech out there today that can properly replace YouTube. Especially things like the recommendation engine. But I also don't think it's that far out of reach. We should putting greater effort into decentralizing the core parts of the internet.
Money, search, email, data storage, social media, DNS, ISP, and I'm sure dozens of other things. We don't need to be vulnerable like this.
It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control).
The current situation is akin to having to travel to some centralized letter-reading facility in order to read letter mail. Your grandma sends you a letter in the mail and you have to go to a central facility downtown, then prove your identity, and then they hand over the (opened) letter.
We put a man on the moon more than 40 years ago. We must be able to sort this out.
reply