Internet is an architecture issue. It was promised but not in real life. Due to isp and mobile intraf, like it or not, so easy to be firewall by national totalitarian country.

Web is originally decentralised as long as the people want to. There is nothing controlled you you must go through Facebook. That can change say if Facebook sent data to china as of now.

Frankly internet and web is still young. But we hope humanity can be free not bounded.

Prometheus please.

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 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.

So in my mind the problems that need to be solved are:

Information-Centric Networking > Unstructured Mesh Networking > Distributed Data Storage > P2P Information Retrieval

This guy's rant is really about the need for decentralization. I fully agree with him. But I disagree that decentralization is incompatible with Google's primary business model (regardless if the Internet is decentralized, there will always be ways to do advertising.) In fact Google Wave (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave) was a fantastic and radical attempt at decentralizing common use cases such as email, instant messaging, social networking, etc. Unfortunately this project failed to gain traction due to various reasons.

To return to a more decentralized Internet, we need software and network protocols that let people easily host their mail and blog, publish their social pages, and share their vacation pictures, etc, without relying on the cloud but doing it via a device that runs at home. An ideal place to run this software would be your Internet router, as it really is a full-blown computer that is always on, always connected. And, as the router, it conveniently bypasses the issue of masquerading/NATing which is the one reason why non-technical people do not run server software more often. Another advantage is that uploading stuff to your Internet router (eg. sharing pictures) is much, much faster than uploading them to a cloud service (Wifi or Ethernet bandwidth can be 50x-1000x faster than the typical upload bandwidth of a home Internet connection.)

It should all work out of the box with zero configuration. That is the only way the idea can gain traction. Not everybody is a sysadmin, so your grandmother should be able to make it work. Want to enable your mailbox? Just tick the appropriate checkbox on your Internet router as easily as you would sign up for some mail provider. Want to follow the social lives of your friends? Your browser can render your custom Facebook-style wall by pulling posts and pictures feeds directly from your friends' Internet routers.

We already have most of the technologies needed to implement such decentralized features: HTTP with cross-origin resource sharing, SMTP, automatic registration of DNS names to make you discoverable on the net, OpenID authentication, etc. Maybe some other needed bits can be pulled from the Wave protocol.

But the sad thing is that I am not aware of any attempt to implement any of what I described above. Perhaps it is a vision too ahead of its time. Or perhaps it is because there are 2 important problems that are very hard to solve in a fully decentralized way: (1) search, and (2) spam. You can easily search for and find your friend's blog via Google web search because it has an index of the entire web, but how do you provide this level of quality if the search engine is your Internet router? As to spam, you can easily filter email if you are the Gmail team running sophisticated analysis on the billions of emails processed daily because the more data you have the easier you can classify it, but how do you implement this filtering quality on an Internet router that does not have access to such a data set?

Perhaps the solution is to run most of the services in a decentralized way (email, instant messaging, social networking, etc) while at the same time relying on a few central services for some features like search and spam filtering.

Edit: thanks for the pointers to FreedomBox and Sandstorm, I will look into them.

I think the Internet needs more communication services that operate on the client-side and communicate in a decentralized manner.

Only truly distributed, client-side services can resist the kinds of mass metadata collection that governments force service operators to engage in.

I personally have long since lost faith in the political systems of the world to safeguard the interests of their people. It's about time we took the matters into our own hands and start coming up with technological solutions.