The Internet
The Internet is one of humanity’s crowning achievements.
The Internet connects more than half of humanity and is reshaping industry, society and government at an unprecedented pace.
While most users are happy with the current state of the Internet due to the proliferation of ‘free’ services that enable them to research, share, transact and communicate, just a handful of these services are responsible for the vast majority of usage.
In less than 30 years, the Internet has transformed the global economy from industrial to information-based, while altering almost every facet of social life at the same time.
With half of the global population now online, the Internet is the link that binds people together, enabling them to research, share, transact and communicate instantly and directly.
The promise of this incredible medium appears to have been met thanks to services like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Amazon, the market leaders who dominate each of their respective categories.
There’s no denying that these services provide incredible value to the world, but the fact that so many of our online activities are monopolized by so few companies is alarming.
The Internet was created to be a distributed and decentralized platform that we could all build upon, but what we’ve ended up with is a series of walled gardens that extract huge revenues and profits from the users who participate in their increasingly-closed ecosystems, with very little ability to influence the direction of the platform, and with little to no transparency.
While most of these services originated as ‘closed’ systems in which users have consciously chosen to participate, and with no real expectation of neutrality or impartiality, one Internet giant stands out for its academic roots and brand built upon being an arbiter of objective truth.
That entity, of course, is Google. The quirky Stanford project sought to organize the world's information, making it ‘universally accessible and useful, and captivated the world’s attention and our searches by being better than other search engines of the time. And, with its ‘do no evil’ mantra, Google built an unprecedented degree of trust with users.
Their simple interfaces, lightning-fast response times and utter reliability, combined with what appear to be amazingly accurate results, have led to Google obtaining 77% of global desktop searches and 96% of mobile searches - more than 5 billion queries per day - and generating almost $100 billion in annual revenue.
But what if Google’s success comes at a hidden cost to humanity, one that continues to increase with each passing year? And what if Google isn’t as impartial as everyone believes?
As Google has become a multi-billion dollar business that answers to Wall Street, their ethos seems to have shifted from the early days people remember them by. They have become known for promoting their own properties at the expense of alternatives , appropriating others’ info and operating in secrecy , all of which is blamed on ‘the algorithm’. The reality is that they manually manipulate results while hiding behind their algorithm and justifying all changes as being ‘best for the user’. It’s not an ideal environment.
Decentralization
From Wikipedia:
Decentralization is the process of redistributing or dispersing functions, powers, people or things away from a central location or authority.
The New Yorker reports that although the Internet was originally decentralized, in recent years it has become less so: "a staggering percentage of communications flow through a small set of corporations -and thus, under the profound influence of those companies and other institutions [...]
One solution, espoused by some programmers, is to make the Internet more like it used to be – less centralized and more distributed."
The internet is in the middle of a revolution: centralized proprietary services are being replaced with decentralized open ones; trusted parties replaced with verifiable computation; brittle location addresses replaced with resilient content addresses; inefficient monolithic services replaced with peer-to-peer algo-rithmic markets. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchain networks have proven the utility of decentralized transaction ledgers. These public ledgers process sophisticated smart contract applications and transact crypto-assets worth tens of billions of dollars. These systems are the first instances of internet-wide Open Services, where participants form a decentralized network providing useful services for pay, with no central management or trusted parties. IPFS has proven the utility of content-addressing by decentralizing the web itself, serving billions of files used across a global peer-to-peer network.
It lib-erates data from silos, survives network partitions, works offline, routes around censorship, and gives permanence to digital information.