7 ms·

Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future? [pdf]

143 points by Dangeranger 9y ago

app4soft 9y ago
Back to the... 1984
quickben 9y ago
We are in this "decentralized" web, is just that the giants have a habit into buying out anything becoming remotely popular. Think end game capitalism. Capital amalgamation. In fact, any modern corporation will be buying as many smaller parts as they can, and regularly firing 10-20% of the people every year (cisco , etc). So then, the problem isn't in the "centralized" web.
- jamespitts 9y ago
  Due to efficiencies of scale and network effects, centralization may seem inevitable. However, we can structurally offset some of this tendency using crypto-economics.
  - Barrin92 9y ago
    I think this is the fundamentally wrong angle, balkanisation and "decentralisation" don't actually seem to help end consumers and don't seem transparent. The logical conclusion when scale and centralisation are inevitable is the good old concept of a "public utility", see Bell Labs, electricity networks, and so forth. Doesn't sound as exciting because there's no "ether" or "crypto" in it but it has served most people quite well
    - quickben 9y ago
      For the stuff that works, i.e. electricity as an invention. But if you need to continue innovating, fragmented ecosystem > one entity. Prime example being: what have 7B people invented, vs , what has UN (as their one face) invented.
      - Barrin92 9y ago
        I don't know what to make of that analogy, but why not stick to the historical example I gave, Bell Labs has invented a good deal of things, as has the military (which I guess can be thought of as a utility of sorts) and the telecommunications sector. For fundamental and 'deep' research the public sector is doing a pretty good job. I'm skeptical about selling every chat app and toy as "innovation".
        gardnr 9y ago
        In fifty years people will look back on this thread and note that we were still debating ideas from such radical ends of the spectrum. I don't know how it will turn out but I have not heard much about your communist internet. I don't mean that in a bad way it is just a useful analogy for me to think about internet as railroads, as the post office, the dmv. Something we need so much that we pay taxes to make sure it is there regardless of whether or not it is viable in a business sense. Then I realize that Bell Labs was not a public utility. It was an exceptional research project driven by exceptional people. Putting a power grid in the same category as Bell Labs is a fallacy. The nature of public institution stifles innovation. The ossified structure provides a safety which precludes the need for survival. Yes, we need the DMV but for fucks sake why do I have to wait in line for 6 hours once a year? How is the post office not profitable? Why are our trains so much slower than in other countries? What is it that you are imagining as good when you see us provisioning our computing resources from a government agency?
  - losteric 9y ago
    I wonder how much centralization is due to consumer ISP and computing limitations. What structure would communication channels take in a world of phones with terabytes of local storage, days of battery life under heavy use, and reliable unlimited high-speed internet? Non-corporate software alternatives are getting there, but the next bottle-neck is operation. A simple static personal website still involves hosting "in the cloud" or setting up personal hardware, and operations. Mass adoption requires a 1-click 0-maintenance app.
    - PeanutCurry 9y ago
      I think computing limitations is the big one but also software limitations in terms of how much software a company might need to develop for itself to compete with a big player. Right now there's a lot of innovation going on. Not that there won't always be innovation, but in the grand scheme of time I'd argue web-tech will one day reach a state of the art that progresses more incrementally in the way that fields like physics, biology, etc. tend to with of waves of small insights rather than the few decades of rapid evolution they underwent in their infancy. It's at that point of incremental innovation for web-tech where I think little guys become competitive because that's where they can start smaller businesses running cheap but 'good enough' hardware and premade open-source software to provide similar services to the big players albeit at smaller margins to provide comparable but less comprehensive products for cheaper. These smaller businesses are where I imagine the decentralization manifesting. Especially if some of those businesses are things like "Join our regional hardware co-op and contribute your unused processing power to our service in exchange for a share of the profit". That would be huge on its own for de-centralization, if a profitable service could bring anybody and everybody a worthwhile amount of money for simply running their web-service software during downtime.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    It's not inevitable. Centralization is a side effect of the CFAA and copyright laws. The reason that people aren't able to read Facebook on a user's behalf and multiplex the feed into a competing network is because Facebook will sue you and the FBI may arrest you if you do this. As such, users are denied true competitive freedom to say "I prefer the way that NewThing does stuff". They instead have to say "I prefer NewThing, but my social graph is held hostage by Facebook." I won't say anything in particular about network effects because it's usually taken the wrong way, but there's no reason any of this lock-in has to exist on the digital web. We've chosen it by giving extremely strong legal protections to existing tech incumbents.
    - quickben 9y ago
      Network effects will sooner be broken by a legal, than a technical solution.
- narrator 9y ago
  The big guys get capital for next to nothing from the public markets so they can buy out the small guys who challenge their control. They can even run the bought businesses badly and still make a profit because the money they used to buy them was so cheap.
  - Freak_NL 9y ago
    Plus the nasty fact that being huge and global means you can afford implementing the most effective tax evasion schemes. If a significantly lower tax rate means having to open up an office with a thousand employees in country X, then that is simply what's done, because it is cheaper than paying taxes.
sremani 9y ago
(From the document..) Risks Posed by the Centralized Web - Facebook and Google, account for 81% of all incoming traffic to online news sources in the U.S. - Google processes 3.5 billion search queries per day, roughtly ten times more than its nearest competitors Risk 1- Top-down, Direct Censorship Risk 2 - Curational Bias/ Indirect Cencorship Risk 3 - Abuse of Curatorial Power Risk 4 - Exclusion
- will_brown 9y ago
  >Google processes 3.5 billion search queries per day, roughtly ten times more than its nearest competitors The crazy thing to me is this has already been examined through many of their obviously anti-competitive acquisitions, and yet they always win. Namely, they use their position as the search engine leader to determine trends in search, purchases and advertising to buy companies in industries that will ultimately help the bottom line of their advertising revenue driven search engine to the detriment of alternative products. In other words the very people/companies who already buy Google ads now must pay more for Google ads because Google entered the market and is competing for the same ads jacking up prices. Because of Google's search engine they know exactly where they can get away with this, they know the maximum ad cost bearable by their competitors and can/will squeeze it at best or they can effectively drive you out of business leaving themselves as the sole operator in the space at worst. I mentioned it the other day, the one thing people could do is boycott google search, which I know sounds ridiculous, but how hard would it really be to organize a single day google search boycott across the web where people agreed to use bing or DuckDuckGo for a single day? google shareholders would throw a fit and change would be made internally in an instant, and I'd go so far as to say political pressure would come down to seriously look into the business practices. Most importantly people would wake up, understand their power and realize they own the web not these dominant corporate entities.
  - visarga 9y ago
    > how hard would it really be to organize a single day google search boycott across the web - DDG and probably even Bing would go under. - It's just a slap on the wrist for Google. I think a better idea is to create a distributed, federated crawler and search engine that does not depend on a central point of failure. Alternatively, we could still use Google for long-tail, technical searches and use a different one for important queries such as politics and social.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
stephengillie 9y ago
Is there any sort of free open source internet search project? Similar to OpenStreetMap for open map data. Searching hasn't found any.
- amelius 9y ago
  Also, the amount of open source software libraries for search is disappointing. Somewhat strange, because searching is one of the pillars of CS.
- mlinksva 9y ago
  https://about.commonsearch.org/ https://about.commonsearch.org/ could use help.
- vgb2k11 9y ago
  yacy.net
toby_mars 9y ago
To increase the competition via decentralization of the government control of internet
- Qwertious 9y ago
  Removal of government control is a double-edged sword - government can be a huge barrier to innovation, but they can also enforce innovation, by blocking monopolistic companies from being anticompetitive.
  - bobdingus 9y ago
    I feel like these monopolistic companies will have a lot more sway in any attempts at legislation than the disorganized, disinterested masses.
kermittd 9y ago
Started reading last night. No technical expert but I came of age after the widespread use of the Internet. Many people, my age and older, can care a less about the philosophy of decentralized platforms. However could you combine usability of centralized platforms with a decentralized platform focus on privacy, lack of ads, etc? (of course how to pay for it...)
- indigochill 9y ago
  Regarding payment, I think you must take payment from your users (my recommendation would be donations, like Wikipedia). This is because an organization's primary objective is self-preservation, and that means aligning priorities with income sources (or when you're designing the organization, aligning your business model with your priorities). As we've seen with journalism, journalism's reliance on advertising leads to journalism designed primarily to attract viewers for advertisers rather than to serve the public interest (although good journalism does still happen because some journalists care about that despite their organization's priorities).
  - kermittd 9y ago
    Wikipedia is a great example of a free decentralized product. I suppose a way without having to ask for donations is one I would be interested in though I suspect there are " whales" who make up the bulk. I think the issue with Wikipedia, though it has been able to scale to reach the world, is that it seem to lack the power to change how info is distributed and consumed in the spirit of Google and Facebook outside its digital border.
dcow 9y ago
I'm sad they don't mention urbit.org. Urbit aims to solve a lot of these problems at once (storage + identity + social + platform).
- gardnr 9y ago
  This part made me laugh out loud: "and “Arvo,” a functional network OS, which is also a database." https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/urbit-the-bold-pitch-to-re-decentralize-the-internet-on-top-of-the-internet-1468257340/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/urbit-the-bold-pitch-to... It seems like they've had a professional story teller masticate their ideas into good descriptions. But really, if you had to describe it in 5 buzzwords or less would it be a "federated crypto p2p lambda server"?
  - dcow 9y ago
    Curtis loves to write about political philosophy and it's clear some of that has leaked into the urbit project--which isn't in isolation bad. It does seem to deter a general person simply interested in what the project is all about since you have to cut through the obscure language.
sakabasataka 9y ago
A lot of literal neo-nazis are trying to hijack the debate to create a false equivalence between "hate-speech" and "free-speech" (two orthogonal topics). Don't let them use you as a vessel by falsely equating their hate with "free-speech".

143 points by Dangeranger 9y ago

Back to the... 1984

We are in this "decentralized" web, is just that the giants have a habit into buying out anything becoming remotely popular. Think end game capitalism. Capital amalgamation. In fact, any modern corporation will be buying as many smaller parts as they can, and regularly firing 10-20% of the people every year (cisco , etc). So then, the problem isn't in the "centralized" web.

jamespitts 9y ago
Due to efficiencies of scale and network effects, centralization may seem inevitable. However, we can structurally offset some of this tendency using crypto-economics.
- Barrin92 9y ago
  I think this is the fundamentally wrong angle, balkanisation and "decentralisation" don't actually seem to help end consumers and don't seem transparent. The logical conclusion when scale and centralisation are inevitable is the good old concept of a "public utility", see Bell Labs, electricity networks, and so forth. Doesn't sound as exciting because there's no "ether" or "crypto" in it but it has served most people quite well
  - quickben 9y ago
    For the stuff that works, i.e. electricity as an invention. But if you need to continue innovating, fragmented ecosystem > one entity. Prime example being: what have 7B people invented, vs , what has UN (as their one face) invented.
    - Barrin92 9y ago
      I don't know what to make of that analogy, but why not stick to the historical example I gave, Bell Labs has invented a good deal of things, as has the military (which I guess can be thought of as a utility of sorts) and the telecommunications sector. For fundamental and 'deep' research the public sector is doing a pretty good job. I'm skeptical about selling every chat app and toy as "innovation".
      - gardnr 9y ago
        In fifty years people will look back on this thread and note that we were still debating ideas from such radical ends of the spectrum. I don't know how it will turn out but I have not heard much about your communist internet. I don't mean that in a bad way it is just a useful analogy for me to think about internet as railroads, as the post office, the dmv. Something we need so much that we pay taxes to make sure it is there regardless of whether or not it is viable in a business sense. Then I realize that Bell Labs was not a public utility. It was an exceptional research project driven by exceptional people. Putting a power grid in the same category as Bell Labs is a fallacy. The nature of public institution stifles innovation. The ossified structure provides a safety which precludes the need for survival. Yes, we need the DMV but for fucks sake why do I have to wait in line for 6 hours once a year? How is the post office not profitable? Why are our trains so much slower than in other countries? What is it that you are imagining as good when you see us provisioning our computing resources from a government agency?
- losteric 9y ago
  I wonder how much centralization is due to consumer ISP and computing limitations. What structure would communication channels take in a world of phones with terabytes of local storage, days of battery life under heavy use, and reliable unlimited high-speed internet? Non-corporate software alternatives are getting there, but the next bottle-neck is operation. A simple static personal website still involves hosting "in the cloud" or setting up personal hardware, and operations. Mass adoption requires a 1-click 0-maintenance app.
  - PeanutCurry 9y ago
    I think computing limitations is the big one but also software limitations in terms of how much software a company might need to develop for itself to compete with a big player. Right now there's a lot of innovation going on. Not that there won't always be innovation, but in the grand scheme of time I'd argue web-tech will one day reach a state of the art that progresses more incrementally in the way that fields like physics, biology, etc. tend to with of waves of small insights rather than the few decades of rapid evolution they underwent in their infancy. It's at that point of incremental innovation for web-tech where I think little guys become competitive because that's where they can start smaller businesses running cheap but 'good enough' hardware and premade open-source software to provide similar services to the big players albeit at smaller margins to provide comparable but less comprehensive products for cheaper. These smaller businesses are where I imagine the decentralization manifesting. Especially if some of those businesses are things like "Join our regional hardware co-op and contribute your unused processing power to our service in exchange for a share of the profit". That would be huge on its own for de-centralization, if a profitable service could bring anybody and everybody a worthwhile amount of money for simply running their web-service software during downtime.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  It's not inevitable. Centralization is a side effect of the CFAA and copyright laws. The reason that people aren't able to read Facebook on a user's behalf and multiplex the feed into a competing network is because Facebook will sue you and the FBI may arrest you if you do this. As such, users are denied true competitive freedom to say "I prefer the way that NewThing does stuff". They instead have to say "I prefer NewThing, but my social graph is held hostage by Facebook." I won't say anything in particular about network effects because it's usually taken the wrong way, but there's no reason any of this lock-in has to exist on the digital web. We've chosen it by giving extremely strong legal protections to existing tech incumbents.
  - quickben 9y ago
    Network effects will sooner be broken by a legal, than a technical solution.
narrator 9y ago
The big guys get capital for next to nothing from the public markets so they can buy out the small guys who challenge their control. They can even run the bought businesses badly and still make a profit because the money they used to buy them was so cheap.
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  Plus the nasty fact that being huge and global means you can afford implementing the most effective tax evasion schemes. If a significantly lower tax rate means having to open up an office with a thousand employees in country X, then that is simply what's done, because it is cheaper than paying taxes.

sremani 9y ago

(From the document..) Risks Posed by the Centralized Web - Facebook and Google, account for 81% of all incoming traffic to online news sources in the U.S. - Google processes 3.5 billion search queries per day, roughtly ten times more than its nearest competitors Risk 1- Top-down, Direct Censorship Risk 2 - Curational Bias/ Indirect Cencorship Risk 3 - Abuse of Curatorial Power Risk 4 - Exclusion

will_brown 9y ago
>Google processes 3.5 billion search queries per day, roughtly ten times more than its nearest competitors The crazy thing to me is this has already been examined through many of their obviously anti-competitive acquisitions, and yet they always win. Namely, they use their position as the search engine leader to determine trends in search, purchases and advertising to buy companies in industries that will ultimately help the bottom line of their advertising revenue driven search engine to the detriment of alternative products. In other words the very people/companies who already buy Google ads now must pay more for Google ads because Google entered the market and is competing for the same ads jacking up prices. Because of Google's search engine they know exactly where they can get away with this, they know the maximum ad cost bearable by their competitors and can/will squeeze it at best or they can effectively drive you out of business leaving themselves as the sole operator in the space at worst. I mentioned it the other day, the one thing people could do is boycott google search, which I know sounds ridiculous, but how hard would it really be to organize a single day google search boycott across the web where people agreed to use bing or DuckDuckGo for a single day? google shareholders would throw a fit and change would be made internally in an instant, and I'd go so far as to say political pressure would come down to seriously look into the business practices. Most importantly people would wake up, understand their power and realize they own the web not these dominant corporate entities.
- visarga 9y ago
  > how hard would it really be to organize a single day google search boycott across the web - DDG and probably even Bing would go under. - It's just a slap on the wrist for Google. I think a better idea is to create a distributed, federated crawler and search engine that does not depend on a central point of failure. Alternatively, we could still use Google for long-tail, technical searches and use a different one for important queries such as politics and social.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

stephengillie 9y ago

Is there any sort of free open source internet search project? Similar to OpenStreetMap for open map data. Searching hasn't found any.

amelius 9y ago
Also, the amount of open source software libraries for search is disappointing. Somewhat strange, because searching is one of the pillars of CS.
mlinksva 9y ago
https://about.commonsearch.org/ https://about.commonsearch.org/ could use help.
vgb2k11 9y ago
yacy.net

toby_mars 9y ago

To increase the competition via decentralization of the government control of internet

Qwertious 9y ago
Removal of government control is a double-edged sword - government can be a huge barrier to innovation, but they can also enforce innovation, by blocking monopolistic companies from being anticompetitive.
- bobdingus 9y ago
  I feel like these monopolistic companies will have a lot more sway in any attempts at legislation than the disorganized, disinterested masses.

kermittd 9y ago

Started reading last night. No technical expert but I came of age after the widespread use of the Internet. Many people, my age and older, can care a less about the philosophy of decentralized platforms. However could you combine usability of centralized platforms with a decentralized platform focus on privacy, lack of ads, etc? (of course how to pay for it...)

indigochill 9y ago
Regarding payment, I think you must take payment from your users (my recommendation would be donations, like Wikipedia). This is because an organization's primary objective is self-preservation, and that means aligning priorities with income sources (or when you're designing the organization, aligning your business model with your priorities). As we've seen with journalism, journalism's reliance on advertising leads to journalism designed primarily to attract viewers for advertisers rather than to serve the public interest (although good journalism does still happen because some journalists care about that despite their organization's priorities).
- kermittd 9y ago
  Wikipedia is a great example of a free decentralized product. I suppose a way without having to ask for donations is one I would be interested in though I suspect there are " whales" who make up the bulk. I think the issue with Wikipedia, though it has been able to scale to reach the world, is that it seem to lack the power to change how info is distributed and consumed in the spirit of Google and Facebook outside its digital border.

dcow 9y ago

I'm sad they don't mention urbit.org. Urbit aims to solve a lot of these problems at once (storage + identity + social + platform).

gardnr 9y ago
This part made me laugh out loud: "and “Arvo,” a functional network OS, which is also a database." https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/urbit-the-bold-pitch-to-re-decentralize-the-internet-on-top-of-the-internet-1468257340/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/urbit-the-bold-pitch-to... It seems like they've had a professional story teller masticate their ideas into good descriptions. But really, if you had to describe it in 5 buzzwords or less would it be a "federated crypto p2p lambda server"?
- dcow 9y ago
  Curtis loves to write about political philosophy and it's clear some of that has leaked into the urbit project--which isn't in isolation bad. It does seem to deter a general person simply interested in what the project is all about since you have to cut through the obscure language.

sakabasataka 9y ago

A lot of literal neo-nazis are trying to hijack the debate to create a false equivalence between "hate-speech" and "free-speech" (two orthogonal topics). Don't let them use you as a vessel by falsely equating their hate with "free-speech".