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HBO's 'Silicon Valley' Joins The Push For A Decentralized Web (ieee.org)
Tekla Perry writes:
HBO's fictional Silicon Valley character Richard Hendricks sets out to reinvent the Internet into something decentralized. ["What if we used all those phones to build a massive network...we could build a completely decentralized version of our current Internet with no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. Information would be totally free in every sense of the word."] That sound a lot like what Brewster Kahle, Tim Berners-Lee, and Vint Cerf have been calling the decentralized web. Kahle tells IEEE Spectrum about how closely HBO's vision matches his own, and why he's happy to have this light shined on the movement.
In 2015 Kahle pointed out the current web isn't private. "People, corporations, countries can spy on what you are reading. And they do." But in a decentralized web, "the bits will be distributed -- across the net -- so no one can track the readers of a site from a single point or connection."
He tells IEEE Spectrum that though the idea is hard to execute, a lot of people are already working on it. "I recently talked to a couple of engineers working for Mozilla, and brought up the idea of decentralizing the web. They said, 'Oh, we have a group working on that, are you thinking about that as well?'"
In 2015 Kahle pointed out the current web isn't private. "People, corporations, countries can spy on what you are reading. And they do." But in a decentralized web, "the bits will be distributed -- across the net -- so no one can track the readers of a site from a single point or connection."
He tells IEEE Spectrum that though the idea is hard to execute, a lot of people are already working on it. "I recently talked to a couple of engineers working for Mozilla, and brought up the idea of decentralizing the web. They said, 'Oh, we have a group working on that, are you thinking about that as well?'"
Some parts of the Internets infrastructure are decentralized, the network on the whole however heavily depends on central authorities. If you want an IP address, you have to ask a central authority. You want a DNS name, ask a central authority. Even when you want to connect your laptop to your phone you may need to ask your phone company for permission.
With the Web it gets even worse, since almost everything people do on there is hosted on some big Google or Facebook server farm. In theory everybody could run their own Web and mail servers, but in reality everybody depends on centralized providers. Another problem with the Web is that all the addressing is location based, not content based. So you can't refer to a specific document, you can only refer to a storage location and whatever is stored there can change.
There are attempts to build a decentralized content addressable network on top of the Internet, like Freenet, Maidsafe or IPFS, but so far none of them has reached critical mass. On the raw network side mesh networks are slowly gaining some traction and they might help with the whole need for an ISP, you just connect to the nearest phone or computer and hop on from there.
"no way to ensure your machine won't have parts of something disgusting and vile."
This is intentional. Plausible denyability. Even if something is found your node, it's impossible to prove you had any knowledge of it.