Why We Need To Decentralize The Web (postlight.com)

One could argue that the web is already decentralized. But with major websites like Google and Facebook, it's increasingly harder to stay decentralized. Paul Ford writes: There's a good research report that was just published. It's called "Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future?" (That's a PDF so watch yourself.) What is decentralization? Take the web: Anyone can set up a web page and link to any other web page. That's decentralized. Anyone can make a search engine to find those web pages. That's centralized. The search engine can add blogging. That's Google + Blogger. Now it's both a publisher and a search engine. It has more power. Decentralized things are harder to manage and use. Centralized things end up easy to use and make money for relatively few people. The web is inherently decentralized, which has made it much easier for large companies to create large, centralized platforms. It's a paradox and very thorny. God bless the authors of this paper, they don't make you wade through. They pop up with recommendations by page 5: "We advise investors -- whether motivated by civic or fiscal concerns -- both to watch this space closely and to advocate for the pre-conditions that we believe will enable a healthier marketplace for online publishing. A precondition for the success of these distributed platforms is a shift towards user-controlled data, the ownership of a user's social graph and her intellectual property created online. It will be difficult for new platforms to develop without widespread support for efforts towards data portability and rights over data ownership. Data portability also enables new models for aggregation. Small, thoughtfully curated news sources will be made more powerful by having access to the user data currently locked inside mega-platforms, but right now, federated clients that interoperate between different platforms are borderline illegal -- fixing this may require adjusting overly broad regulations, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
"We believe that these user-controlled data rights are essential to develop a more robust market and allow new efforts to emerge from existing communities. Though individual users might not directly care about or understand these rights, their adoption will free developers to create applications that leverage users' existing data, so that they can provide compelling, interesting new experiences, even with a small user base."

Comments

The web has changed

[HeckRuler]

I have a rant about this from 2012:

Yeah, the web has changed in my day.

It used to be full of homepages. Personal sites. If you searched for something (and search sucked in those days, trust me), more often then not you found a website that someone had made on their own time and covered whatever subjects they wanted it to. And not a blurb on some reviewing site. No, the whole damn site was theirs. It depended on what you were searching for, but it ran the gamut of important to trivial. From fan-reviews of books, to people raging about how awesome the newest game was. But also important stuff like the effects of the fall of the Berlin wall the the social entanglement the web is posing for Muslim women.

Most of these pages were hosted for free. And I believe that's where I came in. Way past the endless September. Before the 90's putting something on the web required you to run your own server. Or have access to one in college or something. In the 90's, geocities and all lowered the bar for the internet and hosting was now free, with a small string attached.

Now a days things have changed. People no longer have their own servers or websites, that's too much work. The bar has been lowered even further. You no longer need to know HTML or even what a tag is. In the web 2.0 world, everyone can simply upload what they want onto websites. Facebook, flicker, tumbler, wordpress, and all. Those places have done the heavy lifting of making the webpage and all people have to do is insert the content. Web pages that take in people's information, pictures, links, knowledge and all that crap and host it for everyone else to see. When you google something now, the first result is usually wikipedia. Because wikipedia is where people upload their knowledge.

And that's it's own separate rant on the importance of wikipedia.

But anyway, today's internet is more centralized. If you want to know about a movie, you don't find someone's website with a page dedicated to ranting about the movie, you go to imdb and find facts and reviews uploaded by people. You see someone's rant that was upmodded by other. The one that got downmodded is buried and the truly insightful one got censored. (and then you go torrent it, but that's not the web).

This is a slightly disturbing consolidation of the web. Whereas there was once an ever-increasing amount of participation on the web, the meaningful web is now a handful of sites dedicated to their particular topic. It's arguably more structured, but it's taking the power from the people and putting it in the hands of the companies that own the sites. It's arguably the natural course for these sorts of things. Something new came along. Everyone competed, and then a few, very few, people won, ate up the losers, and the consolidation left one or two victors. Which is why everyone was desperate to become to defacto standard. Fighting that process is hopeless. But the natural way things work is kinda crap. It leads to monopolies, and abuse of power. I guess I'm simply unsure about the nature of our gatekeepers.

And Jesus christ. Think about email. A wonderfully decentralized system where it's a no-holds-bar capitalist survival of the fittest right? We SSSHEEEEEIIITT boy! There's Gmail, yahoo, and maybe hotmail. There are also corporate mail servers. But by and far, for most of the populace, email has consolidated. When the fuck did THAT happen and how did I not notice?