Decentralization is the new disruption—the thing everything worth its salt (and a huge ICO) is supposed to be doing. Meanwhile, Internet progenitors like Vint Cerf, Brewster Kahle, and Tim Berners-Lee are trying to re-decentralize the Web. They respond to the rise of surveillance-based platform monopolies by simply redoubling their efforts to develop new and better decentralizing technologies. They seem not to notice the pattern: decentralized technology alone does not guarantee decentralized outcomes. When centralization arises elsewhere in an apparently decentralized system, it comes as a surprise or simply goes ignored.

Here are some traces of the persistent pattern that I’m talking about:

• The early decentralized technologies of the Internet and Web relied on key points of centralization, such as the Domain Name System (which Berners-Lee called the Internet’s “centralized Achilles’ heel by which it can all be brought down or controlled”) and the World Wide Web Consortium (which Berners-Lee has led for its entire history)
• The apparently free, participatory open-source software communities have frequently depended on the charismatic and arbitrary authority of a “benevolent dictator for life,” from Linus Torvalds of Linux (who is not always so benevolent) to Guido van Rossum of Python
• Network effects and other economies of scale have meant that most Internet traffic flows through a tiny number of enormous platforms — a phenomenon aided and exploited by a venture-capital financing regime that must be fed by a steady supply of unicorns
• The venture capital that fuels the online economy operates in highly concentrated regions of the non-virtual world, through networks that exhibit little gender or ethnic diversity, among both investors and recipients
• While crypto-networks offer some novel disintermediation, they have produced some striking new intermediaries, from the mining cartels that dominate Bitcoin and other networks to Vitalik Buterin’s sweeping charismatic authority over Ethereum governance

This pattern shows no signs of going away. But the shortcomings of the decentralizing ideal need not serve as an indictment of it. The Internet and the Web made something so centralized as Facebook possible, but they also gave rise to millions of other publishing platforms, large and small, which might not have existed otherwise. And even while the wealth and power in many crypto-networks appears to be remarkably concentrated, blockchain technology offers distinct, potentially liberating opportunities for reinventing money systems, organizations, governance, supply chains, and more. Part of what makes the allure of decentralization so compelling to so many people is that its promise is real.

Yet it turns out that decentralizing one part of a system can and will have other kinds of effects. If one’s faith in decentralization is anywhere short of fundamentalism, this need not be a bad thing. Even among those who talk the talk of decentralization, many of the best practitioners are already seeking balance — between unleashing powerful, feral decentralization and ensuring that the inevitable centralization is accountable and functional. They just don’t brag about the latter. In what remains, I will review some strategies of thought and practice for responsible decentralization.

Hat from a 2013 event sponsored by Zambia’s central government celebrating a decentralization process. Source: courtesy of Elizabeth Sperber, a political scientist at the University of Denver

First, be more specific

Political scientists talk about decentralization, too—as a design feature of government institutions. They’ve noticed a similar pattern as we find in tech. Soon after something gets decentralized, it seems to cause new forms of centralization not far away. Privatize once-public infrastructure on open markets, and soon dominant companies will grow enough to lobby their way into regulatory capture; delegate authority from a national capital to subsidiary regions, and they could have more trouble than ever keeping warlords, or multinational corporations, from consolidating power. In the context of such political systems, one scholar recommends a decentralizing remedy for the discourse of decentralization — a step, as he puts it, “beyond the centralization-centralization dichotomy.” Rather than embracing decentralization as a cure-all, policymakers can seek context-sensitive, appropriate institutional reforms according to the problem at hand. For instance, he makes a case for centralizing taxation alongside more distributed decisions about expenditures. Some forms of infrastructure lend themselves well to local or private control, while others require more centralized institutions.

Here’s a start: Try to be really, really clear about what particular features of a system a given design seeks to decentralize.

No system is simply decentralized, full-stop. We shouldn’t expect any to be. Rather than referring to TCP/IP or Bitcoin as self-evidently decentralized protocols, we might indicate more carefully what about them is decentralized, as opposed to what is not. Blockchains, for instance, enable permissionless entry, data storage, and computing, but with a propensity to concentration with respect to interfaces, governance, and wealth. Decentralizing interventions cannot expect to subdue every centralizing influence from the outside world. Proponents should be forthright about the limits of their enterprise (as Vitalik Buterin has sometimes been). They can resist overstating what their particular sort of decentralization might achieve, while pointing to how other interventions might complement their efforts.

Another approach might be to regard decentralization as a process, never a static state of being — to stick to active verbs like “decentralize” rather than the perfect-tense “decentralized,” which suggests the process is over and done, or that it ever could be.

Guidelines such as these may tempt us into a pedantic policing of language, which can lead to more harm than good, especially for those attempting not just to analyze but to build. Part of the appeal of decentralization-talk is the word’s role as a “floating signifier” capable of bearing various related meanings. Such capacious terminology isn’t just rhetoric; it can have analytical value as well. Yet people making strong claims about decentralization should be expected to make clear what distinct activities it encompasses. One way or another, decentralization must submit to specificity, or the resulting whack-a-mole centralization will forever surprise us.

A panel whose participants, at the time, represented the vast majority of the Bitcoin network’s mining power. Original source unknown

Second, find checks and balances

People enter into networks with diverse access to resources and skills. Recentralization often occurs because of imbalances of power that operate outside the given network. For instance, the rise of Facebook had to do with Mark Zuckerberg’s ingenuity and the technology of the Web, but it also had to do with Harvard University and Silicon Valley investors. Wealth in the Bitcoin network can correlate with such factors as propensity to early adoption of technology, wealth in the external economy, and proximity to low-cost electricity for mining. To counteract such concentration, the modes of decentralization can themselves be diverse. This is what political institutions have sought to do for centuries.

Those developing blockchain networks have tended to rely on rational-choice, game-theoretic models to inform their designs, such as in the discourse that has come to be known as “crypto-economics.” But relying on such models alone has been demonstrably inadequate. Already, protocol designers seem to be rediscovering notions like the separation of powers from old, institutional liberal political theory. As it works to “truly achieve decentralization,” the Civil journalism network ingeniously balances market-based governance and enforcement mechanisms with a central, mission-oriented foundation populated by elite journalists — a kind of supreme court. Colony, an Ethereum-based project “for open organizations,” balances stake-weighted and reputation-weighted power among users, so that neither factor alone dictates a user’s fate in the system. The jargon is fairly new, but the principle is old. Stake and reputation, in a sense, resemble the logic of the House of Lords and the House of Commons in British government — a balance between those who have a lot to lose and those who gain popular support.

As among those experimenting with “platform cooperativism,” protocols can also adapt lessons from the long and diverse legacy of cooperative economics. For instance, blockchain governance might balance market-based one-token-one-vote mechanisms with cooperative-like one-person-one-vote mechanisms to counteract concentrations of wealth. The developers of RChain, a computation protocol, have organized themselves in a series of cooperatives, so that the oversight of key resources is accountable to independent, member-elected boards. Even while crypto-economists adopt market-based lessons from Hayek, they can learn from the democratic economics of “common-pool resources” theorized by Elinor Ostrom and others.

Decentralizing systems should be as heterogeneous as their users. Incorporating multiple forms of decentralization, and multiple forms of participation, can enable each to check and counteract creeping centralization.

Headquarters of the Internet Archive, home of the Decentralized Web conferences: Wikimedia Commons

Third, make centralization accountable

More empowering strategies for decentralization, finally, may depend on not just noticing or squashing the emergence of centralized hierarchy, but embracing it. We should care less about whether something is centralized or decentralized than whether it is accountable. An accountable system is responsive to both the common good for participants and the needs of minorities; it sets consistent rules and can change them when they don’t meet users’ needs.

Antitrust policy is an example of centralization (through government bureaucracy) on behalf of decentralization (in private sector competition). When the government carrying out such a policy holds a democratic mandate, it can claim to be accountable, and aggressive antitrust enforcement frequently enjoys broad popularity. Such centralized government power, too, may be the only force capable of counteracting the centralized power of corporations that are less accountable to the people whose lives they affect. In ways like this, most effective forms of decentralization actually imply some form of balance between centralized and decentralized power.

While Internet discourses tend to emphasize their networks’ structural decentralization, well-centralized authorities have played critical roles in shaping those networks for the better. Internet progenitors like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee not only designed key protocols but also established multi-stakeholder organizations to govern them. Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar user experience across servers and browsers. The W3C includes both enormously wealthy corporations and relatively low-budget advocacy organizations. Although its decisions have sometimes seemedto choose narrow business interests over the common good, these cases are noteworthy because they are more the exception than the rule. Brewster Kahle has modeled mission-grounded centralization in the design of the nonprofit Internet Archive, a piece of essential infrastructure, and has even attempted to create a cooperative credit union for the Internet. His centralizing achievements are at least as significant as his calls for decentralizing.

Blockchain protocols, similarly, have tended to spawn centralized organizations or companies to oversee their development, although in the name of decentralization their creators may regard such institutionalization as a merely temporary necessity. Crypto-enthusiasts might admit that such institutions can be a feature, not a bug, and design them accordingly. If they want to avoid a dictator for life, as in Linux, they could plan ahead for democracy, as in Debian. If they want to avoid excessive miner-power, they could develop a centralized node with the power to challenge such accretions.

The challenge that entrepreneurs undertake should be less a matter of How can I decentralize everything? than How can I make everything more accountable? Already, many people are doing this more than their decentralization rhetoric lets on; a startup’s critical stakeholders, from investors to developers, demand it. But more emphasis on the challenge of accountability, as opposed to just decentralization, could make the inevitable emergence of centralization less of a shock.

What’s so scary about trust?

In a February 2009 forum post introducing Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto posited, “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work.” This analysis, and the software accompanying it, has spurred a crusade for building “trustless” systems, in which institutional knowledge and authority can be supplanted with cryptographic software, pseudonymous markets, and game-theoretic incentives. It’s a crusade analogous to how global NGOs and financial giants advocated mechanisms to decentralize power in developing countries, so as to facilitate international investment and responsive government. Yet both crusades have produced new kinds of centralization, in some cases centralization less accountable than what came before.

For now, even the minimal electoral accountability over the despised Federal Reserve strikes me as preferable to whoever happens to be running the top Bitcoin miners.

Decentralization is not a one-way process. Decentralizing one aspect of a complex system can realign it toward complex outcomes. Tools meant to decentralize can introduce novel possibilities — even liberating ones. But they run the risk of enabling astonishingly unaccountable concentrations of power. Pursuing decentralization at the expense of all else is probably futile, and of questionable usefulness as well. The measure of a technology should be its capacity to engender more accountable forms of trust.

Learn more: ntnsndr.in/e4e

If you want to read more about the limits of decentralization, here’s a paper I’m working on about that. If you want to read about an important tradition of accountable, trust-based, cooperative business, here’s a book I just published about that.

Photo by CIFOR

The post What to do once you admit that decentralizing everything never seems to work appeared first on P2P Foundation.

However, I’m concerned Solid is ill-equipped to tackle the challenges of the data ownership space and deliver impact. This article explores some of the problems PDSs face and suggests we need a strategic approach that’s user centered, systemic and allows for a diversity of approaches to overcome centralisation.

Can we sell privacy?

The scandals over Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of Facebook’s app privileges, and the implications in terms of political influence and the spread of disinformation, has led to a significant rise in interest in the decentralised web. People increasingly distrust Facebook which shares your phone number with advertisers to target ads and Google which tracks your location even when tracking is explicitly disabled. More recently, the unwitting exposure of at least fifty million Facebook profiles to the prying eyes of random hackers will only increase the pressure on companies to demonstrate that they can be safe custodians of personal data. So earlier this year, myself and Simon decided to explore the personal data store space to assess the effectiveness of the approach Solid takes.

How does a Personal Data Store work?

Solid’s model is typical of a lot of the PDSs we looked at. User data lives in a datastore. The user either self hosts, or pays for someone to securely host a PDS on their behalf. Applications read/write to that data through user controlled granular permissions.

In the best case scenario of this model, app developers simply provide the interface and functionality of, for example, a calendar or journal app. The data always lives in your datastore. When you browse your journal or calendar in a web or desktop/phone app, the data from your datastore is displayed in the interface, but it’s securely transmitted between you and your datastore. No other parties are able to access it. This would be game changing.

But there are challenges

1. Most digital transactions require verified claims

Much of Tim’s narrative assumes that there is clear ownership of data, which is far from straightforward. Different entities are looking for different kinds of data:

• For the majority of digital transactions and interactions (buying things online, applying for services, booking a flight, proving my age), the most valuable data is data asserted about me from an authoritative source. For example, that I have a valid driving license or verified address, bank account, passport.
• For advertising, it’s what I bought and where I clicked as well as profile data (email address, demographic and interests info). This data is generated by the services I use (e.g. Facebook, Google, Twitter).
• For AirBnB and Uber it’s the ratings that other users have given me that’s important, which isn’t data I obviously ‘own’.

Yes, some of this can be self-asserted, but organisations often want objective data based on behaviour and decisions made about us not what we say is true. Mortgage brokers don’t just want my assertion that I have income, they want proof.

This means that Solid’s use cases will be limited unless it partners with institutions like banks and governments to assert and verify such data. Luckily there are standards being developed in the W3C to facilitate this, but we still need good frameworks and incentives for why such institutions will spend the time/energy to share and verify data about us, how this happens securely and how GDPR requirements are met.

2. If we narrow the market, the value proposition is hard

Putting aside verified claims, we then have the potential market of apps or services which only need self created data, preferences or quantified self data. This could be my calendar, todo list, journal entries, emails, messages, Apple/Google health app stored data, Fitbit data, what websites I use, time spent online, and so on. This is still a major market, but one already well catered for.

What’s the offer to users?

I want to see user research that identifies real problems users have with the current status quo which Solid will solve well enough to overcome switching cost and inertia. Most privacy concerns are centered around Facebook — but people are not on Facebook because they lack alternatives. There are numerous well designed, encrypted, decentralised and privacy preserving, even blockchain-based, alternatives. However, your current social network isn’t portable and the value of Facebook and Twitter comes from the people using it. The way we tackle this is to push for regulation around open protocols, not by expecting everyone to switch.

So if we can’t sell privacy as a product in social media, we need evidence of where else these priorities will bring users. Alternatively, decentralised or PDS-integrated tech must deliver novel and valued functionality or be solving major problems users have with existing centralised solutions.

What’s the offer to companies and app developers?

For companies, service providers and app developers the value proposition is hazy. I have yet to come across a PDS provider with an impressive or long list of partners and companies. Most existing business models depend on controlling the data and using it to improve a service and provide valuable analytics to up-sell paid plans or directly monetise the data collected through advertisers and third party data marketplaces. Giving this up requires incentives or regulation.

If Solid uptake is big enough to attract app developers, what stops the same data exploitation happening, albeit now with an extra step where the user is asked for ‘permission’ to access and use their data in exchange for a free or better service? Consent is only meaningful if there are genuine alternatives and as an industry we have yet to tackle this problem (see how Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon ask for ‘consent’). What’s really going on when users are asked to agree to the terms and conditions of software on a phone they’ve already bought that won’t work otherwise? Or agreeing to Facebook’s data selling if there’s no other way for users to invite friends to events, message them or see their photos if those friends are Facebook users? I wouldn’t call this consent.

The answer may lie in partnering with civic or NGO organisations that have different incentives, but many users. Organisations like the BBC, governments, local authorities, the charity sector, and even financial organisations like Funding Circle and other peer-to-peer lenders. This is a worthwhile avenue to explore, but it doesn’t feel enough.

Alternative approaches

It’s time to challenge the standard economic approach when it comes to digital. The economies of scale are fundamentally different and we need bold new frameworks to ensure that technology benefits and protects everyone in society. Governments could and should invest in open infrastructure so that the basics of communicating online or connecting with people, cannot be ‘owned’ by companies, but is a shared basis like the internet or email protocol.

I’m thrilled Tim is pushing forward with Solid, but we need to be thinking bigger. Let’s start tackling the broader challenges and opportunities for a decentralised web to deliver a better ecosystem for all. Solid and similar projects need user research, user centered design, marketing and coordination to ensure interoperability and a user experience that can compete with the status quo. Common authentication and authorisation standards for digital identity and login and communication standards that work across applications and services will help break down silos and create real benefits to users and companies to motivate the move away from digital monopolies. It’s time to push for serious funding and resources into such public infrastructure to create an internet and web that works for everyone, just like Tim’s original vision.

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As the decentralisation movement grows, I consider the characteristics of decentralisation, what decentralisation is a tactic for, why and what work still needs to happen to re-decentralize the digital world.

Decentralisation has gone mainstream

Between Tim Berners-Lee raising the call to arms to re-decentralize the web, Mozilla, Internet Archive and other institutions pledging support, to the incredible financial success of blockchain and cryptocurrency projects — decentralisation is increasingly sexy.

(If you haven’t seen the hype, some of the mainstream coverage includes the New Yorker covering ‘the mission’ in 2013 to the Guardian calling decentralisation ‘the next big step’ earlier this month and Make Use Of wondering if blockchains are the answer).

Yet, what does decentralisation actually mean? Does it only apply to technology or is governance more important? Who gets to call themselves decentralised and does it matter?

The number of times I’ve heard ‘it’s decentralised’ as a reason to use or move to a particular application or platform recently, is impressive. All kinds of crypto/blockchain companies are branding themselves as ‘decentralised’ — every day there’s a new decentralised social network, decentralised file storage solution, decentralised identity app, decentralised syncing, contract management, health data sharing, dating service, avocado delivery — all decentralised! As if decentralisation is something wonderful and worthwhile in and of itself. Yet, when I ask ‘why does that matter?’ or ‘how are you decentralised?’ the answers tend to be very different and even inconsistent with the actual business proposition people are working on. How did we get here and what’s beyond the hype?

Decentralisation means different things to different people. When Francis and I picked Redecentralize to name our decentralisation-promoting side project 6 years ago, it was precisely because we cared about a number of things: privacy, competition and resilience. It wasn’t just about one solution (such as encryption) that we wanted to promote, it was a set of values: freedom, autonomy, collaboration, experimentation. Those values were tied up to the original spirit of the open web and net — the sense of freedom and possibility that we wanted to remind people of, and protect.

As decentralisation becomes more popular, those values and goals are getting lost as the community fractures into various roles. We need a way to distinguish and assess decentralisation meaningfully.

First, what does decentralisation actually mean?

At its most basic level, it is a distinction between a centralised hub and spoke model and a distributed connected network:

I drew this myself. You’re welcome.

Some people distinguish between ‘decentralised’ and ‘distributed’ — I’m talking about the general idea of decentralisation that encompasses distributed, federated and decentralised systems. This post is about the characteristics of decentralisation and the outcomes and implications of those characteristics rather than the specific configuration. (For more discussion on types of decentralisation, Vitalik wrote a great post on ‘the meaning of decentralisation’ last year).

While the diagrams are a simplification, they do immediately suggest certain characteristics. The centralised system on the left obviously has one much more important or powerful node — the middle one. All the other nodes depend on it to reach each other. It will know about all communication in the network. It’s a central point of failure and a central point of control. If you contrast this with the diagram on the right — which nodes are more important there? It’s hard to tell. Most nodes have multiple routes to other nodes. It seems like a more resilient system, but it’s harder to know how you can quickly make sure all nodes have the same information at once.

What we need is a more formal way to assess if something counts as ‘decentralised’.

Characterististics of decentralisation

The key characteristic I propose is that a system is decentralised to the extent it distributes power. Specifically, the distribution of control, knowledge and capability between many users. What does this look like?

Control is about ensuring user choice — adapting to user preferences and giving users decision making power. It’s fundamentally about autonomy. Decentralised control looks like end-users having a choice between service providers and not being forced into accepting terms and conditions that exploit them due to a lack of alternatives (see Facebook). This also looks like users having the freedom to adapt and customise the products and services they use to their specific needs. It looks like being able to opt out of targeted advertising or choosing to store your data locally. It looks like having applications that don’t require an internet connection to work.

Knowledge is about access to data and information. Knowledge distribution avoids information asymmetry and helps people recognise dependencies and the consequences of their choices. Decentralised knowledge looks like users having local copies of their data, being able to export data or choose to store the authoritative copy of their data locally. It looks like users understanding how the services they use actually work and their business models (for example whether it is advertising based, personalised advertising, selling your profile and preferences to external advertisers, something else etc). It looks like users being able to have private conversations and share photos securely with end-to-end encryption where the content of communication cannot be accessed or deleted by external organisations. It can look like the company providing the service not knowing or storing the metadata of who contacts who and when.

Capability is about infrastructure — the storage, processing and computation power needed to run systems and services. In a centralised model these are either all in the same place or in a small number of places controlled by one company. This creates a central point of failure both in the event of natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, earthquakes) and attacks (whether virtual such as data breaches, data taps, denial of services attacks, or physical destruction and manipulation). Centralisation often means that people’s data, which we rely on and want to protect (such as our conversations, photos and work), can be compromised or even lost. Privacy can be easier to compromise in central systems. A decentralised approach tends to be more resilient, but also offers greater control and knowledge distribution. It looks like apps which work offline, users being able to communicate, collaborate or share data across devices without mobile networks or wifi through peer-to-peer networks or user data federating across a network (e.g. mastodon.social).

Why decentralise?

Importantly, decentralisation in and of itself is neither good or bad. It depends on the context and what is being decentralised. Decentralisation can bring new capabilities, privacy and flexibility or surveillance, inefficiency and waste. How and why it is done, matters.

Not all things need decentralising. Unlike some, I don’t think code should be law. I like the law. It has been iterated on and developed and tested over thousands of years by millions of people. I would trust British Law above even a dozen smart contract developers. (Disclaimer: I’ve worked in tech for over 10 years, but never in law).

Institutions have value and not all expertise can or should be replaced by an immutable list and algorithmic consensus. However, in many other aspects, we desperately need to redecentralise and serve people, not corporations, much better. Even so, simply decentralising in some fashion does not magically bring about utopia. Much of the rhetoric of blockchain and other ‘decentralisation’ startups offer no plausible way from where we are today to the autonomous secure empowered world of decentralisation via their service or application. Let’s be intentional and clear about what changes we want to realise and what exactly it might take to get there. If you’re not building all of it, then be clear on what else will need to happen. We will most likely succeed as an ecosystem, not as one ‘killer app’.

This brings me back to how and why decentralisation is done, matters. And for me, the meaning and value of decentralisation is closely related to the purpose and expected outcomes of it. That means understanding the problem, articulating an alternative and roadmap for how we get there and testing the roadmap and showing it’s better by tracking the impact.

Everybody in the decentralisation space needs to do this.

Understanding the problem

Centralised systems lead to increasingly monotonous and unaccountable power. Over time this encourages exploitation and disinterest in user needs. Take Facebook for example, a platform that on the face of it is designed to help people digitally connect with their friends and family — share photos, talk, organise events and keep in touch. If my needs were a genuine priority then I should be able to share and showcase my photos from flickr or talk to my friends using my favourite app (such as telegram, signal or wire) — which would be most convenient for me. If Facebook cared about connecting people, it would not have dropped xmpp support — an open instant messaging protocol that allowed people to choose their own interface (mine was pidgin!) and from one place and talk to anyone using gchat, facebook, AIM, msn or jabber. Instead, Facebook’s interface and functionality is optimised around keeping me scrolling and in-app as long as possible since their business model depends on selling my attention.

Amazon has become a near monopoly for buying things online with their brand recognition, efficiencies of scale and great customer service. As real-world bookshops close down and everyone else sells on amazon marketplace, few have the infrastructure, supply chains, funds or brand to be able to compete any more. When there are no alternatives, why be cheaper? Why have great customer service? Users have little choice or control and Bezos (the owner of Amazon) is the richest person on the planet. Instead of thousands of independent flourishing businesses, we have one very very very rich man.

Centralisation makes it easy to undermine privacy and use personal information in ways individuals cannot control. As the Snowden revelations showed us, Governments tap network cables and can curtail freedom of speech. Digital monopolies now hold unbelievable amounts of data on us which can be used to manipulate us into spending money, but potentially also to impersonate, blackmail or silence.

An alternative

Keeping power accountable requires alternative competing sources of power which are independent. This could be government, assuming government is there to represent the interests of the many above the few. It could be alternative companies and services. It could be many people choosing together.

An alternative, decentralised world is one of:

• Choice, diversity and competition — where many different business models and structures co-exist beyond the ‘winner takes all’ surveillance capitalism model (which depends on closed networks which don’t integrate or talk to each other). Centralised models, especially with data selling / advertising business models, have been deeply explored and within any new vertical often one or two winners take all and price out new competitors. This is uninspiring compared to the wealth of innovation that might be possible with local organisations tailoring their offering to particular sectors, cultures, interests and preferences. The same open source software can be provided in different configurations and alternative service standards to fit different user needs, budget and cultural context. It’s a world where providing ethical and environmentally friendly products and delivery services is possible and discoverable.
• Resilience — where our valuable data and services are persistent and safe from companies being bought, new management decisions, natural disaster or hacking. No more losing your journal or portfolio gallery when a company is bought up by a monopoly.
• Autonomy and privacy — where we control what kinds of terms and conditions we’re willing to agree to. A world where people can opt out of data sharing or choose to pay for their social network — choosing security and no adverts while still being able to communicate with friends using different providers. A world where end-to-end encryption works seamlessly.

How do we make it happen?

We all can contribute!

At Redecentralize.org we’re encouraging viable alternatives that work together (‘small pieces loosely joined’). This means ensuring that decentralised products and services are usable and work well with other privacy preserving user centered services and products. A key goal of redecentralize is to promote decentralised projects and platforms and bring people working in this space together through events and discussion forums.

Secondly, open protocols and regulation that incentivises or enforces their use is vital. The beginnings of this already exist in the data portability requirements of GDPR. Open protocols allow for collaboration between different and competing products and services, giving the user maximum flexibility and control without losing access to others in their network. The forced exclusion of closed proprietary protocols over network type services (such as social networks or marketplaces like amazon, airbnb, uber) has led to monopolies and lack of innovation and should be consigned to history.

Lastly we all have a role to play to disrupt the surveillance capitalism business model by choosing with our wallets and spending money on respectful software. A promising path may be to have payment built into how things work (cryptocurrency style) so that when you use IPFS and help store content you collect Filecoin you can then spend on the applications and services you value.

Conclusion

Decentralisation in and of itself, is unlikely to achieve all the outcomes that many people in the decentralisation movement care about. Yet it does offer a powerful way to tackle the problems of digital monopolies, growing inequality and loss of autonomy in our societies. Decentralisation incentivises power to be distributed across users. It’s an alternative infrastructure and way of being that creates space for autonomy, collaboration and local control. So, let’s be explicit about the change we want to see and test the impact.

Decentralised governance (knowledge and control in this model) is vital and must be considered alongside infrastructure and capacity. Let’s assess projects on all three characteristics of decentralisation and treat technology as a powerful tool to get us to a better world, but by no means the only intervention needed!

Can I get involved?

Yes of course. Join the discussion list and come chat on the #redecentralize matrix channel. We’re about to start fundraising —shout if you’d like to sponsor our work or come contribute!

Photo by Thomas Hawk

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John Leonard: The Decentralized Web Summit is over – what’s next?

Earlier this month a rather unusual tech event took place in San Francisco.

The Decentralized Web Summit played host to a gathering of web luminaries such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Brewster Kahle and Vint Cerf. On top of that, activists and authors and screenwriters such as Jennifer Stisa Granick, Emili Jacobi, Mike Judge and Cory Doctorow put in an appearance, as did cryptocurrency pioneers like Zooko Wilcox, blockchain developers, and academics.

Then, there was what the Guardian‘s John Harris calls the Punk Rock Internet – companies like MaidSafe and Blockstack who play by their own decentralised rules.

Oh, and there was a sprinkling of techies from Microsoft, Google (Vint Cerf and others) and Mozilla in attendance too, along with a handful of venture capitalists looking for opportunities.

Uniting this diverse selection of delegates was the challenge of fixing the centralising tendencies of the internet and web.

Simply put, the internet’s reliance on centralised hubs of servers and data centres means that the more servers you control the more power you have, with all the negative consequences that follow from the creation of data-haves and data-have-nots.

To redress the balance, data needs to be freed from silos with control handed back to users, but how to do that while retaining the convenience and ease-of-use of the current web?

Aside from the inevitable resistance by the powers that be, this turns out to be quite the technical challenge.

One task among a set of complex interlocking challenges is to separate data from the applications that use it. People could then store their personal data where they choose, granting or limiting access by applications as they please. For example, Berners-Lee’s Solid platform enables everyone to have multiple ‘pods’ for their data allowing for fine-grained control.

Another element is authentication, ensuring that the data owner really is who they say they are, while ensuring real identities remain private by default.

Networking needs to be peer-to-peer rather than hub-and-spoke, with copies of files stored across multiple machines for redundancy and speed of throughput in a manner that users of torrent-based file-sharing services will be familiar with, but adding far more control and performance features.

And above all it will need to be easy to use, low latency and simple for developers to create decentralised applications for.

Computing contacted a number of contributors to the Summit before and after the event and asked about their take on progress towards a viable decentralised web.

Pic credit Vitor Fontes. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold (W.B. Yeats)

14/08/2018 – The key takeaways

With the summit now over and the participants returned to their basement labs (or shiny new offices) it’s time to consider the takeaways.

Interest in decentralisation is growing

While the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit summit attracted 350 enthusiasts, 2018 saw more than twice that number, with 800 attendees across 156 sessions. Not huge numbers as tech events in San Francisco go (the ‘big one’ Oracle OpenWorld attracts an astonishing 60,000 delegates), but important nevertheless in that it brought together the founders of the connected world with those looking at new ways to reclaim the web’s original vision.

“There are dozens and dozens of new projects and protocols and our goal was to get them to a place where people could do real learning,” said Wendy Hanamura of the Internet Archive.

For Blockstack’s Patrick Stanley the seed planted two years ago is still growing strongly: “I was very impressed by the quality of attendees and felt that the spirit of the original vision of the web as a place where people can create was intact,” he said.

No project is an island

The web touches almost every aspect of modern life. Re-architecting such a system will be a huge undertaking, one far too big for disparate bunches of developers working alone. MaidSafe COO Nick Lambert was among many urging more collaboration.

“Certainly, there are some efforts to work together on problem solving, but this is not happening universally,” he said. “Everyone at the event was clearly united in a common purpose to make the internet more private and secure, but the key takeaway for me is how we foster greater cohesion among the different projects.”

Money: no longer too tight to mention

Concerns about attracting VC funding haunted 2016, but those worries have largely evaporated as a result of the crypto goldrush which has given a huge boost to the value of the tokens that support many projects. Booms can turn to busts, of course, and sudden wealth can bring challenges of its own, but for now the gloom has lifted.

While some fear an inevitable clampdown on cryptocurrencies by the authorities, OmiseGO’s Althea Allen, who chaired a debate on the issue, said the worst may not happen.

“What I took away from talking with those excellent thinkers was actually quite a hopeful picture for the future of decentralised finance,” she said. “By all their accounts, they have found regulators to be more open to the possibilities of crypto than we tend to assume, with less default bias toward corporate interests, and largely concerned with the same things that we are: security, privacy, consumer protections; generally speaking, making honest people’s lives easier and not harder.”

Awareness of the bigger picture

Mindful of the developing relationship with the authorities, governance was front and centre of many discussions, a sign of growing maturity in decentralised thinking. For Miriam Avery, director of strategic foresight at Mozilla’s Emerging Technologies department, valuable lessons can be learned from those working “in countries where corruption is blatant, regulation is ineffective, and centralised control points cause palpable harm.”

Their experiences may turn out be more universal than some might think, she said. 

“The threat model is changing such that these harms are relevant to people who are less acutely aware of their causes. For instance, the things Colombian Ethereum hackers are worried about are things that we should all be a little worried about.”

Avery continued: “At the same time, digging into these projects we can already see pitfalls in the ‘governance’ of the software projects themselves, from the prevalence of benevolent dictators to disagreements on the limits of moral relativism. There’s room to grow these technologies through healthy, inclusive open source communities, and I’m excited to see that growth.”

The door needs to be wedged open, or it will be slammed shut again

Another Mozillan, software engineer Irakli Gozalishvili, said: “It was reassuring to see that the community is actively thinking and talking about not only making decentralised web a place that serves people, but also how to create technology that can’t be turned into corporate silos or tools for empowering hate groups.”

Scaling up

Any decentralised web worthy of that name needs to be quick and responsive at scale, said MaidSafe’s Lambert. “There is a long way to go to create a user experience that will encourage everyone to adopt the decentralised approach.  For example, none of the demonstrations at the summit were able to show scalability to millions of users.”

Front-end focus

The decentralised web, with a few notable exceptions, is still very ‘engineering-y’ with most of the effort going into the back-end rather than the user interface. The networking may be futuristic but the front end is (with a few honourable exceptions) still Web 1.0. Which is fine at the development stage but projects will soon need to move on from demonstrating capabilities to making apps that people actually want to use.

Creating an easy onramp is an essential step. Mozilla is piloting decentralised web browsing via WebExtension APIs, the first of the ‘major’ vendors to do so, although others have been working in this area for a while, notably the Beaker browser for navigating DAT sites and ZeroNet.

A long list of necessary developments includes a human-readable decentralised replacement for the DNS system, search engines, and proof that crypto-based incentive systems for the supply and demand of resources can make for a scalable economy.

And the next Decentralized Web Summit? Hanamura wouldn’t be drawn on a date. “We’re still recovering from organising this one,” she said.

Enthusiasm is not sufficient fuel

06/08/2018 – Maintaining the momentum

If the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit was a call to action, in 2018 it’s all about working code. That’s according to Wendy Hanamura, director of partnerships at the Internet Archive, the organisation that hosted both events. However, there’s still a fair way to go before it goes anything like mainstream.

The Internet Archive’s mission is to preserve the outputs of culture, turning analogue books, files and recordings into digital, storing digital materials for posterity and preserving web pages going back to 1996 in the Wayback Machine.

Unsurprisingly given its aims, the organisation is sitting on a mountain of data – more than 40 petabytes and rising fast. It has recently started experimenting with decentralised technologies as a way of spreading the load and ensuring persistence, including file sharing and storage protocols WebTorrent, DAT and IPFS, the database GUN and P2P collaborative editor YJS.

And it’s open to looking at more in the future. “We’re glad to be in at the ground floor,” said Hanamura. “We have no horse in the race. We’re looking for all of them to succeed so we’re looking at different protocols for different functions.”

Wendy Hanamura

Despite some substantial progress, few decentralised projects could yet be described as ‘enterprise ready’. More work is required in many different areas, one of which is providing more straightforward ways for non-technical users to become involved.

Hanumara pointed to developments among big-name browsers including Firefox, Chrome and Brave as among the most promising for improved user experience. Mozilla demonstrated a Firefox API for decentralised systems at the event.

“Participants were able to talk to each other directly browser to browser without a server involved, and they thought that was tremendously exciting,” she said.

Collaborations

For Ruben Verborgh of the Solid project, the cross-pollination required to overcome some of the challenges is hampered by the diversity of approaches.

“Ironically, the decentralised community itself is also very decentralised, with several smaller groups doing highly similar things,” he said. “Finding common ground and interoperability will be a major challenge for the future since we can only each do our thing if we are sufficiently compatible with what others do.”

While it’s still too early for projects to merge or consolidate around standards, Hanamura said she witnessed “lots of meetings in corridors and deals being struck about how you could tweak things to work together.”

“That’s another way you can make it scale,” she added.

Maintaining momentum

The summit had strong ideological underpinnings. Hanamura described it as “an event for the heart. People came to share,” she said.

The strength of small open-source projects with big ideas is that they can easily sustain shared ideals, but this can be hard to maintain as they evolve, she went on.

“Many founders said governance was their biggest worry. You need a team of developers who believe in you and are willing to work with you – if not they can fork the code and create something very different.”

In 2016 the main concern was very different: it was funding. The success of cryptocurrency token sales (ICOs) have removed many of these worries, at least for some. A lot of money has flowed into decentralised technologies, for example Filecoin recently raised $230m in an ICO and Blockstack made $50m. But this can be a double-edged sword as rapid expansion and bags of cash make team cohesion more challenging to maintain, Hanamura believes.

“It makes it a dangerous time. We came to this with a purpose, to make a web that’s better for everyone. So we need to keep our eye on the North Star.”

Once the technologies hit the mainstream, there will be other challenges too, including legal ones.

“As this ecosystem grows it has to be aware of the regulations on the books around the world but also those pending,” said Hanamura. “We have to have a strong voice for keeping areas where we can sandbox these technologies. We need a governance system to keep it decentralised otherwise it can get centralised again.”

It’s gonna take a lot of thinking through

01/08/2018 – Why is decentralising the web so hard to achieve?

Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues faced a number of tough challenges when inventing the web, including having to build early browsers and protocols from scratch and overcoming initial scepticism (his original idea was labelled ‘vague but exciting’ by his boss at CERN). The nascent web also needed to be brought into being under the radar, and the terms for the release of its code carefully formulated to guarantee its free availability for all time. It took 18 months to persuade CERN that this was the right course.

“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it,” said Berners-Lee in 1998.

The original web was designed to be decentralised, but over the course of time it has been largely fenced off by a small number of quasi-monopolistic powers we know as ‘the tech giants’. This makes designing a new decentralised internet  – one that’s ‘locked open’ in the words of the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle – a challenge even more daunting than those pioneers faced. The problem is the tech giants are very good at what they do, said Jamie Pitts, a member of the DevOps team with the Ethereum Foundation, speaking for himself rather than on behalf of his organisation.

“One of the key hurdles to decentralisation is the lock-in effect and current excellent user experience provided by the large, centralised web services,” he said.

“Decentralised web technology must enable developers to produce high-quality systems enabling users to search, to connect with each other, and to conduct all forms of business. Until that happens, users will continue to be satisfied with the current set of options.”

While a subset of users is worried about power imbalances, surveillance and lack of control and transparency, the fact is that most people don’t care so long as there are bells and whistles aplenty. A tipping point must be achieved, as Althea Allen of OmiseGO put it.

“The only thing that will force those decentralised systems to change on a fundamental level is a mass shift by consumers toward decentralised systems.”

Selling ads and services through the centralisation and mining of data (‘surveillance capitalism’) has made the tech giants very powerful, and it can be hard to see beyond this model.

“The monopolisation that can occur in a rapidly-advancing technology space poses one of the greatest challenges to decentralisation,” said Pitts.

“Aggregation of capital and talent results from the network effect of a successful commercially-run service, and developers and users can become locked-in. While many of their needs of users may be met by the dominant content provider, search engine, or social network, the monopolised network becomes a silo.”

Moreover, the suck-up-all-the-data model has proven to be highly lucrative for the big boys, and while alternative economic methods for paying participants involving cryptocurrencies and micropayments are emerging, none has yet proved itself on the wider stage.

“There need to be viable business models for app developers that do not depend on advertisements or exploiting user behaviour and data,” said Blockstack’s Patrick Stanley.

On the systems side, there is a necessity to rethink the architecture to avoid central hubs. One of the toughest problems is achieving reliable consensus: with nodes seeing different versions of the ‘truth’ (i.e. what events are happening and in what order), how can one ‘truth’ be agreed upon without reference to a central arbiter? And how can this consensus be secured against faults and bad actors?

This longstanding conundrum was finally solved by the bitcoin blockchain a decade ago, and many efforts are ongoing to make it more efficient and a better fit for the decentralised web, the IoT and other applications. However, other projects, such as IPFS and MaidSafe’s SAFE Network, don’t use a blockchain, arriving at different methods for achieving consensus.

There are many ways to skin the decentralised cat – and that is another issue. What do people want, is it privacy, autonomy, security, an alternative economy, all of the above? Where are the tradeoffs and who decides the priorities? And how can the various strategies work together?

The problem is too big for one player to handle. MaidSafe’s David Irvine sees collaboration as key to any solution, which was one reason why the firm open-sourced all its code.

“We want to collaborate with other companies in this space. We have the scars of developing specific functionality and are happy to work with companies to integrate that functionality where it makes sense.”

Pic credit Rene Böhmer. A decentralised web can also be a place to hide

31/07/2018 What might go wrong?

Technology is morally agnostic. Nuclear power provides the raw material for nuclear bombs. That new road can carry serial killers as well as saints. And while a decentralised web would redistribute power over personal data, it could also provide a convenient hiding place for the bad guys.

Danielle Robinson

It’s high time technologists started to see this issue in the round, said Danielle Robinson, co-executive director, of Code for Science & Society, a non-profit supporting collaboration in public interest technology.

“When technology is built, the biases of its creators are often embedded into the technology itself in ways that are very hard for the creators to see, until it’s used for a purpose you didn’t intend,” she said during an interview with Internet Archive. “So I think it’s really important that we talk about this stuff.”

The increased privacy and security built into decentralised web technologies makes it easier for anyone to collaborate in a secure fashion. And that includes hate groups.

“They’re on the current existing web, and they’re also on the decentralised web, and I think it’s important for our community to talk about that,” she said. “We need a deeper exploration that’s not just ‘oh you know, we can’t control that’.”

In a separate interview, Matt Zumwalt, program manager at Protocol Labs, creator of Inter-Plantetary File System (IPFS), argued that proponents of decentralised web need to think about how it might be gamed.

“We should be thinking, really proactively, about what are the ways in which these systems can be co-opted, or distorted, or gamed or hijacked, because people are going to try all of those things,” he said.

The decentralised web is still an early stage project, and many involved in its creation are motivated by idealism, he went on, drawing parallels with the early days of the World Wide Web. Lessons should be learned from that experience about how reality is likely to encroach on the early vision, he said.

“I think we need to be really careful, and really proactive about trying to understand, what are these ideals? What are the things we dream about seeing happen well here, and how can we protect those dreams?”

Mitra Ardron, technical lead for decentralisation at the Internet Archive, believes that one likely crunch point will be when large firms try to take control.

“I think that we may see tensions in the future, as companies try and own those APIs and what’s behind them,” he said. “Single, unified companies will try and own it.”

However, he does not think this will succeed because he believes people will not accept a monolith. Code can be forked and “other people will come up with their own approaches.”

30/07/2018 Blockstack on identity and decoupling data

Authentication and identity are cornerstones of decentralised networking. Through cryptography, I as a user can verify who I am and what data I own without reference to any central registry. I can use my decentralised ID (DID) to log on securely and perhaps anonymously to services and applications with no third party involved.

Identity is bound up with another tenet of decentralisation: separating the data from the applications. Applications are now interfaces to shared data rather than controllers and manipulators of it. Without my express permission, apps can no longer use and retain data beyond my control.

Coupling data to ID rather than apps was the starting point for the Blockstack platform, as head of growth Patrick Stanley explained.

“Blockstack is creating a digital ecosystem of applications that let users fully own their identities and data on the Internet. User data – like photos and messages – are completely decoupled from the applications. Apps can no longer lock users and their social graph in, since they no longer store anything.”

Storage is taken care of elsewhere, in a decentralised storage system called Gaia. As apps are now ‘views’ or interfaces you don’t need to log in to each individually.

“People use applications on Blockstack just like they would with today’s Internet. But instead of signing up for each app one-by-one with an email address and password — or a Google/Facebook log-in — users have an identity that’s registered in the blockchain and a public key that permissions applications or other users to access pieces of data.”

That’s lots of positives so far from a user point of view, and also for developers who have a simpler architecture and fewer security vulnerabilities to worry about, but of course, there’s a catch. It’s the difference between shooting from the hip and running everything by a committee.

“Decentralisation increases coordination costs. High coordination costs make it hard to get some kinds of things done, but with the upside that the things that do get done are done with the consensus of all stakeholders.”

There are already privacy-centric social networks and messaging apps available on Blockstack, but asked about what remains on the to-do list, Stanley mentioned “the development of a killer app”. Simply replicating what’s gone before with a few tweaks won’t be enough.

A viable business model that doesn’t depend on tracking-based advertising is another crucial requirement – what would Facebook be without the data it controls? – as is interoperability with other systems, he said.

And the big picture? Why is Blockstack sponsoring the event? Ultimately it’s about securing digital freedom, said Stanley.

“If we’re going to live free lives online, there needs to be protocol-level safeguards to ensure your data stays under your control. Otherwise, the people who control your data ultimately control your digital life.”

Independent but interconnected

27/06/2018 OmiseGO on the importance of UI

OmiseGO, a sponsor of the Decentralized Web Summit, is a subsidiary of Asia-Pacific regional fintech firm Omise. Omise is a payments gateway similar to PayPal or Stripe that’s doing brisk business in East Asia. Omise enables online and mobile fiat currency transactions between customers and participating vendors, and OmiseGO, a separate company and open source project, aims to do the same with cryptocurrencies too.

The backbone of OmiseGO is the OMG blockchain which in turn is built on Ethereum. The goal is to provide seamless interoperability across all blockchains and providers. OMG uses Plasma, an enhancement designed to speed up transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, and the company counts Ethereum’s founders Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood among its advisors. While it’s very early days, in the long run OmiseGO wants to extend banking-type services to the billions of ‘unbanked’ people by cutting out the financial middleman who don’t serve those people, and also giving the ‘banked’ an alternative.

The current Internet has too many middlemen of its own, meaning that equal access does not mean equal control, explained OmiseGO’s head of ecosystem growth Althea Allen in an email.

“The decentralised web is crucial is providing equitable agency within the systems that internet users are accessing. Sovereignty over your own data, money and communication; access to information that is not censored or manipulated; the ability to control what aspects of your identity are shared and with whom; these are essential freedoms that the centralised web simply will not provide.”

However, if the alternatives are awkward and clunky, they will never take off.

“It is difficult, though not impossible, to create a decentralised system that provides the kind of user experience that the average internet user has come to expect. Mass adoption is unlikely until we can provide decentralised platforms that are powerful, intuitive and require little or no change in users’ habits.”

Team OmiseGO

Blockchains are a powerful tool for decentralisation as they can help keep control of events and processes across the network, but that depends on how they are used. There’s a lot of ‘blockchain-washing’ out there, Allen warned.

“Blockchains are not intrinsically decentralised – they can absolutely be private and proprietary. Many institutions, old and new, are showing an interest in adopting new technologies such as blockchains, maintaining the same centres of power and influence, and putting an ‘I blockchained’ sticker on them – essentially, appropriating the rhetoric of decentralisation without actually adopting the principles.”

Asked about the plethora of competing decentralised approaches, Allen said she believes this is positive, but sharing ideas is vital too.

“Cooperation is crucial for us to move the space forward, while healthy competition encourages the exploration of many different possible solutions to the same problems. We work particularly closely with Ethereum, but the success of our project depends on a thriving ecosystem (which extends well beyond crypto or even blockchain technology). To this end, we make a concerted effort to work with projects and individuals in many fields who are contributing to building the decentralised web.”

26/07/2018 MaidSafe on collaboration

As we mentioned in the introduction, a decentralised web will require a number of different interlocking components, including decentralised storage, decentralised networking, decentralised applications and decentralised identities.

MaidSafe, one of the event’s sponsors, is trying to cover all but one these bases with its autonomous SAFE Network, replacing the Transport, Session and Presentation layers of the current seven-layer internet with decentralised alternatives to create a platform for applications. The project is currently at alpha test stage.

So it’s all sewn up then, no need for further collaboration? Not at all said CEO David Irvine, who will be speaking at the event, pointing to the firm’s open-sourcing of its PARSEC consensus algorithm and its invitation to other projects to help develop it. It’s just not always easy to organise joint ventures he said. The summit will bring together many pioneers and innovators (70-plus projects are represented) with each pushing their own ideas for redefining the web.

“[Everyone’s] so passionate about improving the internet experience, we are defining the rules for the future, and everyone has a point of view. That does mean there are some egos out there who are quite vocal about the merits of their approach versus others, which makes for good media stories and fuels hype, but it’s not what we’re really focused on.”

Within any movement dedicated to upending the status quo, there lurks the danger of a People’s Front of Judea-type scenario with infighting destroying the possibilities of cooperation. Amplifying the risk, many projects in this space are funded through cryptocurrency tokens, which adds profiteering to the mix. It’s easy to see how the whole thing could implode, but Irvine says he’s now starting to see real collaborations happen and hopes the summit will bring more opportunities.

“We’ve already been talking to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project at MIT, and we have a growing number of developers experimenting with applications for the platform,” he said.

MaidSafe’s David Irvine

MaidSafe has been a fixture in the decentralised firmament for a while, predating even the blockchain which is the backbone of many other ventures. At one time it had the space almost to itself but has since been joined by a host of others. Asked about his company’s USP, Irvine came back with one word: “honesty”.

We asked him to expand.

“There is far too much hype in the wider blockchain crypto space and we have always tried to distance ourselves from that nonsense. We’re trying to build something hugely complex and radically different. That doesn’t happen overnight, so you have to be upfront with people so they are not misled. Sure we’ve learned along the way, got some things wrong, but whenever we have we’ve held our hands up and that has helped us.”

And the big-picture goal?

“In essence, privacy, security and freedom. The technology we are building will provide private and secure communications, as well as freedom through the unfettered access to all humanity’s data.”

25/07/2018 Kahle and Berners-Lee on the need for decentralisation

Organiser the Internet Archive directed us to some recent statements by founder Brewster Kahle. Here Kahle outlines some of the problems with the existing web.

“Some of the problems the World Wide Web that we’ve seen in the last few years are the surveillance structures that Snowden gave light to. There are the trolling problems that we saw in the last election. There’s privacy aspects, of people spilling their privacy into companies that sometimes aren’t the most trustworthy. There’s advertising technologies being used against users. There’s a lot of failings that we’ve seen in the World Wide Web.”

To be successful, the decentralised web will need to encourage “lots of winners, lots of participation, lots of voices” he said.

“So this is a time to join in, to find a place, get knee-deep in the technologies. Try some things out. Break some stuff. Invest some time and effort. Let’s build a better, open world, one that serves more of us.”

Open source principles are essential but not sufficient. There must be a focus on performance, functionality and new ideas.

“We’re only going to survive if the open world is more interesting than closed app worlds … what I would think of as a dystopian world of closed, segmented, siloed, corporately-owned little pieces of property. I’d much rather see an open, next-generation web succeed,” Kahle said.

Tim Berners-Lee

As ‘Father of the Web’ (Mk I), Tim Berners-Lee has become increasingly disillusioned with his offspring. Around the time of the previous Decentralized Web Summit in 2016, he said: “The web has got so big that if a company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which websites you go to, they have tremendous control over your life.

“If they can spy on what you’re doing they can understand a huge amount about you, and similarly if a government can block you going to, for example, the opposition’s political pages, they can give you a blinkered view of reality to keep themselves in power.”

Since then, of course, many of the things he warned about have become evident in increasingly obvious and frightening ways. And in the US Congress recently scrapped net neutrality, doing away – in that country at least – with a longstanding principle of the internet, namely that ISPs should treat all data equally.

So, are there any positive developments to report over the last two years? Berners-Lee remains hopeful.

“There’s massive public awareness of the effects of social networks and the unintended consequences,” he told Computing. “There’s a huge backlash from people wanting to control their own data.”

In part this awareness is being driven by GDPR coming into effect, in part by news headlines.

Meanwhile, there’s the rise of “companies which respect user privacy and do not do anything at all with user data” (he namechecks social network MeWe to which he acts as an advisor), open-source collaborations like the data portability project (DTP) led by tech giants, and his own project Solid which is “turning from an experiment into a platform and the start of a movement”.

“These are exciting times,” said Berners-Lee.

John Leonard, Research Editor, Incisive Media

The post Decentralising the web: The key takeaways appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Maira Sutton: Since the first browser was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee over 25 years ago, the World Wide Web has grown to become a massive ecosystem of information that has democratized access to knowledge and culture on the Internet. But today, the Web is under threat.

More and more, we’re seeing governments and corporations control what and how we’re allowed to access online content. From state-mandated censorship to private copyright takedowns, an increasing number of websites are getting blocked or delisted. It’s also a honeypot for state surveillance and corporate data collection, where our private data is being harvested at will without oversight or accountability. Major platforms have emerged to monopolize many services on and off the Web, leading to a concentration of online activity within gated platforms.

The Web has enabled anyone with a computer to access any document hosted on public web servers. For some years, this was decentralized enough. But over time forces of control and centralization have enveloped the Web. In today’s world, the Internet has proven to be susceptible to censorship, surveillance, and siloization.

In response, computer scientists are developing tools that they hope will be the basis for an alternative, more distributed model that could withstand these threats. To strategize a path forward, over 100 technologists, academics, and advocates met at the Internet Archive in San Francisco for the Decentralized Web Summit. Many of the leading architects of the early Web were there, including Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet” and even the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee.

The focus of the conference was on new, decentralizing technologies. Many of the tools involved distributed methods of publishing and accessing content, which is the most basic functionality of the Web. However, there were a host of other tools to purchase goods, crowd-invest in projects, and set and enforce contracts—all using various decentralized methods, many of which rely on blockchain technology.

In his keynote at the Decentralized Web Summit, Cory Doctorow urged the decentralized web movement to commit to principles before they are tempted to trade them away. Photo: Maira Sutton. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0

The highlight of the conference was Cory Doctorow’s keynote. In it he urged the decentralized web movement to bind itself to a “Ulysses Pact” where they can commit to principles when they still have the will and forthrightness to do so, before they are forced to make compromises and trade them away. He said it’s like going on a diet and deciding to throw away the cookies before you become desperate, hungry, and likely to give into temptation. Those working to build the new decentralized web must make sure the principles they uphold now go on to survive, and that one way to ensure this is to design them into the systems themselves. They can do this by emulating the GNU General Public License, which guarantees that software licensed with it remains free to be studied, copied, and modified.

He suggested two principles for the decentralized web. First, that a computer must always obey the owner’s wishes and that should always take precedence over any other command from a remote party. The second is that it should never be illegal for someone to disclose valid information about the security of a system.

These values may be somewhat technical as Doctorow was speaking to a more technologically-oriented audience at this conference. However, his message should also resonate with the platform co-op movement, in which people are building online platforms that share the value they create with their own users.

According to the International Cooperative Alliance, cooperatives are based the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. Like other categories of cooperatives, platform co-ops strive to embody these values through practice. This includes having democratic member control over the platform and its capital, and supporting their community, such as through education programs and sustainable practices.

Much of the conference was fixated on how new distributed technologies have the potential to solve the problems facing the current Web. The question that kept arising throughout the event was how these “decentralized tech” companies were funded and organized themselves. This issue points to Doctorow’s keynote in which he called for the engineers to encode their values into the technology itself. If the organizations developing these technologies are ultimately incorporated as for-profit corporations that don’t have cooperative principles baked into their institution, it’s questionable whether they can truly be used to protect the interests of their community. If these companies already have a primary fiduciary obligation to their shareholders, then it’s uncertain whether any kind of “Ulysses Pact” they may make with their values could truly be public-interest motivated.

At the Summit, I gave a lightning talk addressing this issue: I argued that platform co-ops must play an important part in building a decentralized web. While networks have the potential to upend concentrations of power, they more than often maintain existing power dynamics. This has been made apparent through the emergence of mega-powerful Death Star platforms like Uber, Facebook, and the like. That’s why addressing the governance structures and values that constitute the institutions creating new Internet infrastructure—making sure they are community-driven, equitable, and sustainable—is necessary.

One of the workshops at the conference was focused on bringing gender equality and ethnic and racial diversity to the decentralized technology community. The organizers did address their awareness of the lack of gender and cultural diversity in the history of the Internet and see this as a problem. Diversity not only leads to more creative solutions to problems, but it also leads to better diagnoses about what problems to solve in the first place.

A working group was established out of the discussion, to plan for more active inclusion. It seems however, that there were was a lost opportunity to hold an open discussion about the flaws of the current Web during the conference. Instead, the Summit’s organizers built the conference’s agenda around a particular conception of what those were, and in so doing, missed engaging with a more holistic understanding of everyone’s varied challenges with the Web.

All of this does not discount the way in which the Web is in fact under threat due to its design, and that new tools and platforms could remedy these issues. But technology can’t fix nor avoid inevitable people problems. States and powerful entities will always try to censor speech and collect personal data, and corporate services will emerge to make online services addictive and easy-to-use to return a profit. That’s why the platform co-ops would fit well with the decentralized web movement. It would encourage those involved to reflect on how ownership, inclusion and access all play a role in determining the health and resilience of the next World Wide Web. Hopefully, that could lead to human rights and democratic principles to be embedded not only in the code, but in the guidelines of the organizations themselves.

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Illustration: Maira Sutton //  Licensed under CC-BY 4.0

Photo by Dean Hochman

The post Locking the Web Open with Decentralizing Tech and Platform Co-ops appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Solid is a framework in which other applications can be run to create an open p2p social space. Open source software within this framework may, in the future, provide all those services that centralised social media (think Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, many others) provide today. Such services are: identity, authentication and login, authorization and permission lists, contact management, messaging and notifications, feed aggregation and subscription, comments and discussions, and more.

While we have, with Solid, a framework for a distributed p2p social network, we do not have the applications yet that are going to use that framework. Quite some programming work remains to be done.

Calling on programmers: Please look into the Solid framework and adapt/adopt as possible

Discussion

From a discussion on the P2P Facebook page, we can glimpse some more insight. Melvin Carvalho posted this:

“Try not to think of Solid as separate from the web. All web clients and servers already run 90% of the solid protocol. These are just the features invented by Tim Beners-Lee from the very start of the web, to make it P2P (this is all laid out in his book, weaving the web, which is a sort of manifesto, that unfortunately does not gain the attention it deserves). But if I can summarize.

1. The core of Solid is actually the web, web 1.0, web 2.0, web 3.0. Any system on the web is either already compatible with Solid or could be made compatible much in the same way that linux uses drivers to connect to things. So the starting point of solid is everything we have today. But the Web is an ambitious project, it wants to change humanity for the better, via a giant network effect. The first phase of the roll out was just documents (web pages) because that was needed. I’ll list the next phases.

2. The web should be both documents and data. Documents are a delivery mechanism for data. 15 Years of web standards have matured to allow another layer of data to emerge in the web which is useful in itself, aka Linked Data. The state of linked data is that it is very widely adopted with perhaps more than 50% of the web using it already (but normally in a rather boring way). Solid builds on this data layer in order to bring much more interesting functionality. You dont have to use this feature, but if you do, the scope of use cases you can cover with the web increases by an order of magnitude.

3. The first folder in any web server is called public_html. The web was never intended to stop there. The last 25 years has been a lot of work on private data and also shared data. Solid adds a simple access control mechanism powered by linked data to enable you to share what you want with who you want. And protect your privacy. This is a feature that can be used with Solid but you dont need to. You can just keep everything public and the web will work as-is.

4. Browsers are a problem on the web. The idea of browsing says “you can look but you cant touch”. The web was designed to be interactive. The first browser was also an editor. This is the concept of the “read / write” web. But since Mosiac is the father of all browsers today, the writing functionality was taking out. Marc Andressen said it was too hard. But Tim knew it could be done, because his original web browser did it. So how is it possible? Well essentially you have a save file option using HTTP POST, and the ideas of folders. This is standardized in what’s called the LInked Data Platform and is a W3C REC. It builds on linked data and just lets you save your files and data to any server that has this turned on. Its a small change to any existing web server to allow this, and the hope as a w3c REC is that people will start adding it to sever configs. Of course, ability to write also comes with the need for access control, so that is why when taking write functionality you probably want to take permissions.

5. Finally as a popularly requested feature solid provides realtime updates to subscribing to resources. It doesnt need to go in the solid spec, nor does anyone need to implement it, but you can build nice realtime apps with tight feedback loops with this feature.

So in summary, anything you can do on the web today is already solid. Solid the spec just offers more festures, more decentralization and more P2P (as the web was designed to be). App developers dont need to do anything different to what they do today using HTML, HTTP and AJAX. But if you are a fan of decentralization you can start propagating that pattern to clients and servers all through the web, and we’ll see the web transformed from the solid / centralized system it is today, to to a hybrid where both decentralization and centralization offer choices for a large user base.”

Here’s the whole discussion on the P2P Facebook page …

and some

Links

Linked data by Tim Berners-Lee

Re-decentralizing the web (the Solid project page on GitHub)

Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee

on Scribd

on Amazon

Photo by KamiPhuc

The post Project Solid – can the web be re-decentralised? appeared first on P2P Foundation.