Have you ever thought what happens to your online account passwords and other personal information which you share over the Internet? In this age of net neutrality, all of us believe in the power of internet being a free (apart from the ISP fees) and unlimited resource for information exchange. In other words, we perceive it mostly as a decentralized platform. You will be surprised to know that this might not be the case! There are very few players like Google, Facebook, Amazon and other big-tech firms which have monopoly and control over a lot of online data, especially with the rise of cloud computing. The control resides with these big firms and the ISP’s who own the network infrastructure. This concentration of power could be fatal for the common internet user as it provides pricing power lead to their exploitation. Also, it is always easier to hack a central server through DDoS. All these factors incentivize the society to move towards an era of a Web3.0 which could decentralize this control of internet by big-tech firms, hosting firms or ISP’s.
What is Decentralized Web?
A decentralized web (DWeb) enables peer-to-peer (P2P) connectivity where a computer being part of a network can obtain data and share data with other computers on the network. It eliminates the need for central servers/databases as the single point sources of information and instead the internet is hosted by all the user machines on the DWeb. This snatches away data power from a few consolidated giant firms in the industry by passing on the control to common man. Imagine, a developer creating a travel booking website on a local machine connected to the DWeb and a tourist (also on the DWeb) booking flights on this website using the resources provided by the two machines thus eliminating the need for a web hosting service such as GoDaddy as an intermediary.
How does it work?
Unlike, the current internet which works on matching the client and the server through unique location ID’s (IP addresses) using the ‘http’ protocol, DWeb protocols matches the client and the information provider using cryptographic ‘keys’ based on the ‘content’ searched by the user. Any online user possessing that content can potentially share the information with the user who asked for the content. The platform used for DWeb services is based on the decentralized block-chain technology which ensures encrypted exchange of information recorded as a decentralized ledger.
Progress so far
Many industries can potentially benefit from this concept. Healthcare is one industry which can witness immense benefits. Patients will now be able to regulate the sharing of their personal health data with people whom they want to share it with unlike sharing their EHR’s and EMR’s through cloud in today’s world. ‘Blockstack’ and ‘Metamask’ has created a platform to allow users to create and manage their own decentralized web applications (dApps). There are many experimental DWeb products out there in the market such as ‘OpenBazaar’ (a decentralised marketplace), ‘Graphite Docs’ (a Google documents alternative), ‘Textile Photos’ (an Instagram-like alternative for storing, managing, and sharing photos on the DWeb), ‘Matrix’ (which WhatsApp alternatives) and DTube (a YouTube alternative). Social network alternatives include Akasha and Diaspora. There is also a new independent experimental browser for exploring the peer-to-peer web called Beaker Browser. The Internet Archive, the non-profit organisation that archives the web through snapshots of web pages and other media, has made a first attempt to decentralise its website by bringing together many of the technologies. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) system, very similar in concept to the P2P file sharing (BotTorrent etc) allows multiple users on the internet to quickly access a file or content being downloaded by a specific user. That means that instead of connecting to a server to see a site, you just check to see if anyone near you is storing the page (or some pieces of it) and you connect to them instead. Once you download the page, your device will also store it for a little while so other people can get it (or pieces of it) from you. It sounds a bit complicated, but it turns out to be a lot more efficient than our current system of sending data over a single server-client pipeline using the HTTP protocol.
Potential risks and downsides
As they say, a technology is incomplete without having any cons. There are multiple risks attached with the DWeb concept. Since it is based on the blockchain concept, the users might lose access to all their content and applications if the unique encrypted ‘key’ which is required for interacting with other machines is lost. Unlike today, there will be no means to retrieve content by requesting the middle agents to ‘reset’ the passwords on user’s behalf. With the content regulation gone, there might be a rise in the instances of online harassment, hate speech and abusive content. It becomes a tedious task to censor thousands of machines on the network. User’s might also take advantage of the encrypted content share to exchange illegal documents, content and images over the internet making it a platform for anti-social and anti-humane practices such as terrorism and human trafficking. Another disadvantage, although not a risk is that since you pay for what you use it eliminates the free extra usage of data which the current system provides.
Next steps
IMO, DWeb still has a long way to go in terms of achieving scale. The industry players pursuing this idea need to address all the above risks for the adoption to increase. It will require a lot of effort in terms of change management for the society to eventually understand the perks. From a business standpoint, it would require firms to necessarily have a CIO who can overlook the migration of digital part of the enterprise to the DWeb. Multiple DWeb summits such as the ones hosted by Internet Archive will provide a lot of impetus to developers and customers to start adopting this version of internet. With diligent and continuous improvement, it could be indeed be one of the disruptive technology models of the 21st century.
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle
- https://breakermag.com/the-decentralized-web-explained-in-words-you-can-understand/
- https://tech.co/news/decentralized-internet-guide-2018-02
- https://www.maketecheasier.com/how-interplanetary-file-system-decentralize-the-web/
- https://101blockchains.com/centralized-vs-decentralized-internet-networks/#prettyPhoto/0/
Strategy in the Age of Decentralization 