Is the new decentralized Internet or Web 3.0 possible?

It’s time to fight the dominance of Internet giants.In Europe, various regulations have been enacted Announce Designed to force these giants to respect healthier rules of the game, and to protect the rights and competition of users. Some people even threatened to dismantle some technology giants, which is a weapon of mass destruction rarely used in history.

Is an alternative path to a truly decentralized Internet possible?

superpower

A small number of companies in the Internet’s key service areas (search engines, e-mail, etc.), infrastructure (global transmission, content distribution networks, cloud computing services, etc.), and even to some extent, have a virtual monopoly standardization (IETF , ICANN/IANA, W3C, etc.). This equation is unprecedented, and their status has become almost insurmountable.

The now-famous “network effect” explains the origin of the current domination: the bigger the network player, the bigger it becomes. The more users it has, the more interesting it becomes for subsequent users to join the player instead of another player. The services offered are more attractive because they appear to be “free”, but they come at the cost of commoditizing (and sometimes infringing) user privacy.

related: The data economy is a dystopian nightmare

Internet giants have also invested heavily in their own “pipes” (especially submarine cables) to bring their content as close to users as possible. Five years ago, these “priority access paths” accounted for 25% of global network traffic.Today they account 64%.

This is reflected in the quality of services provided by the Internet giant: compared to its (potential) competitors, the delay time is greatly reduced. Let’s consider a platform that wants to compete with YouTube or Netflix but has a 10 times longer load time.

In the end, we all become dependent on a small group of all-round service providers.

Cloud 3.0

Internet decentralization has become a holy grail, and several projects have emerged to meet the challenges (such as Filecoin, ThreeFold, Solid, and Dfinity).

These projects usually have the same goals:

• “Distribute” the cloud and provide alternatives to hyper-centralized data centers and centralized cloud providers.
• Ensure better protection of user privacy and “data sovereignty”.
• Allows deployment of applications with a level of quality and scalability similar to that provided by the Internet.

related: Web 3.0 will bring new possibilities and opportunities

The technical challenges are huge, and the services provided by GAFA are widely adopted by users. GAFA is an acronym that stands for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.

However, the methods to achieve these goals vary from project to project.

Solid is a specification that allows people to store data securely in decentralized data storage called pods. Pod is a secure personal web server for data. When data is stored in someone’s pod, they control who and applications can access it. Users can obtain Pods from selected Pod providers (some are hosted by Amazon), or users can choose to self-host Pods to increase autonomy.

Dfinity proposed the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), which the project describes as “expanding the Internet through serverless cloud functions, enabling secure software and new open Internet services.” The ICP is provided by a global network of independent data centers.

ThreeFold deployed a peer-to-peer (P2P) grid formed by a global network of independent farmers. ThreeFold differs from other serverless clouds in that they start from the ground up and build a new infrastructure from the ground up. The main advantages of ThreeFold Grid are:

• Privacy: The P2P environment means that there are no middlemen or intermediaries-data is directly transmitted between people and stored on the nodes of their choice, rather than sent and stored through a third party.
• Security: The data stored in the data center is vulnerable to security breaches. By bypassing the data center and directly exchanging data between peers, higher security can be achieved because it significantly reduces code and backdoors.
• Scalability: In a many-to-many system, the scale is essentially unlimited. Anyone can easily add hardware (nodes) in any home or office, which is not the case with the current data center model.
• Cost-effectiveness and sustainability: An end-to-end (direct) connection between peers means that the system will define the most efficient path for the data. Compared with the centralized data center model, this leads to higher energy and cost efficiency.

In these two projects, users must purchase utility tokens that act as “gas” to preserve sovereign capacity and store data.

General Resources Internet

The next level may be the actual merger of the existing Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and blockchain technology. The result will be an Internet that can carry data packets and services in a decentralized manner. This “merger” will promote a more open, flexible and diversified Internet, which can provide basic services locally, such as information search, decentralized domain name management, digital identity, electronic messaging, data storage, computing power (artificial intelligence) , Confidentiality, traceability and electronic signatures.

These services have become common resources of the Internet, so they should be provided locally by the network and managed as public resources.

In terms of technology, the challenge is to combine the packet transmission (TCP/IP) function with some kind of “intelligence” that allows the packet to encapsulate the service mark. This service tag will be read and interpreted by all components of the network infrastructure (routers, switches, servers).

By doing so, services-general or critical-are brought back to the protocol level of the Internet. In fact, data packets (routed according to protocol rules) “activate” access to these services from dedicated nodes or servers.

The node is part of a decentralized node network. The operators of these nodes can be existing Internet service providers, professional companies (software publishers, data centers, etc.), or public institutions. The ownership of these nodes can also be mixed and shared among these different participants.

The Belgian Public Utilities Foundation IOUR Foundation promotes this approach and proposes a set of protocols to bring native services to the lower layers of the Internet. Proposals like this have a fundamental impact on the face of the Internet, especially: decentralized governance, service interoperability, local traceability and confidentiality.

Decentralized local search engine

There is no more centralized Internet service than search engines (63% of all searches and 94% of all mobile and tablet search traffic coming From Google).

This basic function can be provided by the Internet network (through its enhanced protocol), which will lead to a more objective, more complete and more privacy-friendly search engine, because all search data will be stored by the network in a decentralized manner and will no longer be centralized On a private server. In addition, users will be able to decide whether to anonymize their searches.

Joined forces

It is very important to promote active cooperation and complementarity among all the above projects (and other projects) pursuing the same goals.

The synergistic effect is not only possible, but also obvious. For example, if you want to benefit from a truly decentralized sovereign infrastructure instead of relying on the current data center model, ThreeFold Grid can add tangible value to Dfinity or Solid and other similar projects. The future IOUR infrastructure can-and should-also rely on such a grid to deploy the nodes necessary to enable the Internet to provide “local” services.

In the new world we want to build, cooperation is essential.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading action involves risks, and readers should research on their own when making a decision.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are only those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.