The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

The argument to re-decentralise the web wildly confuses economic, technical and political concerns. The reason that Facebook runs a centralised system isn't that it cannot figure out a technical alternative, it does so for economic reasons. To assume that making incremental advances in decentralised technologies will somehow fundamentally alter those economics is wishful thinking.

Instead, we need to recognise the fact that all of this is not ultra-new and never-seen-before, but rather an issue of market failure and growing monopolies and that there's an existing mechanism to deal with it: government regulation.

We can treat Facebook & co as utilities, as monopolies - there's a whole range of regulatory options and those in relevant agencies could really use the help of the tech community to figure out how to apply these tools.

Instead, the web community is out on the playground building DHT sandcastles with a bitcoin moat. Let's grow up.

>Think about some sort of publish/subscribe system, in which a web-page creator can regularly hit a publish command that makes it available for archiving, and various web archives can subscribe to receive updates.

Sounds like RSS, which I assume a few sites still use. Most people seem to prefer Twitter.

I'd prefer some action items from meetings like these. What we need is an interledger + IPFS integration with some form of ledgered/DAO backed deployment mechanism. This will give us high trust software deployments that also scale for high decentralization across the world's infrastructure. IoT updates done this way, for example, would allow devices get their own wallets and use those funds to pay for their own existence.

* The technology for a lot of things is there (e.g. diaspora instead of facebook, etherpad instead of google docs) but hosting these costs money. And people don't want to pay and they don't understand they currently pay with their data/privacy.

* Making the data behind a commercial site open is a great, noble idea - but all of the current big, consumer facing players make money with the customer data. They have no incentive to open their data.

* Big players have absolutely no incentive to inter-operate with new competitors and this means that those who use new, decentralized services have to maintain two identities or lose contacts.

I think the only thing that has a chance to get us out of this is intervention by the government:

a) Make running your own node a human right.

b) Give every person on the planet a free node if they cannot afford one (paid for but not controlled by governments).

c) Make IPv6 mandatory (so b can work)

d) Subsidize open source efforts that enable us to have a virtual presence hosted on our own node, interconnected with our friends' nodes.

e) Elevate all electronic communication to the legal status of snail mail: If your MTA blocks my host, you have to have a damn good (security) reason, tell me exactly why and timely unblock me when I have fixed the problem (Yes, AT&T and 1&1, I am talking to you.)

f) Enforce net neutrality.

g) Force current big players to allow machine readable, convenient exports of user generated content by the user.

I can say with some confidence that the blame lies almost entirely with the stewards. Until we learn how to converge faster towards consensus, things are going to remain painfully broken for long stretches of time. The inhibitor here isn't technological and it has nothing to do with the people on the ground relying on the web. It has to do with how things get run at a top level.