Tech Giants Have Hijacked the Web. It’s Time for a Reboot.
Tech
Giants Have Hijacked the Web. It’s Time for a Reboot.
While Washington looks to combat online monopolies, some
innovators are developing new internet platforms to prevent monopolies from
forming in the future
By Paul Vigna Oct. 26, 2019 12:00 am ET
Facebook co-founder
Mark Zuckerberg said, in a speech last week at Georgetown
University, that his social media megacorp and its Big Tech peers “have
decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands.”
That sounds comforting and egalitarian, but a lot of people
worry these days that they’ve actually centralized power—around themselves.
This has become ever more obvious since Russian agents used Facebook in an
attempt to manipulate the U.S. public in the 2016
election. It’s clearer every time somebody searches or posts about dogs, only
to find their feeds inundated with dog food ads.
Capitalizing on the oceans of data produced by the web has
turned Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google into empires, but it hasn’t
made the internet a more open place, said Christian Fuchs, a media professor at
the University of Westminster in London. “The internet is a corporate monopoly
today,” he said, “and monopolies are always a danger to democracy.”
While lawmakers try to combat the concerns by talking about antitrust and regulation, a
cottage industry of true decentralizers is emerging in the computer space. They
want to recapture the original promise of the web, to create a platform where
information isn’t siloed by private companies or monitored by police states.
It’s a stiff challenge. The apps and websites that run on top of
the internet—Facebook’s, Amazon’s, etc.—are managed from centrally controlled
servers. To run efficiently, those programs and servers capture and manage all
of the data that is created. When you write something on Facebook you are
writing from your device, but the data is captured on Facebook’s servers.
To be clear, no website or company controls the internet. And
people using the internet spread their personal information across strings of
different sites and servers. But still, the key for most web companies is
controlling as much data as possible.
Platforms like Elixxir are
using the somewhat heady idea of linking everyone’s computers together to share
data and, in some cases, even processing power. Websites and apps might look
the same—and still be connected to the internet that we know—but companies
wouldn’t be able to amass data, and they might not even need to build massive
cloud-server centers just to run their sites.
One proponent of this approach is the creator of the World Wide
Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee. Thirty years after he launched it, the “perverse
incentives” and unintended consequences of the original design have people
wondering “if the web is really a force for good,” he wrote in a letter this
year.
He is trying to improve his creation on several fronts. The
nonprofit World Wide Web Foundation he leads launched a “Contract for the Web”
movement, a sort of Bill of Rights for the online world. Privately, he
co-founded Inrupt, a company developing a
protocol called Solid.
Solid’s core concept is the POD, for “personal online data,”
which the company compares to a secure, though virtual, USB stick. All of your
personal data is stored there, along with data verifying your identity.
Say you were sharing photos through a social-media site. The
photos could be viewed on the site, but the photos wouldn’t be stored on the
site’s servers, they’d remain in the POD. The user, not a company, would have
control over all his or her data.
“We want to introduce a midcourse correction to the web,” said
John Bruce, co-founder of Inrupt, “one that moves it away from a centralized
web to a decentralized web. We like the term ‘me-centralized.’”
This approach might also remove the incentive to build massive
cloud data-storage facilities that help monopolists maintain a grip. Muneeb
Ali, a Princeton-educated engineer, co-founded Blockstack, which approaches this using a
distributed computing system known as blockchain. Rather than each company
maintaining its own servers, computing power is shared across the network.
Blockstack would provide the overarching platform, a new version
of the World Wide Web, but it would only exist as software on everybody’s
devices. Developers would build on that network, and also contribute computing
power to help maintain it. This shared model theoretically lowers the overall
costs needed to run an app.
The computing costs for developers would be further lowered
because of the way in which Blockstack’s platform handles user data. As with
Solid, all the data created by users is stored on their own devices—what they
read, what sites or apps they use, what they buy.
Mr. Ali believes users could eventually monetize their own data.
He envisions them joining cooperatives that negotiate with advertisers. If a
burger chain wanted to promote something it could offer to pay the users
directly for access. “That’s the biggest potential,” he said. “We can not only
enable users to be in control, but to really plug into the internet economy.”
Mr. Chaum’s Elixxir focuses on handling the “metadata.” When you
write a text message, for instance, a string of information is created—where
you are, what internet service you’re using, etc.—and attached to the words you
type.
In something of an irony, Elixxir takes all that data and
centralizes it in one giant blob. From there, though, it uses a system Mr.
Chaum developed to slice that information up, separate the bits and encrypt
them, then run them through myriad different nodes.
The message you write out gets received intact on the other
side, but all the data underneath it is impossible to reassemble.
“It’s all spread out in tiny pieces,” Mr. Chaum said, likening
it to a shredder. “It’s completely useless.”
This would blunt the data-collection efforts of big web
companies, which underpin their business models. There’s also a theoretical
security benefit: In a centralized web, hackers can get data on millions of
users by focusing on one target, such as a server site. In a decentralized web,
they potentially would have to go from user to user individually.
This in itself might pose a regulatory challenge, however, since
it would enable anonymous interactions online. Law enforcement’s job is easier
when dealing with companies and centralized data, not individuals. For example,
the U.S., U.K. and Australia jointly asked Facebook to delay adding encryption to its
messaging services.
That’s just one more hurdle for the new internetters, who are
playing David to the entrenched Goliaths. The task of building a completely new
community of users is hard. Weaning them off existing networks could be even
harder, not least of all because the companies that have centralized computing
power and data stores won’t give them up without a fight. Also, there’s no
guarantee some Goliath won’t find a way to monopolize these new networks.
“We need a web of the people, not a web of the corporations,”
said Prof. Fuchs. While he worries about the current web, he is optimistic
about the odds of improving it: “There’s now more public awareness, and that’s
the foundation of changing things.”
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