Berkman klein center for internet and society
Those links point to content by its location, telling our computers to find and retrieve things from those locations using the http protocol. Currently we use http and https links to identify information on the web. Second, how information is stored and retrieved is different. First, there is this peer-to-peer connectivity, where your computer not only requests services but provides them. There are two big differences in how the DWeb works compared to the world wide web, explains Matt Zumwalt, the programme manager at Protocol Labs, which builds systems and tools for the DWeb. How does the DWeb work that is different? On the DWeb, it would be harder for the Chinese government to block a site it didn’t like, because the information can come from other places.Ī Google office in China, where the company is said to be working on a censored search engine. It promises control and privacy, and things can’t all of a sudden disappear because someone decides they should.
The DWeb, say proponents, is about giving people a choice: the same services, but decentralised and not creepy. “The services are kind of creepy in how much they know about you,” says Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive. Then there are privacy concerns stemming from the business models of many of the companies, which use the private information we provide freely to target us with ads. And if any of these centralised entities shuts down, your data and connections are lost. It also makes it easier for governments to conduct surveillance and impose censorship. With the current web, all that user data concentrated in the hands of a few creates risk that our data will be hacked. Instead users keep control of their data and connect and interact and exchange messages directly with others in their network. The DWeb is about re-decentralising things – so we aren’t reliant on these intermediaries to connect us. They cannot do anything useful without the cloud,” says Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Blockstack, a platform for building decentralised apps. It is now on Facebook’s platform, in its so called “walled garden”, that you talk to your friends. But from the early 2000s, with the advent of Web 2.0, we began to communicate with each other and share information through centralised services provided by big companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. In the early days of the world wide web, which came into existence in 1989, you connected directly with your friends through desktop computers that talked to each other. It is supposed to be like the web you know but without relying on centralised operators. And more people have heard about the DWeb thanks to the television comedy Silicon Valley, whose main character recently pivoted his startup to try and build this “new internet”. In light of the Snowden revelations and Cambridge Analytica scandal, public concerns around spying and privacy have grown. And its proponents have got projects and apps that are beginning to function, funding that is flowing and social momentum behind them. The proponents of the so-called decentralised web – or DWeb – want a new, better web where the entire planet’s population can communicate without having to rely on big companies that amass our data for profit and make it easier for governments to conduct surveillance. The event they had gathered for was the Decentralised Web Summit, held from 31 July to 2 August, and hosted by the Internet Archive. The same day, a group of 800 web builders and others – among them Tim Berners-Lee, who created the world wide web – were meeting in San Francisco to discuss a grand idea to circumvent internet gatekeepers like Google and Facebook. T he story that broke early last month that Google would again cooperate with Chinese authorities to run a censored version of its search engine, something the tech giant has neither confirmed nor denied, had ironic timing.