Over the internet’s 35-year span, authority over its most vital services has slowly moved from open source protocols run by nonprofit communities to proprietary services run by major tech firms. That shift gave billions of people access to remarkable, free technologies. But it also introduced major problems.
Millions of users have seen their private data abused or taken. Creators and businesses that depend on internet platforms face abrupt rule changes that can strip away their audiences and income. Yet a growing movement — coming out of the blockchain and cryptocurrency world — is working to create new internet services that blend the strength of modern, centralized services with the community-driven spirit of the original internet. We should welcome it.
Creators and businesses that rely on internet platforms are subject to sudden rule changes that take away their audiences and profits.
From the 1980s to the early 2000s, the leading internet services were built on open protocols governed by the internet community. Take the Domain Name System, the internet’s “phone book”: it is overseen by a distributed network of people and organizations, under rules made and managed in public. That means anyone who follows community standards can register a domain name and create an internet presence. It also means companies that run web and email hosting are kept in check — if they act badly, customers can move their domain names to rival providers.
From the mid 2000s to the present, trust in open protocols was replaced by trust in corporate management teams. As companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook built software and services that surpassed the capabilities of open protocols, users migrated to these more sophisticated platforms. But their code was proprietary, and their governing principles could change on a whim.
How do social networks choose which users to verify or ban? How do search engines decide how to rank websites? One moment social networks are courting media organizations and small businesses, and the next they are downgrading their content or altering the revenue split. The power of these platforms has fueled broad social tension, as shown in arguments over fake news, state-backed bots, privacy laws, and algorithmic bias.
That is why the pendulum is swinging back toward an internet run by open, community-controlled services. Only recently has this become possible, thanks to technologies emerging from blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
There has been plenty of discussion in recent years about blockchains, which are widely hyped but not well understood. Blockchains are networks of physical computers that operate together to create one virtual computer. Their advantage is that, unlike a conventional computer, a blockchain computer can provide strong trust guarantees rooted in the mathematical and game-theoretic properties of the system. A user or developer can trust that code running on a blockchain computer will keep behaving as intended, even if individual network participants change their motives or try to undermine the system. That means control of a blockchain computer can be handed to a community.
Users who depend on proprietary platforms, on the other hand, have to worry about data getting stolen or misused, privacy policies changing, intrusive advertising, and more. Proprietary platforms may suddenly change the rules for developers and businesses, the way Facebook famously did to Zynga and Google did to Yelp.
How do social networks choose which users to verify or ban? … The pendulum is swinging back toward an internet run by open, community-controlled services.
The idea that corporate-owned services could be replaced by community-owned services may sound far-fetched, but there is a strong historical precedent in the transformation of software over the past twenty years. In the 1990s, computing was dominated by proprietary, closed-source software, most notably Windows. Today, billions of Android phones run on the open source operating system Linux. Much of the software running on an Apple device is open source, as is almost all modern cloud data centers including Amazon’s. The recent acquisitions of Github by Microsoft and Red Hat by IBM underscore how dominant open source has become.
As open source has become more important, technology companies have changed their business models from selling software to providing cloud-based services. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix are all services companies. Even Microsoft is now mainly a services company. This has enabled these companies to stay ahead of the growth of open source software and preserve control over critical internet infrastructure.
A core insight in the design of blockchains is that the open source model can be extended beyond software to cloud-based services by adding financial incentives to the mix. Cryptocurrencies — coins and tokens built into specific blockchains — provide a way to incentivize individuals and groups to participate in, maintain, and build services.
There has been a lot of talk in the past few years about blockchains, which are heavily hyped but poorly understood.
The idea that an internet service could have an associated coin or token may be a novel concept, but the blockchain and cryptocurrencies can do for cloud-based services what open source did for software. It took twenty years for open source software to supplant proprietary software, and it could take just as long for open services to supplant proprietary services.
But the benefits of such a change will be enormous. Instead of putting our trust in corporations, we can put our trust in community-owned and -operated software, shifting the internet’s governing principle from “don’t be evil” back to “can’t be evil”.
This article originally appeared in Wired in January 2019.