
Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future? [pdf] - Dangeranger
http://dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/decentralized_web.pdf
======
sremani
(From the document..)

Risks Posed by the Centralized Web

\- Facebook and Google, account for 81% of all incoming traffic to online news
sources in the U.S.

\- Google processes 3.5 billion search queries per day, roughtly ten times
more than its nearest competitors

Risk 1- Top-down, Direct Censorship

Risk 2 - Curational Bias/ Indirect Cencorship

Risk 3 - Abuse of Curatorial Power

Risk 4 - Exclusion

~~~
will_brown
>Google processes 3.5 billion search queries per day, roughtly ten times more
than its nearest competitors

The crazy thing to me is this has already been examined through many of their
obviously anti-competitive acquisitions, and yet they always win. Namely, they
use their position as the search engine leader to determine trends in search,
purchases and advertising to buy companies in industries that will ultimately
help the bottom line of their advertising revenue driven search engine to the
detriment of alternative products.

In other words the very people/companies who already buy Google ads now must
pay more for Google ads because Google entered the market and is competing for
the same ads jacking up prices. Because of Google's search engine they know
exactly where they can get away with this, they know the maximum ad cost
bearable by their competitors and can/will squeeze it at best or they can
effectively drive you out of business leaving themselves as the sole operator
in the space at worst.

I mentioned it the other day, the one thing people could do is boycott google
search, which I know sounds ridiculous, but how hard would it really be to
organize a single day google search boycott across the web where people agreed
to use bing or DuckDuckGo for a single day? google shareholders would throw a
fit and change would be made internally in an instant, and I'd go so far as to
say political pressure would come down to seriously look into the business
practices. Most importantly people would wake up, understand their power and
realize they own the web not these dominant corporate entities.

~~~
visarga
> how hard would it really be to organize a single day google search boycott
> across the web

\- DDG and probably even Bing would go under.

\- It's just a slap on the wrist for Google.

I think a better idea is to create a distributed, federated crawler and search
engine that does not depend on a central point of failure.

Alternatively, we could still use Google for long-tail, technical searches and
use a different one for important queries such as politics and social.

~~~
adrianN
Good luck creating a distributed search engine that produces results that come
even close in quality to Google's. Search engines are hard. There is a reason
Google dominates, and its not just inertia.

~~~
gardnr
Don't take that advice as discouragement to start.

Google did have to engineer a giant distributed system to provide the search
results we get. There are articles that talked about how they just had
motherboards connected to hard drives laying on anti-static pads filling rooms
in buildings. The racks and cabinets didn't make sense for them.

Today we take for granted software stacks like lucene. Nothing like that
existed when Google moved into the space.

So yeah, 15-20 years ago internet search was a really difficult problem. Now,
the sheer volume of research available which specifically addresses the
problem space of a trusted decentralized search, to me, means that a solution
is imminent.

You could be the person that puts all the research blocks in the right order
and launches a successful project.

~~~
michaelchisari
> giant distributed system

A politically distributed system is a whole different beast.

People have built plenty of distributed systems where all endpoints are under
the control of a single organization (or cooperating organizations). That's
essentially a solved problem.

But a system which is not under a single control is a whole different approach
to being distributed. Not only does A not control B, they may not intend to
cooperate, and A does not necessarily have any reason to trust B or vice
versa. B may even be an endpoint that is outright hostile to the network
itself (ie, spam, ddos).

There have been very few successful distributed systems that follow that
model. The WWW is one. That's the good news: If you manage to find a viable
model of decentralization, AND it succeeds in user adoption, you have
literally changed the world forever.

That's how hard it is: People who achieve it go down in history.

~~~
gardnr
I see it as more of an incremental process than as an achievement. The
Gnutella2 protocol by Michael Stokes is the most successfully deployed
emergent and distributed search service that I am aware of. While G2 lacks any
trust mechanisms there are a few projects working in the problem space of
trusted decentralized stacks or "anarchitecture" that are trying to solve that
for us.[1][2][3] All the building blocks seem to be in some state of existence
and there are people experimenting by arranging them differently. The systems
trust example you gave seems easily solvable after creating a durable
decentralized trust model which manages identities and can verify trust while
keeping privacy in mind. User key management seems like it will always be a
problem.

The thing you mentioned is user adoption. Even if a decentralized Google was
available there is no marketing machine behind it. There's no reason for
people to adopt it. Patchwork is a good example of what organic growth looks
like for a decentralized social app.

Developers are another facet of user adoption. Developers don't think about
using these tools for new service development. They get paid to work on
centralized architectures. The incentives aren't there yet.

It makes sense to me that this is the natural evolution of that way in which
we build services. And yeah, it is super hard and we are all gonna be famous.
;)

[1] [https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/)

[2] [http://ceptr.org/projects/holochain](http://ceptr.org/projects/holochain)

[3] [https://blockstack.org/](https://blockstack.org/)

~~~
synctext
> While G2 lacks any trust mechanisms there are a few projects working in the
> problem space of trusted decentralized stacks

Search engines need to solve the spam issue.

Without central control you lack any solid ground for eradicating spam,
preventing fake accounts, and exploits to your protocols. Building trust is
not easy. The only progress we made in the past decade was with Bitcoin,
proof-of-work. Bittorrent relies on either a central tracker or the DHT(==not
very secure).

For the past 12 years I've dedicated my academic career to building trust
without any central control or central servers. It's hard. <plug> We enhanced
a Bittorrent client with a web-of-trust plus distributed torrent search and
replaced tit-for-tat with a ledger. We using an incremental PageRank-like
trust model. [https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki#current-items-
under-...](https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki#current-items-under-active-
development)

~~~
gardnr
> Tribler is the first client which continuously tries to improve upon the
> basic BitTorrent implementation by addressing some of the flaws. It
> implements, amongst others, remote search, streaming, channels and
> reputation-management. All these features are implemented in a completely
> distributed manner, not relying on any centralized component. Still, Tribler
> manages to remain fully backwards compatible with BitTorrent.

> Lengthy documentation in the form of two master thesis documents is
> available. First is a general documentation of the tunnel and relay
> mechanism, Anonymous HD video streaming, .pdf 68 pages. Second is focused on
> encryption part, called Anonymous Internet: Anonymizing peer-to-peer traffic
> using applied cryptography, .pdf 85 pages. In addition, there are the
> specifications for the protocols for anonymous downloading and hidden
> seeding on this wiki.

The link that you provided is going to take up a few weeks of my spare time.
Thank you!

------
quickben
We are in this "decentralized" web, is just that the giants have a habit into
buying out anything becoming remotely popular.

Think end game capitalism. Capital amalgamation.

In fact, any modern corporation will be buying as many smaller parts as they
can, and regularly firing 10-20% of the people every year (cisco , etc).

So then, the problem isn't in the "centralized" web.

~~~
jamespitts
Due to efficiencies of scale and network effects, centralization may seem
inevitable. However, we can structurally offset some of this tendency using
crypto-economics.

~~~
cookiecaper
It's not inevitable. Centralization is a side effect of the CFAA and copyright
laws. The reason that people aren't able to read Facebook on a user's behalf
and multiplex the feed into a competing network is because Facebook will sue
you and the FBI may arrest you if you do this.

As such, users are denied true competitive freedom to say "I prefer the way
that NewThing does stuff". They instead have to say "I prefer NewThing, but my
social graph is held hostage by Facebook."

I won't say anything in particular about network effects because it's usually
taken the wrong way, but there's no reason any of this lock-in has to exist on
the digital web. We've _chosen_ it by giving extremely strong legal
protections to existing tech incumbents.

~~~
quickben
Network effects will sooner be broken by a legal, than a technical solution.

------
stephengillie
Is there any sort of free open source internet search project? Similar to
OpenStreetMap for open map data. Searching hasn't found any.

~~~
amelius
Also, the amount of open source software libraries for search is
disappointing.

Somewhat strange, because searching is one of the pillars of CS.

------
dcow
I'm sad they don't mention urbit.org. Urbit aims to solve a lot of these
problems at once (storage + identity + social + platform).

~~~
gardnr
This part made me laugh out loud: "and “Arvo,” a functional network OS, which
is also a database." [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/urbit-the-bold-
pitch-to...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/urbit-the-bold-pitch-to-re-
decentralize-the-internet-on-top-of-the-internet-1468257340/)

It seems like they've had a professional story teller masticate their ideas
into good descriptions.

But really, if you had to describe it in 5 buzzwords or less would it be a
"federated crypto p2p lambda server"?

~~~
dcow
Curtis loves to write about political philosophy and it's clear some of that
has leaked into the urbit project--which isn't in isolation bad. It does seem
to deter a general person simply interested in what the project is all about
since you have to cut through the obscure language.

------
kermittd
Started reading last night. No technical expert but I came of age after the
widespread use of the Internet. Many people, my age and older, can care a less
about the philosophy of decentralized platforms.

However could you combine usability of centralized platforms with a
decentralized platform focus on privacy, lack of ads, etc?

(of course how to pay for it...)

~~~
indigochill
Regarding payment, I think you must take payment from your users (my
recommendation would be donations, like Wikipedia).

This is because an organization's primary objective is self-preservation, and
that means aligning priorities with income sources (or when you're designing
the organization, aligning your business model with your priorities).

As we've seen with journalism, journalism's reliance on advertising leads to
journalism designed primarily to attract viewers for advertisers rather than
to serve the public interest (although good journalism does still happen
because some journalists care about that despite their organization's
priorities).

~~~
kermittd
Wikipedia is a great example of a free decentralized product.

I suppose a way without having to ask for donations is one I would be
interested in though I suspect there are " whales" who make up the bulk.

I think the issue with Wikipedia, though it has been able to scale to reach
the world, is that it seem to lack the power to change how info is distributed
and consumed in the spirit of Google and Facebook outside its digital border.

------
toby_mars
To increase the competition via decentralization of the government control of
internet

~~~
Qwertious
Removal of government control is a double-edged sword - government can be a
huge barrier to innovation, but they can also _enforce_ innovation, by
blocking monopolistic companies from being anticompetitive.

~~~
bobdingus
I feel like these monopolistic companies will have a lot more sway in any
attempts at legislation than the disorganized, disinterested masses.

