
Who Pays for the Decentralized Web? - nsrediron
https://tierion.com/blog/who-pays-for-the-decentralized-web/
======
barnacs
A decentralized web would be vastly more efficient in terms of resources. A
lot of the data could be deduplicated and a lot of backbone traffic could be
avoided.

Right now, if a dozen people around a block watch the same viral video, all of
them will fetch it through the backbone, which is obviously wasteful. If they
want to store the video for later, they will have a dozen copies wasting space
on their drives, which could again be reduced by more efficient algorithms
(eg. erasure codes).

There are lots of unused resources at endpoints (local network links, unused
storage space and computing power on most consumer devices, etc) which could
be utilized more efficiently. If we can pay for this wasteful centralized
approach, why would paying for a decentralized network be more difficult?

And make no mistake, we are all paying for this "free" centralized network
now. Whenever you buy a product from a company that advertises on facebook,
google, whatever, you are effectively paying for it.

~~~
smallnamespace
In terms of computation and storage, maybe, but in terms of the network
bandwidth, perhaps not.

The current _physical_ topology of the Internet is already heavily biased
towards backbone-to-edge connectivity, and is directionally asymmetric.

By comparison, edge-to-edge connectivity that doesn't go through any backbone
is much more limited, and edge nodes often don't have the upload bandwidth to
effectively deliver content.

Plus, CDNs and other distribution networks already effectively put easily
cachable content closer to the edges to relieve backbone congestion.

~~~
barnacs
I think edge to edge connectivity being limited is mostly a software (routing
protocol architecture) issue.

For example, I live in an apartment and the ISP has a router installed in the
building. Coax cables are running to each apartment. I can see 15+ wifi
networks from my home. Yet to fetch the exact same front page of a news site
my neighbor is reading and has a cached copy of, I am routed through the
backbone probably half way around the world, or to a CDN at the other end of
my country at best.

I don't think photons really care which way they travel but the shortest the
path the faster they will get there and the less photons we send the cheaper
it ends up being.

~~~
smallnamespace
If the argument is that this saves on network hardware costs, then you'd think
ISPs would have some incentive to invest in decentralization as well.

But I'm not so sure about the thesis that it's just a software issue. It seems
wasteful to sling electrons through a backbone and back when those bits are
(physically) close by, but the cost here is not the _distance_ those bits
traveled, but the marginal cost of the physical hardware to deliver those bits
to your doorstep.

It's probably much cheaper, on a cost-per-bandwidth basis, to beef up the
existing backbone, because significant economies of scale exist.

OTOH, there's a significant fixed cost every time you try to widen edge links
(it's very expensive to dig up and replace residential cables).

~~~
barnacs
My ISP would certainly love if my whole local area
(building/street/district/whatever) only fetched each unique piece of data
once through their network and then distributed it locally via mesh networks.
It's just that they can't make it happen by themselves. It needs to be
supported by network protocols, which need support from content providers and
content consumers as well, so it goes way beyond the reach of ISPs.

------
Karrot_Kream
I'm always annoyed when people think the Decentralized Web needs to replace
the Centralized Web, like some glorious revolution. The decentralized web
doesn't need to be as big as the centralized web, nor does it have to have as
many users. The distributed file and chat applications used in the '90s and
2000s (IRC, XMPP, Gnutella, etc) were mostly run by a niche set of users
anyway. I just want to have an ecosystem where like-minded folks can share,
communicate, and such. I also would love to see the ability for the
decentralized web to "plug into" the centralized web (i.e. publish to
Twitter/FB under my identities).

My friends and I have been running our own network for a bit and playing with
a very grassroots version of the web. Those of us that work in software host
and create services to distribute music, movies, etc. that we collect. We also
process our own IoT sensors and devices. It's maintained by those of us in
software, but we have friends not in software accessing the network and using
its resources. It's a lot of fun!

~~~
j3097736
Limewire was mostly run by a niche set of users?

~~~
dajohnson89
Relative to how ubiquitous Facebook et al is, yes.

~~~
niftich
Limewire, Bittorrent, and its ilk were fairly mainstream in the same way that
driving over the speed limit, recreational drug use, and jaywalking are; and
like these things it was often afoul of the law.

So as enforcement got better and legal alternatives emerged, their
'popularity' declined. There are also people who share Netflix logins, which
is a (grey-market) option for those with no money, but is vastly less likely
to result in DMCA notices mailed out to you.

If anything, the various decentralized networks of the 1990-2000s were the
products of organic demand. There is simply less demand now than there was, or
that demand is being suppressed by other mechanisms (such as laws, in the case
of copyright-infringing sharing).

Perhaps there's just not a lot of demand for hosting your own identity in some
decentralized, federated social network.

------
Animats
Micropayments again. Except Bitcoin, this time, because blockchains are magic.

As I've pointed out before, all the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from
people who want to _collect_ them. There's no vast grass-roots demand for the
ability to send pennies.

Actually, we do need a more decentralized web for these use cases:

\- I want to send you a big file without going through a server.

\- I want to send you a text message without going through a server.

\- I want to talk to my home control system from my phone without going
through a server.

Technically, we need to fix it so that you can reliably get an Internet
connection between any two nodes that want to talk. For starters, all mobile
devices and networks need to speak IPv6, so everybody has an address.

~~~
zanny
I've used bitcoin tip bots on reddit a lot. They are really neat, and I really
like having them.

Of course the loudest mouths will be those looking to profit off
micropayments, which then defeats the point of the system, which is why the
only successful ones are the ones that start without the selfish motive to
begin with.

ipv6 is not going to be a catch all answer. Despite having more addresses than
number of computers we could feasibly build ever, rollouts of ipv6 are still
allocating tiny blocks to home networks that don't provide enough addresses
for guaranteed public IP addressing between all nodes. If Comcast only gives
you 8 ipv6 addresses on your home router, your 10th device is being natted
again and even on ipv6 you cannot assume a working p2p endpoint.

~~~
twr
Comcast assigns a /56, /60, or /64 depending on the router configuration (/56
is for business class). That's 16 * 16 * 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IPv6
addresses, respectively, not 8.

------
drcode
The most expensive part for any "decentralized web" is going to be data
storage, so the question basically boils down to "How can a person in a P2P
system incentivize other people to host their files for them?" Bittorrent
sidesteps this question by focusing only on very popular files and enabling
hosting by default in most clients.

So far, no established solution exists for doing this. The most promising
projects working on this problem that I know of are IPFS[1] and Ethereum
Swarm[2] but both are still struggling with the low level protocol that makes
sure person A gets paid for hosting files from person B.

[1] [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)

[2] [http://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/swarm/](http://swarm-
gateways.net/bzz:/swarm/)

~~~
api
Given how cheap drives are I think upstream bandwidth for that storage will
quickly eclipse the storage itself.

~~~
drcode
I disagree- the hardest files to deploy in a decentralized web are "long tail"
files, for which there is usually very little demand on any given day (by
definition) but which are extremely important to establishing a new web
platform.

~~~
reitanqild
I think I rememeber that napster and various other file sharing services held
quite a lot of the long tail but I might be wrong (never a heavy user).

IIRC the problem was more that there was an awful lot of malware + the RIAA
and MAFIAA.

~~~
drcode
Napster had a tail 40,000 files long, with the decentralized web we'll need a
tail 1,000,000,000 documents long or something.

------
pmontra
Everybody pays a little.

Pay for storage by sharing the disks attached to the computer at home that is
connected to the Internet. Run out of space? Buy another disk or reduce the
space for sharing. Same of what happens with file sharing.

Pay for bandwidth through the bill of the ISP. This could be tricky because
ISPs don't usually make it easy to have servers at home.

Both storage and bandwidth can be outsourced to server farms: a machine on AWS
or anywhere else would be as good as one at home. Maybe more convenient, maybe
less.

But if you're a big content provider you might end up with large disks and
large pipes because you want that your content is always accessible and no
random guy can affect its availability.

------
guptaneil
While who pays for the decentralized web is a perfectly valid question to
raise, I think it's counterproductive right now.

Much like the internet itself, this new architecture will be ushered in by
hackers looking to disrupt the status quo of walled gardens and data
warehouses, not corporations. So immediate monetization is not a top concern.
We can't even imagine what the economics will look like, just like Tim
Berners-Lee couldn't have imagined the current web 30 years ago. If we stop to
worry about fitting the decentralized web into our current economic models, we
will trap ourselves in a box.

------
penglish1
It is the hubris of computer scientists to think that if we can just build it
(again!) that THIS time people will surely use it, pay for it etc.

If we just make a better algorithm, people won't find our UI design
intolerable.

If we just offer them some privacy, they will pay real money for it.

Long before there was a web, people were giving up privacy and freedom for the
convenience of credit cards.

If the decentralized web is going to fly, it needs to START with the social
sciences.

We can all nerd out over algorithms that make it happen, or use math to prove
that it can't be done, only once the economists have created a model in which
it might, theoretically be done. And the social scientists have created a
model in which a critical mass of people will make the necessary choices, when
presented with them.

As it stands, most people are not willing to pay:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11047801/Would-
yo...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11047801/Would-you-
pay-140-a-year-for-an-ad-free-web.html)

I would be willing to pay that _and more_ in a heartbeat if given the option.
But, in social science terms - I understand the problems with centralization
much better than most, I'm willing to put up with much worse UI than most, and
I'm wealthier than average.

Heck I'd probably pay just because I think the underlying technology is neat!
But that makes me a pretty extreme outlier on the broad spectrum of humanity
that are choosing, en-masse to use Facebook, which means that I either need to
use Facebook, or nothing.

~~~
wyager
The predictive power of the social sciences is dismal and the predictive power
of economics is mediocre.

If social scientists could actually predict what people would do, they would
have been the ones to start every multi-billion-dollar "why is this so
valuable?" startup like twitter, snapchat, etc.

Computer scientists are and will continue to be the driving force behind
techno-social change. We have no idea what people actually want, but neither
does anyone else, so we should just keep trying stuff and see what sticks.

~~~
penglish1
I agree - the predictive power of social sciences (including economics) is
pretty terrible.

But as you point out - computer scientists don't know what people want
_either_, so.. predictive power itself is not necessary for a thing to work.

But _working_ isn't sufficient either. Facebook _works_. As I understand it is
WILDLY profitable. But the way it works is a matter of economics and social
sciences. Building a social networking website is a SOLVED PROBLEM in computer
science. (yes, I realize they're doing some creative research on scaling it
up).

Someone could clone Facebook tomorrow, and offer it for free, right? But..
could they charge $10/mo for it, and say "Facebook but without the spying and
advertising?" \- Probably not.

I'm not saying computer science is useless here. New algorithms WILL be
needed. Bitcoin or any form of distributed ledger seems extremely unlikely to
scale as needed, for instance. Perhaps provably unable to scale as needed -
I'd welcome a paper proving this with solid math / computer science (and there
probably is one, I don't keep up).

But what IS necessary is a working economic model that is not the current
economic model. You're saying that nobody can predict the future (true), so
just try a bunch of stuff - so far, so good. But then when you find something
that works.. how do you pay for it? Nobody in computer science is trying to
figure it out... that is a consideration "for later" \- the point the article
is making! What happens "later" when money needs to be made.. well..
advertising and surveillance. That is literally the only answer anyone has
come up with.

That is why, FIRST, predictive or not, someone (probably in the social
sciences) needs to come up with the idea(s) about how it _might_ be paid for,
that don't include advertising.

The article was a response to the big decentralized web conference "web 3.0"
that happened recently. It was all CS people, technologists who got together
to enjoy talking about technology. But economics is what will shift this, and
_innovation_ perhaps will be needed in economics. And other social sciences -
nudging, gamification, etc.

~~~
wyager
Bitcoin is a great example. Indeed, many (but not all) economists,
particularly those of the Keynesian persuasion, said Bitcoin was economically
untenable. And they were obviously wrong; Bitcoin is vastly more successful in
every respect than nearly anyone would have predicted six years ago. The only
way we found out was because some programmer said "I don't know if this
matches the worldview of professional economists, but I'm going to try it
anyway." If he'd taken your approach, we'd never have bitcoin in the first
place.

(Wrt scaling, there is no theoretical reason the Bitcoin network couldn't
scale to handle any number of transactions in a bounded spacial volume much
larger than Earth. There are only surmountable practical limitations like
processing power.)

~~~
jude-
It's also a long, long, long way from becoming a currency with properties most
people actually care about. Wild price fluctuations don't help it's cause, for
example.

~~~
wyager
Most people prefer some variance mostly in the up direction (Bitcoin) to a
steady decline (Dollar) or a rather precipitous decline over the last few
years (Euro, GBP).

And those are the most "first-world" currencies. People seem to use even more
unstable currencies without issue.

------
zer0gravity
Looking only at the cost of running a decentralized network is not sufficient.
We need to look also at the cost of _not_ running a decentralized network.

Not all incentives have an economic nature, some are political, and I think
the latter applies in a greater meassure in the current case.

Just the realization that you give too much power to those running centralized
services, may represent the required incentive for people to switch.

The overall material cost to run a centralized vs decentralized service may be
comparable, but the political cost is not..

------
erikb
The web is decentralized. The data and the money is not. As long as it stays
that way (and it probably will) changing some protocols doesn't make a big
difference.

Really, someone tell me what is centralized about the web right now and we can
figure out together that this thing actually IS decentralized, it's just that
money forces people, companies and govs to work together and keep more of the
power in fewer hands.

~~~
nickpsecurity
The main methods of average person paying for stuff online. Wikileaks was
crippled by a boycott by Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal. Just three companies
made a decision and poof!

------
phkahler
I think it's obvious. People are not going to maintain a decentralized network
for copyright infringement. But imagine a NAS device that also hosts something
like a Facebook account which is shared with trusted others. Your personal
data is also encrypted and backed up on your friends machines - even data not
part of your FB stuff. When everyone has their own NAS with the decentralized
P2p/backup software then we win. How one maintains that software across the
network is a mystery, but it must be up to the individuals to maintain in some
way.

~~~
zzzcpan
> People are not going to maintain a decentralized network for copyright
> infringement.

They do. That's pretty much what bittorrent incentivizes.

~~~
phkahler
But most people don't run bit torrent 24/7

~~~
boomlinde
I'd say that the fact that no one agent has to is the basis of its success. In
the end it isn't without its shortcomings, though, so I agree with your
sentiment in general. Either that, or something is used to incentivize the
maintenance of the long tail of things, e.g. filecoin.

------
waynevaughan
Article author here.

Wow was I surprised to see this on Hacker News! It's my view that
decentralized systems will almost always be less efficient than centralized
systems. This is because centralized systems can organize information in a
more efficient manner and use specialized hardware. Decentralized systems give
you privacy, redundancy, anonymity and other benefits at a significant
additional cost.

Bitcoin has the potential to provide a mechanism for decentralized systems to
set prices and allocate resources. We'll see how this plays out over time.

------
zmanian
I have a few hypothesizes about this.

1\. Decentralization won in 1970 - 2005 protocol design because reliable
computers were very expensive. It was economically advantageous to have a
decentralized network of unreliable computers than centralized unreliable
protocols. Reliable compute has now become commoditized by the cloud services.
This creates a pressure for centralization.

2\. Decentralized protocols have not aged well(TCP/IP, SMTP), have deep
security flaws and have proven difficult to upgrade. This has created new
centralization pressures to cope with the security flaws(Gmail, Cloudflare)

3\. There continue to be pressures for decentralization related to both
politics and security pressures. Tor and blockchain cryptocurrencies are
excellent examples of these. But decentralization is unlikely to extend all
the way to edge devices and instead operate in a federated fashion.

~~~
PhaseMage
Interesting that you describe TCP/IP as a decentralized protocol. I have the
opposite opinion: That TCP/IP is the #1 forcing function for centralization in
the world right now.

IP allows a maximum of 255 hops for any packet. This inherently restricts the
topology of the Internet: As it stands, it can never be a world-wide
decentralized mesh. Instead, you end up with large hubs and choke-points. The
IP addressing scheme also makes it very difficult to have a mesh: IP addresses
are assigned hierarchically. The name "Inter-Net" describes the problem
directly: The Internet isn't a global network that just anyone can contribute
or connect to; instead, the Internet is just a protocol for inter-connecting
the world's centrally owned and operated networks. With the IP Internet forced
topology, Economies-of-Scale make massive centralized services cheaper than
distributed services (even if similarly massive). The obvious result: Comcast
is your only ISP at home.

Disclosure: I've been working in my spare time for years on a solution, and I
think an isochronous source-routed stream-based protocol is the only solution.
I've got a proposed spec at IsoGrid.org

~~~
zmanian
Have you seen [http://www.scion-architecture.net/](http://www.scion-
architecture.net/)?

TCP/IP and Ethernet were decentralized alternatives both from a design and IP
licensing point of view. But the unresolved technical debt at the transport
layer is major centralizing force on the Internet right now.

~~~
PhaseMage
I hadn't seen SCION, but just read through the FAQ and skimmed some of the Apr
2016 whitepaper. It doesn't appear to address centralization. For example from
their literature: "SCION only assumes that a few top-tier ISPs in the
isolation domain are trusted..." Sounds like it's trying to solve many
problems, but centralization isn't one of them.

I wish them well, it's good to have lots of people working on this from all
angles.

------
zokier
This is one key reason why I strongly prefer federated services over fully
decentralized/distributed ones. Typically in federated services each node pays
for itself, which is both fair and economical. Of course it doesn't always
work perfectly, as demonstrated by email spam.

------
th-ai
0) fix the name: 'distributed' more then just 'decentralized'

1) fix the security:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking)

2) pay by sidechain: [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/greg-maxwell-
lightning-...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/greg-maxwell-lightning-
network-better-than-sidechains-for-scaling-bitcoin-1461077424)

3) pay players to copy:
[https://www.wired.com/1994/09/superdis/](https://www.wired.com/1994/09/superdis/)

------
zzzcpan
Having an incentive is a key, but I think the article is incorrect a bit on
what exactly needs to be incentivized. Users are supposed to get some value
from the decentralized web, it they do - they will be happy to share the cost
of the infrastructure. No need for special incentives there.

The biggest problem, though, is having an incentive to promote the technology
and push it to users. Both bittorrent and bitcoin have that incentive, that's
why they are successful.

------
PaulRobinson
The same people as who have always paid for it: the users at the edge of the
network via subscription fees to centralised providers (Usenet, email, etc.),
or directly for web hosting, etc.

If you're not paying for something, you're the thing being sold.

It may be we end up paying central IT orgs small amounts of money to host apps
(I can see people paying AWS for social network applications of their own
running on Lambda, for example), but the network pays for itself by users
paying for it.

If users are not prepared to do that, they are always going to be sold as
commodities, as they are today in most free SaaS consumer-facing applications.

~~~
harryf
Privacy and security might sell. Freedom from government snooping and similar.

Anti-virus software shows how you motivate non-technical consumers to buy - in
cynical terms you basically just scare people enough until ready to pay.

~~~
type0
Well it seems already be a market for selling hardware without backdoors,
unfortunately the price is not affordable for the majority of people. There
was HN tread about this desktop system
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12711185](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12711185)

------
macawfish
Often when people think of decentralized webs, they are thinking of bittorrent
or tor, or of decentralized webs running on top of traditional web
infrastructure, being used in conventional web kinds of ways.

But decentralized webs need not resemble the www. Decentralized webs are
radically different.

For me a big part of decentralized webs is people using computers in person,
in real life spaces, to share and interact with information. Much of the
information will be transmitted in very shallow ways, via home routers and
built in wireless hardware, over local networks. People sharing personal
files, photos, videos, work documents and using decentralized web
applications, together in person or over small, local networks.

The decentralized web could be a huge boon to local economies. For example,
imagine a band that plays monthly at a local theater. When you go to a show,
they release a new song over the local network, via p2p sharing protocols.
Assume that people like the band, and that this is a world where people are
familiar with using these kinds of applications. The experience of getting new
content will provide additional incentive for people to come to the show. If
it is marketed well, the band and the theater will make money from increased
turnout. I think this could be huge.

The real question being asked here is: who pays for the world wide web if
people aren't relying on it as much. Decentralized webs need not be world
wide, though pockets of decentralized webs may interact with worldwide webs,
they will not be inherently dependent on it, and will put draw far fewer of
its resources.

And in this sense, decentralized webs are paid for by their users when users
buy hardware. Much more than users pay for centralized webs.

Maybe there is an argument to be made that software application industries,
like the web, somehow incentivize hardware manufacturing. This is probably the
case to a degree. For decentralized hardware applications to carry the give
people the same incentive to buy hardware as centralized applications do, they
are going to need to be dependable and usable by all different kinds of
people. If decentralized web applications are an uphill battle for people,
then users won't buy hardware with the intention of using it in a
decentralized way.

------
jokoon
ISPs and users pay for the decentralized networks.

Decentralized networks are a cheaper way to do networking, of course it's not
as fast and simple to use, but the big advantage of P2P is that the user pays
for the hardware. If your software can work on user hardware (which is a lot
of computers), it's a huge economic and infrastructure advantage.

The point is not only to give user the control over their data, it's also to
reduce the barrier of having to pay to make a service, since it can also
require knowledge and maintenance to build a service.

P2P removes the duality of the internet. The internet is not just a "series of
tubes", it's also a large quantity of expensive server rooms and high grade
hardware that must sustain large throughput. To me, p2p is the real "web". If
today you remove gmail, youtube, google, facebook and twitter, the internet
dies because users don't know what to do anything anymore.

Granted, it's not as simple and the software is complex, but if companies can
do horizontal scaling in server rooms, it should also be doable with user
computers.

~~~
z3t4
i think we will soon be back to thin console, as you can get less than 1ms
latency via fiber all you need is IO and the computation is done in the
"cloud".

------
rgbrenner
(This is going to seem a bit off topic at first.) I think many of the
decentralization projects have issues that will limit their deployment.

A lot of these ideas limit the ability of companies like facebook, google, etc
to earn money from a service and/or ignore ecommerce, etc. Take federated
systems, for example.. how does a federated facebook earn money?

And while you and I might not care if facebook earns anything, it's going to
be tough for existing stakeholders to back it or anything like it if the idea
would result in the end of their business.

Similarly, the same limitations apply to startsups.. meaning todays startups,
who eventually become tomorrows large companies, aren't going to be based
around something that can't be used to generate revenue.

This isn't the 1980s anymore. There are too many users, placing too many
demands on systems for it to ever be free.

So to answer the question: I think the distributed web is paid for just like
today's web.. because any distributed system that succeeds, will need to be
able to support the current methods of generating revenue from the internet.

~~~
eternalban
The old fashioned way: by providing a service.

Here is an example. We'll assume an imaginary decentralized communication
platform. Alice wants to chat with Baozhai. Alice speaks English, Baozhai
speaks Mandarin. They connect and chat (in their own language). Each
capability here, identity, presence, and translation is provided by service
providers. Alice and Baozhai have paid for these services.

~~~
ex3ndr
And why it should be done in decentralized way?

------
Qantourisc
If it's user@domain, the same answer as your email provider ? If it's P2P,
basically: everyone by disk space and bandwidth.

We might need to invent an easy and secure way to pay first though :)

Edit: and a comment here gave me another idea: offline syscs to friends when
your PC is online (or syncs from friends)

------
cJ0th
This is an important question. Maybe universities could play a key role as far
as hosting is concerned. Anyhow, imo this question is not the most pressing
one. If there is a will, there is a way. However, there is no will! The
average person is totally okay with storing their correspondence on fb or
google servers.

Some energy should be spend on making people want a decentralized web. Better
privacy might be nice but even Snowden's revelations couldn't change people's
mind. So besides privacy, what additional value would a decentralized web
bring to the average person?

------
bobajeff
Ultimately, the web is centralized because the architecture of the internet
(which it's built on) is created that way.

In essence users aren't part of the network the way servers are they are
simply clients connected through a ISP. That's because routing is a difficult
thing to do well without a planned structure.

It's hard enough to route between normal home wireless routers. Could you
imagine the complexity involved in routing between wireless devices like
Smartphones that physically move around, turn off all the time?

~~~
wyager
> centralized because the architecture of the internet (which it's built on)
> is created that way.

What are you referring to? In a hardware sense, the Internet is decentralized
to a large degree. I think you mean that it's Federated, as there is a large
degree of coordination within ISPs, but a fairly small degree of coordination
(outside of a number of peering stations) across ISPs.

Routing is difficult, but it's not as if there is some central authority
managing all routing on the Internet. There are multiple redundant pathways
for any given connection, and ISPs manage these things themselves using
protocols like BGP.

I wouldn't say the physical architecture of the Internet is _de_ centralized,
but it's certainly not centralized.

------
delinka
It'll have to be dedicated devices owned by ISP customers. It'll need to be
software in their routers.

Better yet, (and I realize there are a couple logical leaps here) these
devices will progress The Internet into a mesh amongst neighbors and
neighborhoods. And that's when the Decentralized Web will be realized: when a
decentralized, resilient, adaptive Internet is available to host it on and
that Internet isn't controlled by profiteering gluttons.

------
DyslexicAtheist
there is lots of buzz around this not just to come up with the next use-case
for a unicorn but also to provide break out of the costs associated with
securing and maintaining the infrastructure.

server less computing would in applications where this makes sense reduce the
latency down to what is dictated by the last mile. on the other hand there is
a huge push towards going mobile in many industries (thanks to LTE, LTE-A),
but these wireless protocols do horribly poor routing P2P traffic. (this is a
problem that operators are just about getting to grips with in their fixed
networks).

When it comes to use-cases I think we have some realistic opportunities if an
industry is big or desperate enough to also buy data from individuals (rather
than a broker). I ran recruitment firm the last few years and a recruiter
would always do anything to get their hands on a larger pool of data. If you
give them a tiny new cloud service to search for "niche skill candidates" they
will pay for it provided they can add additional people to their database. And
a distressed candidates would sure rather sell their data directly to the
company (earning a few cents along the way) rather than paying linkedin to
host their profile and suck up all data.

the bigger challenge (than creating a p2p network) is how to structure
services on top, the article mentions btc miners as the profit model for
bitcoin. it is for me perfectly logical to have a company with a centralized
service/buisness model that builds data applications on top of the
decentralized p2p paradigm (most trackers are not really decentralized and the
total decentralized bootstrapping of the p2p network itself is also a problem
which isn't totally solved afaik).

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mark_l_watson
I was at the Decentralized Web Conference. We pay our local ISPs for Internet
access, so the user side is taken care of. I donate little bits of bitcoin to
my Gnu Social host. I pay to host my own content because I like to share and
it helps both my consulting and writing businesses. This all works well.

What doesn't work well right now is supporting development for replacements of
services like Google Now, Facebook, etc.

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matchagaucho
I love the principle behind the decentralized web movement, but perhaps we
should start by chipping away at walled gardens and making data more portable?

Very popular nodes on distributed systems are essentially just another form of
centralization. But portability of data creates a free market, low switching
costs, and a more consumer-centric focus on retention.

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milansuk
Many of comments here are about storage but I hope that some solution will
also care about content. As we see on popularity of AdBlockers and need for
privacy, I hope Decentralized webs will have better business model than
advertising.

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EGreg
Skype by authors of Kazaa was decentralized, until M$ bought it.

Groove by the author of Lotus Notes was the same, until M$ bought it.

Don't you see a pattern here? In the real world, you can start a micronation,
but it will need the protection of a centralized state pretty soon. Thats why
libertopias don't exist anywhere on the Earth, after all this time.

However, online, a lot has already been decentralized. Email is decentralized.
The web is decentralized. In practice, we just need to make better, more user
friendly servers. Why host your video on YouTube where it can be taken down?

The decentralized web has simple economics: EACH COMMUNITY PAYS FOR ITS OWN
HOSTING. They can also have arrangements to have (encrypted, redundant) backup
mirror hosting for each other.

What people get wrong is that the natural unit for the decentralized web is an
ORGANIZATION and not an individual. Domains correspond to organizations.

~~~
wyager
We're Skype and Groove open source? If they were, it shouldn't matter who buys
their maintainer.

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_nedR
I am not too familiar with it, but gridcoin
([http://gridcoin.us](http://gridcoin.us)) apparently verifies and rewards
people donate computation power to BOINC.

~~~
mehh
There website throws a lot of jargon at me but fails (at least I couldn't find
it) to tell me how I would run an application on the decentralised compute :(

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kordless
I'd suggest we start thinking about a new type of business which is funded for
performance instead of profitability. Like a utility, the Intercloud is a
shared resource that needs to justify it's existence in connecting and
processing data in our reality. Traditional business models corrupt this end
goal to serve all of us equally and without exploitation.

One possible solution is the creation of a new type of corporate
infrastructure entity that is disconnected from our current financial models.
It should prevent outside investment or intent to create profit to keep those
models from infecting it.

Also, I would point out that infrastructure can be centralized, decentralized
and distributed. Whatever we end up with will likely be a combination of all
three.

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eveningcoffee
Isn't it a stupid question? We all pay for this. Like we pay today. Every
dollar that is accounted for advertising is included in the price of the
products.

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jamez1
Your ISP should pay for it

