For the World Wide Web to remain a universal space accessible to all, control can never be centralized; at least, this was Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web when he gifted it to humankind in 1989. Today, we’ve appointed a handful of companies as stewards over the majority of the web’s activity — Google for web searches, Facebook for social networking and personal communications, and Amazon for purchases. Our depdenc en on their collective services, collectively relinquishing privacy for convenience; vendor lock-in made real. Competing against such deeply entrenched giants with the ability to systematically profile millions—or in Facebook’s case, billions—of people is futile. This has inspired two compelling efforts to rewrite Internet architecture and de-centralize the web.
Straight from Berners-Lee himself, the first project seeks to radically alter the way Web applications function by decoupling data from the application. Solid, short for “socially linked data,” empowers users to carry their data with them and seamlessly switch between apps and personal data storage servers without ever losing any information or social connections. The idea is that data is contained within independent “pods” or personal online data stores and that the users authenticate which apps have permission to access and use it.
In practice, users may spread their personal information across multiple pods, so that social media-related pictures, posts, and friend listings reside within one; while banking information, biometrics, and geotags fit into others. This way, when a new application comes around, switching over is as easy as granting it access to the respective pods. Data would belong to the user, preventing vendor lock-in.
Solid embraces the principle of Linked Data, a structured method of expressing data—also designed by Berners-Lee—that makes it possible to interlink separate repositories like HTTP, RDF, and URIs, leading a significantly smarter Web. For example, you may decide to grant a tourism site access to the pods containing information about your demographics and prior travels. The site could then combine your data with everyone else’s to perform a smart analysis that deduces where people are traveling and whether that’s having an impact on local economies, carbon emissions, or local attitudes toward tourists. The best part is that Solid would theoretically do this without having to centralize the information in the hands on that particular tourist site.
The InterPlantary File System’s (IPFS) approach emerges from a different school of thought: even having web pages identified by a pointer to the server that stores them is excessive centralization. Instead, why not distribute portions of data across multiple servers and let them simultaneously supply parts of the page in sync, so that if one server goes down, it shan’t take the entire web page with it. In that sense, the peer-to-peer distribution protocol is very similar to how BitTorrent works. IPFS may installed through Chrome and Firefox browser extensions, though it requires wide-scale dissemination to full function
Will Solid and IPFS succeed at decentralizing the Web? The answer to that question ultimately depends on whether the user cares enough to willing put up with what might feel like a temporary downscaling of features, to achieve a greater good. More importantly, devising a new business model that incentives companies to trade off owning data, for temporarily using it; that’s just put it lightly.
Source: Digital Trends
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