Why do we need decentralization of the Internet and why is it inevitable
Over the past year, and especially after the scandal with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, articles on violation of data privacy by IT companies began to appear actively in Europe and the USA. Especially from Google and Facebook. Most of these stories are presented as “a blatant act of unfair use of users' personal data for political manipulation and for advertising purposes”. For some, this was already obvious, but for many ordinary users - this fact was a kind of surprise and a hot topic for discussion.
For some reason, some people forgot or maybe didn’t even know that Facebook and Google are more likely advertising companies, and it is the huge and stable advertising income that allows them to calmly engage in some kind of innovation. For some reason, the fact that they (users) are more likely a product of the company, rather than any services specially created for them, has also become something incredible.
And what happened when this veil before my eyes slept? Yes, basically nothing. Of course, some kind of awareness appeared, but still everyone continued to use Facebook and Google. And the reason is that to refuse such services is difficult enough if you just want to use the Internet.
All this has led to the fact that the so-called digital detox has recently become fashionable - a temporary rejection of the services of large IT companies. Stories and articles began to appear about how people completely abandoned Google services and which substitute services they used. Guides on how to download and see all the information that Google and Facebook knows about you have come up. They appear even now . Even the most real studies are conducted that prove that giving up Facebook for a month will make you happier, more productive, more self-confident,increase your potency and other joys.
But, like many fashionable things, all this will be forgotten over time, because it is somehow half-hearted. This is unlikely to solve the problem of data privacy in general, but after downloading or deleting their data, it will seem to many individuals that they have bent the system, become independent and confident in their security. In fact, we are still far from independence.
One of these stories, which are no longer so half-hearted, leads to much more serious thoughts than data privacy - the centralization of the Internet. This was the story of the journalist Gizmodo, who within six weeks decided to refuse the services of only five companies - Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. And for her it was a real hell .
In the article, she talks about how many of the usual online activities have begun to cause her enormous difficulties. She could not use Skype to conduct an interview, because this is a Microsoft product. I had to record the conversation on the recorder, but then a new problem appeared - file transfer. Google Drive is not an option, Dropbox also, because its host is Amazon Web Services, a daughter of Amazon. Anyway, many serious services are deploying their capabilities on three major cloud platforms - Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. In turn, small services did not want to transfer files over 50 MB.
She was helped only by a friend-developer who has his own service for transferring files through a darknet. But she couldn’t just use his service, because AWS also hosts him. As a result, she downloaded the program directly from a friend's server using the command line on her Linux computer. I created a temporary site using the downloaded program, uploaded an audio file and dropped the URL to the right person. After the person downloaded, she stopped the distribution of the file, as a result of which the file and the site were removed from the network.
In terms of entertainment, too, everything is not very fun. She couldn't use YouTube, Apple Music, Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu because they work thanks to AWS and Google Cloud. In the end, she only listened to the radio and read books.
In many cases, she either completely refused certain applications, for example, such as Venmo, because she could not find an adequate replacement for them, or changed one monopolist to another. Instead of searching, Google started using Ask.com, which also owns Tinder and Vimeo. It turned out some kind of flea.
In turn, many of her loved ones continued to write messages to her in messengers and on Gmail even after she informed her whole community about the experiment. They wrote by habit and purely by inertia, and then they were still indignant at why she did not answer their messages.
A strong digital detox was not part of her plans and she did not think that refusing the services of only five companies would mean for her refusing almost all the usual technologies. Some high-tech critics claim that you can opt out of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple and enjoy the network. In fact, this is very problematic for the average person, because everything comes down to cloud storage, which belongs to a handful of companies.
“These companies control the Internet infrastructure, information flows and online commerce. It all started with the sale of books, a search engine and a network for classmates to communicate, and now these corporations are intermediaries for almost any online interaction, ”says Gizmodo journalist.
At first, the Internet was something incredible, a magical idea with unimaginable possibilities. When he was just a small child, his development was centralized and he took his first steps thanks to a small number of enthusiasts who believed that something magnificent and decentralized could come out of him.
At first, he was an inconspicuous and strange cramp, but then became the most popular guy at school. Everyone adored him and everyone prophesied a great future for him in a few years. During this time, he gained a large number of friends of various scum and became more decentralized. Some tried to travel at his expense and enjoyed his popularity, while others believed that they really help him reach a new level. But the Internet was still too young to justify all the expectations that the environment had set upon him. And then they started laughing at him and declaring the exact opposite, and many former friends disappeared as if they had never been. Typical teenagers.
In the end, he had to become a serious business youth to show that he was really worth something. And with the help of some friends who have remained with him since school times - he became a businessman, and his business was observation. Parents could not recognize him - this is not an amorphous decentralized system that they dreamed of, but something completely different and centralized.
A curtain.
Now Google sees about 40% of all Internet traffic every day. Amazon, which used to be engaged only in online commerce and information storage, is gradually entering the advertising market. Due to its influence, it will further expand the ability to monitor user habits.
On the other hand, we have the Chinese Golden Shield project and black boxeswith large ISPs in the USA who vacuum the data. They are narrow centralized channels through which every bit in the network passes.
We are used to the fact that most of the usual services on the Internet are free, but this is not so. There is always some price and this is our data. Information is the new gold that we ourselves have gladly brought.
And all this information collected, not only ours, but also the capacities of other companies, is still stored centrally. You could even say too centrally. We think that all of this is similar to Fort Knox, but in fact, security is much more prosaic.
As you can see from the history of the journalist, she greatly limited herself, because most of the capacities of modern Internet empires are stored on the clouds AWS, GC and MA. Yes, the word "cloud" may sound like something high-tech, but, in fact, it’s just someone else’s server. And this is precisely where the critical factor of centralization lies, that’s why.
When everything works well, centralization does not seem bad to us, it is convenient for us. It’s convenient for us to store all the information about ourselves on Google Drive, all our photos, our portfolio, articles, tables; Sign up through Google and Facebook asking the browser to remember passwords and store our history. And the more we immerse ourselves in this ecosystem, the more difficult it is for us to get out of there, because we shift the responsibility for all this information onto others' shoulders. This is no longer our concern.
When all is well, it seems to us that this will continue forever. As a result, we begin to shut ourselves off from thoughts of the bad and they turn into ghostly delirium. But when a crisis does happen and something bad happens, we don’t want all our information to be in one place and just disappear like a house after a fire.
For some reason, as an example, the story with passbooks after the collapse of the USSR immediately comes to mind, but everything is not so bad. All the same, in our situation there is some kind of no choice, albeit minimal. Therefore, the story with investment banks during the crisis of 2008-2009 is best suited.
I will not go into the details of the crisis, what are subprime loans, how did it happen, who is to blame, and so on. Here the fact of centralization is interesting. In 2007, Bear Stearns assets amounted to about $ 395 billion - at that time, this was equivalent to PPP Swiss GDP. In 2008, Lehman Brothers controlled $ 680 billion of customer assets - that's like Pakistan's PPP. It would seem that all these companies are “too big to fail”, but still they went bankrupt.
Particularly noteworthy is the example of Lehman Brothers, from whose bankruptcy the crisis went into an acute phase. The reason for this was the fact that this investment bank was the largest in the market of credit default swaps. Having lost all their insurance on investments, investors began to massively go to the dollar.
Now let's look at AWS and its largest cloud storage. What will happen to all these companies that deploy their capacities on Amazon servers if something bad happens? Where should they go when AWS is followed by Google Drive and Microsoft Azure? Everything is so interconnected that having lost one major player, we lose almost the entire foundation on which the industry stands. These servers contain information that you can’t download in one day and can’t drop it on a USB flash drive. If something like this happens, then it will be much more fun than the 2008-2009 crisis.
As history shows, no one and nothing is “too big to fail”. Neither Lehman Brothers, nor Google, nor Amazon, nor Microsoft. Empires will fall sooner or later and new ones will come in their place. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch resold for nothing.
Yes, among the three, Merrill Lynch looks livelier than all the living. It was bought out by Bank of America and now Merrill Lynch operates with assets of $ 2.2 trillion - this is even more than what it controlled before the crisis. Who will buy the business of Google or Microsoft in case of problems? Apple? Or any other, new company? One way or another, this still does not negate the issue of centralization and the possibility of the appearance of the same problem after some time. The actor is new, but the scenery is still the same.
I think very few people guess when the cycle will repeat and we will see a new IT market. It is also difficult to predict where the feet of the new crisis will grow from. If the dot-com bubble was a crisis of hopes and expectations, then a new crisis could become a victim of high conceit and careless behavior. Perhaps this will be a crisis of venture capital of IT companies, a major hacker attack or a new revolutionary technology. No one knows. As in 2008, few could have imagined that because of “one of the most reliable and confident markets” (the real estate market), almost the entire house of cards sprinkled.
Now the Internet has matured, has become a stately and serious system, but it seems that in recent years it is getting closer to the midlife crisis. He is again interested in decentralization, as in childhood. He is so used to his "friends" that they have already begun to bother him. I want fun, something new and unusual. It can even be fussed with this beautiful, young and interesting technology - blockchain. She often reminds him of herself in his youth.
Everything is back to square one. Perhaps this young individual will turn his head and completely change his attitude to life. Life will sparkle with new colors, he will meet new friends, reconsider his relationship with old ones and finally become more decentralized, as those who supported him at the very beginning wanted. Perhaps this will be a small affair, or just a look in her direction, which will change little in his life.
It is not known whether blockchain will play a significant role in the life of the Internet, but this technology is so far the main contender for the heart of our old man for moving towards decentralization. Although, it is possible that I'm wrong.
The Internet is growing stronger enthusiasm and thoughts about decentralization, and it is not known how quickly this fire in his soul goes out. We do not know whether this step will be justified in the future, but we can only say with confidence that excessive centralization has never led to anything good.
For some reason, some people forgot or maybe didn’t even know that Facebook and Google are more likely advertising companies, and it is the huge and stable advertising income that allows them to calmly engage in some kind of innovation. For some reason, the fact that they (users) are more likely a product of the company, rather than any services specially created for them, has also become something incredible.
And what happened when this veil before my eyes slept? Yes, basically nothing. Of course, some kind of awareness appeared, but still everyone continued to use Facebook and Google. And the reason is that to refuse such services is difficult enough if you just want to use the Internet.
All this has led to the fact that the so-called digital detox has recently become fashionable - a temporary rejection of the services of large IT companies. Stories and articles began to appear about how people completely abandoned Google services and which substitute services they used. Guides on how to download and see all the information that Google and Facebook knows about you have come up. They appear even now . Even the most real studies are conducted that prove that giving up Facebook for a month will make you happier, more productive, more self-confident,
But, like many fashionable things, all this will be forgotten over time, because it is somehow half-hearted. This is unlikely to solve the problem of data privacy in general, but after downloading or deleting their data, it will seem to many individuals that they have bent the system, become independent and confident in their security. In fact, we are still far from independence.
One of these stories, which are no longer so half-hearted, leads to much more serious thoughts than data privacy - the centralization of the Internet. This was the story of the journalist Gizmodo, who within six weeks decided to refuse the services of only five companies - Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. And for her it was a real hell .
Why it is hard to be a digital vegetarian
In the article, she talks about how many of the usual online activities have begun to cause her enormous difficulties. She could not use Skype to conduct an interview, because this is a Microsoft product. I had to record the conversation on the recorder, but then a new problem appeared - file transfer. Google Drive is not an option, Dropbox also, because its host is Amazon Web Services, a daughter of Amazon. Anyway, many serious services are deploying their capabilities on three major cloud platforms - Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. In turn, small services did not want to transfer files over 50 MB.
She was helped only by a friend-developer who has his own service for transferring files through a darknet. But she couldn’t just use his service, because AWS also hosts him. As a result, she downloaded the program directly from a friend's server using the command line on her Linux computer. I created a temporary site using the downloaded program, uploaded an audio file and dropped the URL to the right person. After the person downloaded, she stopped the distribution of the file, as a result of which the file and the site were removed from the network.
In terms of entertainment, too, everything is not very fun. She couldn't use YouTube, Apple Music, Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu because they work thanks to AWS and Google Cloud. In the end, she only listened to the radio and read books.
In many cases, she either completely refused certain applications, for example, such as Venmo, because she could not find an adequate replacement for them, or changed one monopolist to another. Instead of searching, Google started using Ask.com, which also owns Tinder and Vimeo. It turned out some kind of flea.
In turn, many of her loved ones continued to write messages to her in messengers and on Gmail even after she informed her whole community about the experiment. They wrote by habit and purely by inertia, and then they were still indignant at why she did not answer their messages.
A strong digital detox was not part of her plans and she did not think that refusing the services of only five companies would mean for her refusing almost all the usual technologies. Some high-tech critics claim that you can opt out of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple and enjoy the network. In fact, this is very problematic for the average person, because everything comes down to cloud storage, which belongs to a handful of companies.
“These companies control the Internet infrastructure, information flows and online commerce. It all started with the sale of books, a search engine and a network for classmates to communicate, and now these corporations are intermediaries for almost any online interaction, ”says Gizmodo journalist.
Surveillance is the business model of the Internet
At first, the Internet was something incredible, a magical idea with unimaginable possibilities. When he was just a small child, his development was centralized and he took his first steps thanks to a small number of enthusiasts who believed that something magnificent and decentralized could come out of him.
At first, he was an inconspicuous and strange cramp, but then became the most popular guy at school. Everyone adored him and everyone prophesied a great future for him in a few years. During this time, he gained a large number of friends of various scum and became more decentralized. Some tried to travel at his expense and enjoyed his popularity, while others believed that they really help him reach a new level. But the Internet was still too young to justify all the expectations that the environment had set upon him. And then they started laughing at him and declaring the exact opposite, and many former friends disappeared as if they had never been. Typical teenagers.
In the end, he had to become a serious business youth to show that he was really worth something. And with the help of some friends who have remained with him since school times - he became a businessman, and his business was observation. Parents could not recognize him - this is not an amorphous decentralized system that they dreamed of, but something completely different and centralized.
A curtain.
Now Google sees about 40% of all Internet traffic every day. Amazon, which used to be engaged only in online commerce and information storage, is gradually entering the advertising market. Due to its influence, it will further expand the ability to monitor user habits.
On the other hand, we have the Chinese Golden Shield project and black boxeswith large ISPs in the USA who vacuum the data. They are narrow centralized channels through which every bit in the network passes.
We are used to the fact that most of the usual services on the Internet are free, but this is not so. There is always some price and this is our data. Information is the new gold that we ourselves have gladly brought.
And all this information collected, not only ours, but also the capacities of other companies, is still stored centrally. You could even say too centrally. We think that all of this is similar to Fort Knox, but in fact, security is much more prosaic.
As you can see from the history of the journalist, she greatly limited herself, because most of the capacities of modern Internet empires are stored on the clouds AWS, GC and MA. Yes, the word "cloud" may sound like something high-tech, but, in fact, it’s just someone else’s server. And this is precisely where the critical factor of centralization lies, that’s why.
New Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch
When everything works well, centralization does not seem bad to us, it is convenient for us. It’s convenient for us to store all the information about ourselves on Google Drive, all our photos, our portfolio, articles, tables; Sign up through Google and Facebook asking the browser to remember passwords and store our history. And the more we immerse ourselves in this ecosystem, the more difficult it is for us to get out of there, because we shift the responsibility for all this information onto others' shoulders. This is no longer our concern.
When all is well, it seems to us that this will continue forever. As a result, we begin to shut ourselves off from thoughts of the bad and they turn into ghostly delirium. But when a crisis does happen and something bad happens, we don’t want all our information to be in one place and just disappear like a house after a fire.
For some reason, as an example, the story with passbooks after the collapse of the USSR immediately comes to mind, but everything is not so bad. All the same, in our situation there is some kind of no choice, albeit minimal. Therefore, the story with investment banks during the crisis of 2008-2009 is best suited.
I will not go into the details of the crisis, what are subprime loans, how did it happen, who is to blame, and so on. Here the fact of centralization is interesting. In 2007, Bear Stearns assets amounted to about $ 395 billion - at that time, this was equivalent to PPP Swiss GDP. In 2008, Lehman Brothers controlled $ 680 billion of customer assets - that's like Pakistan's PPP. It would seem that all these companies are “too big to fail”, but still they went bankrupt.
Particularly noteworthy is the example of Lehman Brothers, from whose bankruptcy the crisis went into an acute phase. The reason for this was the fact that this investment bank was the largest in the market of credit default swaps. Having lost all their insurance on investments, investors began to massively go to the dollar.
Now let's look at AWS and its largest cloud storage. What will happen to all these companies that deploy their capacities on Amazon servers if something bad happens? Where should they go when AWS is followed by Google Drive and Microsoft Azure? Everything is so interconnected that having lost one major player, we lose almost the entire foundation on which the industry stands. These servers contain information that you can’t download in one day and can’t drop it on a USB flash drive. If something like this happens, then it will be much more fun than the 2008-2009 crisis.
As history shows, no one and nothing is “too big to fail”. Neither Lehman Brothers, nor Google, nor Amazon, nor Microsoft. Empires will fall sooner or later and new ones will come in their place. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch resold for nothing.
Yes, among the three, Merrill Lynch looks livelier than all the living. It was bought out by Bank of America and now Merrill Lynch operates with assets of $ 2.2 trillion - this is even more than what it controlled before the crisis. Who will buy the business of Google or Microsoft in case of problems? Apple? Or any other, new company? One way or another, this still does not negate the issue of centralization and the possibility of the appearance of the same problem after some time. The actor is new, but the scenery is still the same.
I think very few people guess when the cycle will repeat and we will see a new IT market. It is also difficult to predict where the feet of the new crisis will grow from. If the dot-com bubble was a crisis of hopes and expectations, then a new crisis could become a victim of high conceit and careless behavior. Perhaps this will be a crisis of venture capital of IT companies, a major hacker attack or a new revolutionary technology. No one knows. As in 2008, few could have imagined that because of “one of the most reliable and confident markets” (the real estate market), almost the entire house of cards sprinkled.
Back to basics
Now the Internet has matured, has become a stately and serious system, but it seems that in recent years it is getting closer to the midlife crisis. He is again interested in decentralization, as in childhood. He is so used to his "friends" that they have already begun to bother him. I want fun, something new and unusual. It can even be fussed with this beautiful, young and interesting technology - blockchain. She often reminds him of herself in his youth.
Everything is back to square one. Perhaps this young individual will turn his head and completely change his attitude to life. Life will sparkle with new colors, he will meet new friends, reconsider his relationship with old ones and finally become more decentralized, as those who supported him at the very beginning wanted. Perhaps this will be a small affair, or just a look in her direction, which will change little in his life.
It is not known whether blockchain will play a significant role in the life of the Internet, but this technology is so far the main contender for the heart of our old man for moving towards decentralization. Although, it is possible that I'm wrong.
The Internet is growing stronger enthusiasm and thoughts about decentralization, and it is not known how quickly this fire in his soul goes out. We do not know whether this step will be justified in the future, but we can only say with confidence that excessive centralization has never led to anything good.