Tiring of the tech titans

The push is on to create a new internet – one for the users, not corporate monopolies.

Master of his Facebook universe, Mark Zuckerberg argues Big Tech has ‘decentralised power’. Many users would beg to disagree. Picture: AFP

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a speech at Georgetown University in the US this month that his social media megacorp and its Big Tech peers “have decentralised power by putting it directly into people’s hands”.

That sounds comforting and egalitarian, but a lot of people worry these days that they’ve actual­ly centralised power — around themselves. This has become­ ever more obvious since Russian agents used Facebook in an ­attempt to manipulate the US public in the 2016 presidential election. It’s clearer every time somebody searches or posts about dogs, only to find their feeds in­undated with dog food ads.

Capitalising on the oceans of data produced by the web has turned Facebook and Alphabet’s Google into empires, but it hasn’t made the internet a more open place, says Christian Fuchs, a media professor at the University of Westminster in London.

“The internet is a corporate monopoly today,” he says, “and monopolies are always a danger to democracy.”

Web’s original promise

While US politicians try to combat the concerns by talking about antitrust and regulation, a cottage ­industry of true decentralisers is emerging in the computer space. They want to recapture the original promise of the web, to create a platform where information isn’t siloed by private companies or monitored by police states.

It’s a stiff challenge. The apps and websites that run on top of the internet — Facebook’s, Amazon’s, etcetera — are managed from centrally­ controlled servers. To run ­efficiently, those programs and servers capture and manage all of the data that is created. When you write something on Facebook you are writing from your device, but the data is captured­ on Facebook’s servers.

To be clear, no website or compan­y controls the internet. And people using the internet spread their personal information across strings of different sites and servers. But still, the key for most web companies is controlling as much data as possible.

“The key is centralisation of ­information,” says David Chaum, a computer scientist who built the first working digital currency in the 1990s and today is building a new internet platform called Elixxir.

“You don’t have to control things to exert power in the inform­ation space. Just knowing a lot about everybody lets you manipula­te the whole situation.”

Berners-Lee’s solution

Platforms such as Elixxir are using the somewhat heady idea of linking everyone’s computers together to share data and, in some cases, even processing power. Websites and apps might look the same — and still be connected to the internet that we know — but companies wouldn’t be able to amass data, and they might not even need to build massive cloud-server centres just to run their sites.

One proponent of this ­approach is the creator of the world wide web himself, Tim ­Berners-Lee. Thirty years after he launched it, the “perverse incent­ives” and unintended consequences of the original design have people wondering “if the web is ­really a force for good”, he wrote in a letter this year.

He is trying to improve his creation­ on several fronts. The non-profit World Wide Web Foundation he leads launched a “contract for the web” movement, a sort of bill of rights for the online world. Privately, he co-founded Inrupt, a company developing a protocol called Solid.

Ending data monopolies

Solid’s core concept is the POD, for “personal online data”, which the company compares to a ­secure, though virtual, USB stick. All of your personal data is stored there, along with data verifying your identity.

For example, if you were sharing photos through a social media site, the photos could be viewed on the site, but the photos wouldn’t be stored on the site’s servers, they’d remain in the POD. The user, not a company, would have control over all his or her data.

“We want to introduce a mid-course correction to the web,” says John Bruce, co-founder of Inrupt, “one that moves it away from a centralised web to a decentralised web. We like the term ‘me-centralised’.”

This approach might also ­remove the incentive to build massive cloud data-storage facilit­ies that help monopolists maintain a grip. Muneeb Ali, a Princeton-educated engineer, co-founded Blockstack, which ­approaches this using a distributed computing syste­m known as blockchain. Rather than each company maintaining its own servers, computing power is shared across the network­.

“People’s computers and phones are very powerful,” he says. “They can do most of the work.”

Blockstack would provide the overarching platform, a new ­version of the world wide web, but it would only exist as software on everybody’s devices. Developers would build on that network, and also contribute computing power to help maintain it. This shared model theoretically lowers the overall costs needed to run an app.

The computing costs for developers would be further reduced because of the way in which Blockstack’s platform handles user data. As with Solid, all the data created by users is stored on their own ­devices — what they read, what sites or apps they use, what they buy.

Ali says users could eventually monetise their own data. He envis­ions them joining co-operatives that negotiate with advertisers. If a burger chain wanted to promote something, it could offer to pay the users directly for access.

“That’s the biggest potential,” he says. “We cannot only enable users to be in control, but to really plug into the internet economy.”

Chaum’s Elixxir focuses on handling the “metadata”. When you write a text message, for instance­, a string of information is created — where you are, what internet service you’re using — and attached to the words you type.

In something of an irony, Elixxir takes all that data and centralises it in one giant blob. From there, though, it uses a system Chaum developed to slice that inform­ation up, separate the bits and ­encrypt them, then run them through myriad different nodes.

The message you write gets ­received intact on the other side, but all the data underneath it is ­impossible to reassemble.

“It’s all spread out in tiny pieces,” Chaum says, likening it to a shredder. “It’s completely useless.”

Spreading data

This would blunt the data-collection efforts of big web companies, which underpin their business models. There’s also a theoretical security benefit: In a centralised web, hackers can get data on million­s of users by focusing on one target, such as a server site.

In a decentralised web, they ­potentially would have to go from user to user individually.

This in itself might pose a regul­atory challenge, however, since it would enable anonymous interact­ions online.

Law enforcement’s job is easier when dealing with companies and centralised data, not individuals. For example, the US, Britain and Australia jointly asked Facebook to delay adding encryption to its messaging services.

That’s just one more hurdle for the new internetters, who are ­playing David to the entrenched Goliaths. The task of building a completely new community of users is hard.

Weaning them off existing network­s could be even harder, not least of all because the companie­s that have centralised computing power and data stores won’t give them up without a fight. Also, there’s no guarantee some Goliath won’t find a way to monopolis­e these new networks.

“We need a web of the people, not a web of the corporations,” says Fuchs.

While he worries about the curren­t web, he is optimistic about the odds of improving it: “There’s now more public awareness, and that’s the foundation of changing things.”

The Wall Street Journal