Internet’s future is decentralized: World Wide Web founder

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You open your browser, and as a 21st-century netizen, your natural first impulse is to click on Facebook or something like it—some platform to which you first signed up to keep in touch with your friends and family or maybe even make new ones.

But where you once saw a scrolling feed of invitations to cousins’ birthday parties, photographs from your aunt’s recent trip to Majorca, and humorous personal status updates from your best friends, what you now see is an unrecognizable horror show.

Angry people you’ve never met appear on your feed to rant about topics you’ve never heard of. Smug political memes badger you to sneer at one cause or champion another, even though you’re pretty sure you’ve never let any of your political leanings slip on Facebook. A video of a sloven talking head tells you that the movie you just saw at the cinema is one of the worst things Hollywood has ever done and may signal the end of Western civilization. Underneath it all is a comment section that looks more like a botched colonoscopy than a discussion between real people.

You think maybe it’s time to look for an alternative platform or even detach from social media entirely, but quickly realize there’s a problem. You’ve spent years, if not decades, populating Facebook with your musings, photos, videos, and cherished conversations with friends—even your friend’s list is an essential vein of personal information that would be lost forever should you decide to close your account.

Despite all these things being products of your creation, which are only practically relevant to you, they will forever be gated behind the closed ecosystem of Facebook. Leaving Facebook or any other social media platform means leaving your data where it is while you abscond to another platform.

And speaking of alternative platforms, where are they? What happened to the carousel that shepherded you from Myspace to Bebo to Facebook?

The truth is, it’s gone for the same reason you’ll never delete Facebook: It has become too hard to entice people away from platforms they’ve invested years into. If Google‘s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) attempt at social media couldn’t lure people away from Facebook, what hope does any other would-be disruptor have?

In light of the grim reality set out below, it’s fair to wonder: Is this really how the Internet was supposed to be?

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW), certainly doesn’t think so. In an ornery editorial published in the Financial Times (FT), Berners-Lee said this: “People sometimes ask me how I think the World Wide Web is doing 35 years after its invention, and I have to admit, like them, to reservations. Reservations of two sorts: the dysfunctional nature of some aspects of it, but also wistfulness – the challenge of yet unrealized promise.”

Berners-Lee didn’t invent the Internet, but to the average user, he may as well have. The WWW is the system of interconnected webpages built atop the Internet’s infrastructure. In practical terms, it’s everything you see when you surf.

To him, today’s Internet is not how it used to be and certainly isn’t how he envisioned it. But, he says, it is the end result of years and years of what he calls ‘the natural application of markets and monopolies,’ something that has been to the detriment of us all.

But as Berners-Lee points out, it never had to be this way. Email doesn’t work that way, and it is infinitely better for it: Gmail users are not trapped in the Gmail ecosystem, only able to communicate with other Gmail addresses using special Gmail-approved software clients. Instead, all a person with an @gmail.com address can use Microsoft Outlook to email a @yahoo.com email address as though they were all part of the same ecosystem. In other words, email is interoperable.

And, as Berners-Lee argues, there’s no reason the entire Internet, including social media, can’t be like this. The personal data that serves as the raw material for platforms like Facebook could have been kept within the user’s control, with social media platforms merely pulling from a user-controlled repository of information to build whatever profile they want.

Berners-Lee’s FT article ultimately attempts to sell the reader on his own solution – a set of data standards and software solutions called ‘Solid’ that would see personal data stored online in ‘pods’ controlled by the user, who would determine which services can access the data and when. However, he’s somewhat late to the party, and such solutions—truly decentralized solutions—already exist.

In fact, Berners-Lee’s proposed solution describes the vision espoused by advocates of the BSV blockchain. For example: “Solid seeks to decentralize the web. The platform can be used to build new applications that request access to user data. This data is stored in such a way that users have complete control over it.”

“The power of these tools isn’t limited to social media. I co-founded Inrupt to build a data wallet on top of Solid that can store everything from your driving licence to photos to medical data.”

Such a vision is so attractive that it has already been implemented using a robust technology that was practically purpose-built for this very use case: The BSV blockchain. nChain’s Identity solution performs more or less as described by Berners-Lee; however, BSV has an immovable advantage over Berners-Lee’s Solid or any other attempt to decentralize the Internet: Scalability. The BSV blockchain’s central tenet is its ability to scale indefinitely. Unlike other blockchains, which artificially limit the amount of transactions that can be recorded in each new block, BSV has no such limit, meaning it can process as many transactions as are needed.

As the use of the network grows, transaction speeds and fees stay the same.

Crucially, this scalability is the only thing guaranteeing that the promised decentralization will never be compromised. Consider the workarounds required to make the BTC network function as adoption has grown. Faced with transaction speeds slowing to a crawl and fees ballooning to unmanageable levels, those in charge of BTC decided to deploy ‘layer 2’ solutions, essentially using centralized, private software to process transactions in batches and then uploading them to the blockchain all at once. This may help reduce the load on the network, but it comes at the cost of decentralization, which is supposedly the network’s selling point in the first place.

A system built to be scalable from the beginning is the only way to truly preserve decentralization. A project without a plan to work at scale has yet to prove itself as a decentralized system. Berners-Lee’s product, unfortunately, falls into the latter category; BSV falls into the former.

Not that any of this undermines Berners-Lee’s core message: That the Internet is broken and that the fix is out there as long as users are willing to demand it. The more mainstream voices that call attention to this simple fact, the better.

Watch: Bitcoin Retrospective and a Focus on the Future of the Internet with Mike Hearn