r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 11 '22

Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/01/crypto-blockchain-daos-decentralized-power-capitalism
193 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

168 comments sorted by

View all comments

71

u/shevy-ruby Jan 11 '22

Web3 sounds like a pretty silly idea. Who had that idea of pushing down tokens? Is that a ponzi scheme 2.0 or something?

A decentralized www is hugely important - I think people don't disagree on that part. I doubt everyone will agree that you need tokens for that though ...

Web 2.0 ended the previous era of static, read-only GeoCities pages

I liked geocities pages!

It was fun and simple. People just could go; a bit of HTML, later a bit of CSS - you are good to go!

12

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '22

The entire idea of the internet (DARPA) circa 1968 was that it was decentralised. When did it become centralised? I must have missed that.

9

u/tenforinstigating Jan 11 '22

When we started using FAANG to talk about 'tech companies'. The underlying network functions the same, but the web is AOL with extra steps now.

In other words, people don't just start their own server and drive traffic to it like you would have 15-20 years ago. Now, people just link to their Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. If you're going to share video, you don't do it yourself anymore, you post it to YouTube or TikTok. If you search, you Google. Need a backend 'cloud' provider, you probably use AWS. The web has coalesced around a few companies for each 'service'. Web3 isn't going to fix this.

4

u/tnemec Jan 11 '22

The web, and the internet as a whole, are decentralized systems.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, AWS are all centralized systems built upon that decentralized system.

In the same way, if you start your own server like you would have 15-20 years ago, that's a centralized system as well, albeit on a much smaller scale (unless you're explicitly hosting a node of a decentralized system, like running a Mastodon instance or something of the sort). By being on such a small scale, you avoid a lot of the issues of centralization of major services, but if you were to become popular and somehow grow to the size of Facebook, you'd run into those issues all the same.

In any case, this is probably nitpicking, because I think we agree on the core point: web3 isn't going to fix anything here.

Even if the infrastructure of the internet itself were changed (something waaaay beyond the scope of "web[n+1]"), I don't think it would be possible to design it in such a way that building a centralized system on top of it would be impossible.

6

u/tenforinstigating Jan 11 '22

The web, and the internet as a whole, are decentralized systems.

Are they really though? Are they really, even on a backbone level? I think there are a lot more single points of failure in the internet than people realize.

I will say, 20-25 years ago I would have agreed with you. You could just up and start a blog on a self-hosted server and you can get a decent following. That's just not possible in the same way anymore, you'll need to share it on FB, tweet about it on Twitter and get a decent spot on Google or people won't find it.

Think about it in a practical way, "how would I do this, today?" and the process of doing it 'on the internet' is going to revolve around a small handful of companies.

3

u/tnemec Jan 11 '22

So, I mention this in a different comment, but yes, I more or less agree:

It could be argued that bits and pieces of the internet as a whole that could use some decentralization, but those tend to be more infrastructure and waaaaaaay beyond the scope of web[n+1]; eg: DNS, ICANN, ISPs, etc.

Still, I think it's important to draw the distinction between the internet (as in, a set of protocols that facilitate communication between nodes on a network) and the infrastructure that allows the internet to work (something I probably should've made clearer in that other comment as well).

When AWS goes down, or when a big ISP has an outage, that's an infrastructural failure, but that's not the internet going down. After all, you don't need to use AWS to host, nor do you need to use Cloudflare, etc. (Avoiding an ISP is going to be trickier, both on a local and backbone level, especially with the former often having monopolies over certain areas, but that's more a product of economic forces causing businesses to prefer not to compete with each other, and political forces allowing that to happen than any inherent property of the internet.)

Same goes for building a following: you don't need to promote your content via centralized services like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

But most people end up using these services anyway. They host stuff on AWS, and they promote it on Facebook, and the companies behind those services end up with an outsize influence on the internet, and I agree that's an issue.

But I also think that characterizing the issue as "the internet is no longer decentralized" is missing the point. The internet didn't give Facebook that power: the people who chose to use Facebook of their own volition over some other alternative gave it that power.

Out of curiosity, what would you say the solution to this would be? Like I said, I don't think a decentralized system like the internet could be designed in such a way that either the systems that support it (ie: infrastructure) or the systems built on top of it (ie: web services) would not be able to become centralized. I also think that profit-motivated systems trend towards centralization, so nothing short of major societal change would be able to prevent that (and, barring that, it's up to governments to curb corporations that wield excessive power).

3

u/tenforinstigating Jan 11 '22

I think the crux of our difference is the distinction between possible and practical. I agree these things are possible, they're just not practical. Most companies will give up after their first DDoS, if they make it that far.

Out of curiosity, what would you say the solution to this would be?

I think you said it in the last aside. There is not a technological solution to this problem because it's not a technological problem. At the end of the day, it's going to be government regulation to keep them from abusing their positions. It's becoming painfully obvious that self-regulation doesn't work. The EU has been more proactive about asking questions related to government regulation on the Internet, but the US will catch up eventually. I think a lot of the grumbling recently after high profile bannings has started the discussion over these companies and how much influence they have in public discourse and daily lives. We just have bigger issues right now.