The first Decentralized Web Summit , a gathering of developers striving to make the web open, secure and free of censorship by distributing data, processing and hosting across millions of computers around the world, with no centralized control, was held in San Francisco on June 8 and 9.
The Summit was hosted by The Internet Archive, which issued “ a call for dreamers and builders … to spark collaboration and take concrete steps to create a better web.” The event was organized by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, and Tim Berners-Lee ‒ the “father of the web” ‒ himself, and attended by top movers and shakers in the computing world, including Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, and renowned author Cory Doctorow.
The New York Times notes that the first Decentralized Web summit marks the beginning of “a new phase for the web” based on next-generation decentralized systems inspired by the P2P technology that powers file-sharing networks, and the distributed ledger technology ‒ the blockchain ‒ that powers digital currencies such as Bitcoin.
“Edward Snowden showed we’ve inadvertently built the world’s largest surveillance network with the web,” said Kahle. “China can make it impossible for people there to read things, and just a few big service providers are the de facto organizers of your experience. We have the ability to change all that.”
In fact, the internet was designed with a distributed architecture in mind, but today’s web is centralized, with billions of users dependent on a few central services run by large telecom providers and web giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. Today’s web is also fragile, because it relies on centralized distribution models, with servers that come and go. If a server goes down for any technical or commercial reason, or is taken […]
