ca. 1999 — Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, stands at a chalkboard where he has written notes on Web development. — Image by © Andrew Brusso/Corbis Share with:
Tim Berners-Lee recently gathered in San Francisco with other top computer scientists — including Brewster Kahle, head of the nonprofit Internet Archive and an internet activist — to discuss a new phase for the web at the Decentralized Web Summit event.
The founders and builders of IPFS, the Dat Project, WebTorrent, Tahoe-LAFS, zcash, Zeronet.io, BitTorrent, Ethereum, BigChainDB, Blockstack, Interledger, Mediachain, MaidSafe, Storj and others presented their technologies and answer questions.
Hosted by the Internet Archive , the first Decentralized Web Summit was a call for dreamers and builders to spark collaboration and take concrete steps to create a better Web . The event includes tech legends such as Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, and renowned author Cory Doctorow.
Quentin Hardy from the New York Times attended the event and captured some of the essence. At the session on Tuesday, computer scientists talked about how new payment technologies could increase individual control over money. For example, if people adapted the so-called ledger system by which digital currencies are used, a musician might potentially be able to sell records without intermediaries like Apple’s iTunes. News sites might be able to have a system of micropayments for reading a single article, instead of counting on web ads for money. “The web is already decentralized,” said Berners-Lee. “The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging. We don’t have a technology problem; we have a social problem.” Doctorow gave the opening talk, “How Stupid Laws and Benevolent Dictators can Ruin the Decentralized Web, too,” which was about the “ Ulysses pacts “: […]
