Tim Berners-Lee and other web pioneers intended for their creation to be decentralized and open-source. “The cyber-utopian view was not merely that seizing the means of information would make you free, but that failing to do so would put you in perpetual chains,” says Doctorow.
There are many theories about why the web became centralized. Doctorow largely blames the abuse of intellectual property law to defeat the decentralized “free software” movement championed by the programmer and activist Richard Stallman. Stallman helped create the popular open-source operating system Linux after freely modifying Unix, Bell Labs’ proprietary system.
Mitra Ardron is the head of decentralization at the Internet Archive, a digital repository of more than 50 petabytes of images, movies, and texts—including more than 330 billion webpages. He says the history of the web is too important to be held in custody by a single organization. So he’s overseeing a plan to migrate the Internet Archive’s more than 50 million gigabytes of data to a distributed network maintained by users.
A beta version of this peer-to-peer network is already operating and publicly accessible.
You can read more and also watch a video in an article by Zach Weissmueller at https://reason.com/video/the-decentralized-web-is-coming/.
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Categories: Online Privacy & Security
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