Decentralized web

Imagine a web in which browsers connect directly to each other for voice, video, media content sharing, application collaboration, using P2P and various APIs instead of driving all this through centralized servers that control traffic and its usage conditions. .

Potentially, this is a very powerful idea, and with proper implementation in the future it will protect the web from authoritarian outages, natural disasters and many other things that are not hard to imagine. It also allows you to create a time zone "without restrictions" if the devices connected to each other do not have a "middleman" who could stop or start filtering data.

Sometimes it happens that different people start working in several places on the same invention or, rather, on technology. This is what happens with the idea of ​​a decentralized web. The International Web Consortium ( W3C ) yesterday announced the creation of a working group on real-time web communications (Web Real-Time Communications) in order to formulate a client-side API that allows such communications to be performed without implementing the server side.
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At W3C, this group was headed by engineers from Google and Ericsson, but it turned out that Opera, in fact, offered the same idea two years ago, just not connected to browsers in general, as a web browsing tool. Opera, as usual, was a few steps ahead of its time.

On the video, Opera describes its own Unite technology.


“These APIs should allow building applications that can run inside the browser,” says the working group, “without the need for additional downloads, plug-ins. Allowing participants to communicate using audio and video, as well as additional real-time communication tools, without using interfering servers (with the exception of service, or, for example, firewall). ”

It is the question of the API that the new group deals with, developing interfaces that will later be used by devices for such connections. Collaboration is also underway with the IETF group , which creates a technical protocol for exchanging data between browsers. The first traces of the IETF work in this direction were discovered several months ago, when Google Cromium found signs of creating a so-called. P2P API.

At the head of this development are Harald Alvestrand (Harald Alvestrand) from Google and Stefan Hakansson from Ericsson. Up until February 2013, when the development is planned to be completed, official news will appear on the development of the technology. Separately, attention will be paid to the control of the transmitted / received data by the user, as well as understanding what data is processed by your browser.

via W3C , RRW