Why we need Internet decentralization and why it is inevitable
Over the past year, and especially after the scandal with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, articles about breaches of data privacy by IT companies have begun to actively appear in Europe and the USA. Especially from Google and Facebook. Most of these stories are presented as "a blatant act of unfair use of personal data of users for political manipulation and for advertising purposes." For some, this was already so obvious, but for many ordinary users this fact became a kind of surprise and a hot topic for discussion.
For some reason, some people have forgotten, or may not even know, that Facebook and Google are more likely advertising companies, and it is the huge and stable advertising revenue that allows them to quietly engage in some kind of innovation. For some reason, the fact that it is they (the users) who are the product of the company rather than any services specially created for them has also become something incredible.
And what happened when this veil fell before my eyes? Yes, basically nothing. Of course, some kind of awareness appeared, but still everyone continued to use Facebook and Google. And the reason is that it is rather difficult to refuse such services if you just want to use the Internet.
All this has led to the fact that recently the so-called digital detox has become fashionable - the refusal of time from the services of large IT companies. Stories and articles began to appear about how people completely abandoned Google services and what substitute services they used. They made guides on how to download and see all the information that Google and Facebook know about you. They appear even now . Even the most genuine research is conducted , which proves that giving Facebook away for a month will make you happier, more productive, more confident,will increase the potency and other pleasures.
')
But, like many fashionable things, all this will eventually be forgotten, because it is kind of halfway. This is unlikely to solve the problem of confidentiality of data in general, but after downloading or deleting their data, many individuals will feel that they have bent the system, become independent and confident in their security. In fact, we are still far from independence.
One of these stories, not so half-hearted now, pushes into much more serious thoughts than data confidentiality - centralization of the Internet. It was the story of a journalist Gizmodo, who for six weeks decided to abandon the services of only five companies - Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. And for her it was a real hell .
In the article, she tells how many of the usual activities on the Internet began to cause her enormous difficulties. She could not use Skype to conduct an interview, because this is a Microsoft product. I had to record the conversation on the recorder, but then a new problem appeared - file transfer. Google Drive is not an option, Dropbox, too, because it is hosted by Amazon Web Services, the daughter of Amazon. And indeed, many serious services are deploying their capabilities on three main cloud platforms - Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. In turn, small services did not want to transfer files over 50 MB.
She was helped only by a friend-developer, who has her own service for transferring files through a darknet. But she could not just use his service, because it is also hosted by AWS. As a result, she downloaded the program directly from a friend’s server using the command line on her Linux computer. I created a temporary website using the downloaded program, downloaded the audio file and dropped the URL to the right person. After the person downloaded, she stopped distributing the file, as a result of which the file and the site were removed from the network.
In terms of entertainment, everything is not very fun either. She could not use YouTube, Apple Music, Netflix, Spotify and Hulu because they work thanks to AWS and Google Cloud. In the end, she just listened to the radio and read books.
In many cases, she either refused to use certain applications at all, for example, such as Venmo, because she could not find an adequate replacement for them, or changed one monopolist to another. Instead, Google began using Ask.com, which also owns Tinder and Vimeo. It turned out some kind of awl on the soap.
In turn, many of her relatives continued to write messages to her messengers and to Gmail even after she informed the whole community about the experiment. They wrote out of habit and purely by inertia, and then still resented why she did not respond to their messages.
A strong digital detox was not part of her plans and she did not think that the refusal of the services of all five companies would mean the refusal of virtually all the usual technologies. Some high-tech critics say that you can opt out of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple and quietly use the network. In fact, this is very problematic for the common man, because it’s all about cloud storage that is owned by a handful of companies.
“These companies control the Internet infrastructure, information flows and online commerce. It all started with the sale of books, the search engine and the network for fellow students, and now these corporations are intermediaries for almost any online interaction, ”said Gizmodo journalist.
Initially, the Internet was something incredible, a magical idea with unimaginable possibilities. When he was only a small child, his development was centralized and he took the first steps thanks to a small number of enthusiasts who believed that something magnificent and decentralized could come out of him.
At first he was an inconspicuous and strange clever, but then became the most popular guy in school. Everyone adored him and everyone predicted a great future for him in a few years. During this time, he found a large number of friends of different scall and became more decentralized. Some tried to leave at his expense and enjoyed his popularity, while others believed that they really helped him to reach a new level. But the Internet was still too young to meet all the expectations that the entourage placed on it. And then they began to laugh at him and declare completely the opposite, and many former friends disappeared as if they never existed. Typical teenagers.
In the end, he had to become a serious business man to show that he was really worth something. And with the help of some friends who have remained with him since school, he became a businessman, and his business is observation. Parents could not recognize him - this is not an amorphous decentralized system they dreamed of, but something completely different and centralized.
A curtain.
Now Google sees about 40% of all Internet traffic every day. Amazon, which used to deal only with online commerce and information storage, is gradually entering the advertising market. Thanks to his influence, he will further enhance the ability to monitor user habits.
On the other hand, we have the Chinese Golden Shield project and the black boxes of major Internet service providers in the US who vacuum the data. They are narrow centralized channels through which every bit in the network passes.
We are used to the fact that most of the usual services on the Internet are free, but this is not the case. There is always some price and this is our data. Information is a new gold that we ourselves brought with joy.
And all this collected information, not only ours, but also the capacities of other companies, is still kept centrally. You could even say too centrally. We think that all this looks like Fort Knox, but in reality security is much more prosaic.
As can be seen from the history of the journalist, she severely limited herself, because most of the capacities of modern Internet empires are stored in AWS, GC and MA clouds. Yes, the word "cloud" may sound like something high-tech, but, in fact, it's just someone else's server. And this is precisely the critical factor of centralization, that is why.
When everything works well, centralization does not seem bad to us, it is convenient for us. It is convenient for us to store all the information about ourselves on Google Drive, all our photos, our portfolio, articles, tables; Sign up with Google and Facebook ask the browser to remember the passwords and keep our history. And the more we dive into this ecosystem, the harder it is for us to get out of there, because we are shifting the responsibility for all this information onto others' shoulders. This is no longer our concern.
When all is well, it seems to us that this will continue forever. As a result, we begin to shut off thoughts of the bad and they turn into ghostly nonsense. But when a crisis does happen and something bad happens, we don’t want all our information to be in one place and just disappear like a house after a fire.
For some reason, as an example, the story of savings books after the collapse of the USSR immediately comes to mind, but everything is not so bad. All the same, in our situation there is some kind of choice, albeit minimal. Therefore, the best story with investment banks during the crisis of 2008-2009.
I will not go into the details of the crisis, what are subprime loans, how did it happen, who is to blame and so on. Here the very fact of centralization is interesting. In 2007, Bear Stearns' assets amounted to about $ 395 billion - at the time, this was equivalent to Switzerland's PPP GDP. In 2008, Lehman Brothers controlled clients' assets for $ 680 billion - this is like Pakistan's GDP at PPP. It would seem that all these companies are “too big to fail”, but still they went bankrupt.
Particularly noteworthy is the example of Lehman Brothers, from whose bankruptcy the crisis has moved into an acute phase. The reason for this was the fact that this investment bank was the largest in the market of credit default swaps. Having lost all their insurance for investments, investors began to massively withdraw into the dollar.
And now let's look at AWS and its largest cloud storage. What will happen to all these companies that deploy their facilities on Amazon’s servers if something bad happens? Where should they go when Google Drive and Microsoft Azure follow after AWS? Everything is so interconnected that losing one major player, we lose almost the entire foundation on which the industry stands. On these servers there is information that you cannot download in one day and you can’t download it to a USB flash drive. If something like this happens, it will be much more fun than the crisis of 2008–2009.
As history shows, no one and nothing is “too big to fail”. Neither Lehman Brothers, nor Google, nor Amazon, nor Microsoft. Empires will fall sooner or later and new ones will take their place. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch resold for a song.
Yes, among these three, Merrill Lynch looks more alive than ever. She bought Bank of America and now Merrill Lynch operates assets of $ 2.2 trillion - this is even more than she controlled before the crisis. Who buys the business of Google or Microsoft in case of problems? Apple? Or some other new company? Anyway, it still does not cancel the question of centralization and the possibility of the appearance of the same problem after some time. The actor is new, but the scenery is still the same.
I think very few people guess when the cycle will be repeated and we will see a new IT market. It is also difficult to predict where the legs of the new crisis will grow. If the dotcom bubble was a crisis of hopes and expectations, then the new crisis could be a victim of high arrogance and careless behavior. Perhaps it will be a crisis of venture capital of IT companies, a major hacker attack or a new revolutionary technology. Nobody knows. As in 2008, few could have imagined that because of “one of the most reliable and confident markets” (the real estate market) almost the entire house of cards was falling down.
Now the Internet has matured, has become a stately and serious system, but it seems that recently it is getting closer to the midlife crisis. He is again interested in decentralization, as in childhood. He was so used to his "friends" that they had already begun to bother him. I want fun, something new and unusual. It may even be a bit of a joke with this beautiful, young and interesting technology - blockchain. She often reminds him of herself in her youth.
Everything is back to normal. Perhaps this young individual will turn his head and completely change his attitude to life. Life will sparkle with new colors, he will see new friends, reconsider his relationship with his old ones and finally become more decentralized, just like those who supported him at the very beginning. Perhaps it will be a small affair, or just a glance in her direction, which will change little in his life.
It is not known whether the blockchain will play a significant role in the life of the Internet, but this technology is still the main contender for the heart of our old man for the movement towards decentralization. Although, it is possible that I am mistaken.
At the Internet, the enthusiasm and thoughts of decentralization are growing stronger, and it is not known how quickly this fire in his soul will go out. We do not know whether this step will be justified in the future, but it can only be said with certainty that excessive centralization has never led to something good.
For some reason, some people have forgotten, or may not even know, that Facebook and Google are more likely advertising companies, and it is the huge and stable advertising revenue that allows them to quietly engage in some kind of innovation. For some reason, the fact that it is they (the users) who are the product of the company rather than any services specially created for them has also become something incredible.
And what happened when this veil fell before my eyes? Yes, basically nothing. Of course, some kind of awareness appeared, but still everyone continued to use Facebook and Google. And the reason is that it is rather difficult to refuse such services if you just want to use the Internet.
All this has led to the fact that recently the so-called digital detox has become fashionable - the refusal of time from the services of large IT companies. Stories and articles began to appear about how people completely abandoned Google services and what substitute services they used. They made guides on how to download and see all the information that Google and Facebook know about you. They appear even now . Even the most genuine research is conducted , which proves that giving Facebook away for a month will make you happier, more productive, more confident,
')
But, like many fashionable things, all this will eventually be forgotten, because it is kind of halfway. This is unlikely to solve the problem of confidentiality of data in general, but after downloading or deleting their data, many individuals will feel that they have bent the system, become independent and confident in their security. In fact, we are still far from independence.
One of these stories, not so half-hearted now, pushes into much more serious thoughts than data confidentiality - centralization of the Internet. It was the story of a journalist Gizmodo, who for six weeks decided to abandon the services of only five companies - Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. And for her it was a real hell .
Why is it hard to be a digital vegetarian?
In the article, she tells how many of the usual activities on the Internet began to cause her enormous difficulties. She could not use Skype to conduct an interview, because this is a Microsoft product. I had to record the conversation on the recorder, but then a new problem appeared - file transfer. Google Drive is not an option, Dropbox, too, because it is hosted by Amazon Web Services, the daughter of Amazon. And indeed, many serious services are deploying their capabilities on three main cloud platforms - Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. In turn, small services did not want to transfer files over 50 MB.
She was helped only by a friend-developer, who has her own service for transferring files through a darknet. But she could not just use his service, because it is also hosted by AWS. As a result, she downloaded the program directly from a friend’s server using the command line on her Linux computer. I created a temporary website using the downloaded program, downloaded the audio file and dropped the URL to the right person. After the person downloaded, she stopped distributing the file, as a result of which the file and the site were removed from the network.
In terms of entertainment, everything is not very fun either. She could not use YouTube, Apple Music, Netflix, Spotify and Hulu because they work thanks to AWS and Google Cloud. In the end, she just listened to the radio and read books.
In many cases, she either refused to use certain applications at all, for example, such as Venmo, because she could not find an adequate replacement for them, or changed one monopolist to another. Instead, Google began using Ask.com, which also owns Tinder and Vimeo. It turned out some kind of awl on the soap.
In turn, many of her relatives continued to write messages to her messengers and to Gmail even after she informed the whole community about the experiment. They wrote out of habit and purely by inertia, and then still resented why she did not respond to their messages.
A strong digital detox was not part of her plans and she did not think that the refusal of the services of all five companies would mean the refusal of virtually all the usual technologies. Some high-tech critics say that you can opt out of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple and quietly use the network. In fact, this is very problematic for the common man, because it’s all about cloud storage that is owned by a handful of companies.
“These companies control the Internet infrastructure, information flows and online commerce. It all started with the sale of books, the search engine and the network for fellow students, and now these corporations are intermediaries for almost any online interaction, ”said Gizmodo journalist.
Observation is the business model of the Internet.
Initially, the Internet was something incredible, a magical idea with unimaginable possibilities. When he was only a small child, his development was centralized and he took the first steps thanks to a small number of enthusiasts who believed that something magnificent and decentralized could come out of him.
At first he was an inconspicuous and strange clever, but then became the most popular guy in school. Everyone adored him and everyone predicted a great future for him in a few years. During this time, he found a large number of friends of different scall and became more decentralized. Some tried to leave at his expense and enjoyed his popularity, while others believed that they really helped him to reach a new level. But the Internet was still too young to meet all the expectations that the entourage placed on it. And then they began to laugh at him and declare completely the opposite, and many former friends disappeared as if they never existed. Typical teenagers.
In the end, he had to become a serious business man to show that he was really worth something. And with the help of some friends who have remained with him since school, he became a businessman, and his business is observation. Parents could not recognize him - this is not an amorphous decentralized system they dreamed of, but something completely different and centralized.
A curtain.
Now Google sees about 40% of all Internet traffic every day. Amazon, which used to deal only with online commerce and information storage, is gradually entering the advertising market. Thanks to his influence, he will further enhance the ability to monitor user habits.
On the other hand, we have the Chinese Golden Shield project and the black boxes of major Internet service providers in the US who vacuum the data. They are narrow centralized channels through which every bit in the network passes.
We are used to the fact that most of the usual services on the Internet are free, but this is not the case. There is always some price and this is our data. Information is a new gold that we ourselves brought with joy.
And all this collected information, not only ours, but also the capacities of other companies, is still kept centrally. You could even say too centrally. We think that all this looks like Fort Knox, but in reality security is much more prosaic.
As can be seen from the history of the journalist, she severely limited herself, because most of the capacities of modern Internet empires are stored in AWS, GC and MA clouds. Yes, the word "cloud" may sound like something high-tech, but, in fact, it's just someone else's server. And this is precisely the critical factor of centralization, that is why.
New Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch
When everything works well, centralization does not seem bad to us, it is convenient for us. It is convenient for us to store all the information about ourselves on Google Drive, all our photos, our portfolio, articles, tables; Sign up with Google and Facebook ask the browser to remember the passwords and keep our history. And the more we dive into this ecosystem, the harder it is for us to get out of there, because we are shifting the responsibility for all this information onto others' shoulders. This is no longer our concern.
When all is well, it seems to us that this will continue forever. As a result, we begin to shut off thoughts of the bad and they turn into ghostly nonsense. But when a crisis does happen and something bad happens, we don’t want all our information to be in one place and just disappear like a house after a fire.
For some reason, as an example, the story of savings books after the collapse of the USSR immediately comes to mind, but everything is not so bad. All the same, in our situation there is some kind of choice, albeit minimal. Therefore, the best story with investment banks during the crisis of 2008-2009.
I will not go into the details of the crisis, what are subprime loans, how did it happen, who is to blame and so on. Here the very fact of centralization is interesting. In 2007, Bear Stearns' assets amounted to about $ 395 billion - at the time, this was equivalent to Switzerland's PPP GDP. In 2008, Lehman Brothers controlled clients' assets for $ 680 billion - this is like Pakistan's GDP at PPP. It would seem that all these companies are “too big to fail”, but still they went bankrupt.
Particularly noteworthy is the example of Lehman Brothers, from whose bankruptcy the crisis has moved into an acute phase. The reason for this was the fact that this investment bank was the largest in the market of credit default swaps. Having lost all their insurance for investments, investors began to massively withdraw into the dollar.
And now let's look at AWS and its largest cloud storage. What will happen to all these companies that deploy their facilities on Amazon’s servers if something bad happens? Where should they go when Google Drive and Microsoft Azure follow after AWS? Everything is so interconnected that losing one major player, we lose almost the entire foundation on which the industry stands. On these servers there is information that you cannot download in one day and you can’t download it to a USB flash drive. If something like this happens, it will be much more fun than the crisis of 2008–2009.
As history shows, no one and nothing is “too big to fail”. Neither Lehman Brothers, nor Google, nor Amazon, nor Microsoft. Empires will fall sooner or later and new ones will take their place. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch resold for a song.
Yes, among these three, Merrill Lynch looks more alive than ever. She bought Bank of America and now Merrill Lynch operates assets of $ 2.2 trillion - this is even more than she controlled before the crisis. Who buys the business of Google or Microsoft in case of problems? Apple? Or some other new company? Anyway, it still does not cancel the question of centralization and the possibility of the appearance of the same problem after some time. The actor is new, but the scenery is still the same.
I think very few people guess when the cycle will be repeated and we will see a new IT market. It is also difficult to predict where the legs of the new crisis will grow. If the dotcom bubble was a crisis of hopes and expectations, then the new crisis could be a victim of high arrogance and careless behavior. Perhaps it will be a crisis of venture capital of IT companies, a major hacker attack or a new revolutionary technology. Nobody knows. As in 2008, few could have imagined that because of “one of the most reliable and confident markets” (the real estate market) almost the entire house of cards was falling down.
Back to basics
Now the Internet has matured, has become a stately and serious system, but it seems that recently it is getting closer to the midlife crisis. He is again interested in decentralization, as in childhood. He was so used to his "friends" that they had already begun to bother him. I want fun, something new and unusual. It may even be a bit of a joke with this beautiful, young and interesting technology - blockchain. She often reminds him of herself in her youth.
Everything is back to normal. Perhaps this young individual will turn his head and completely change his attitude to life. Life will sparkle with new colors, he will see new friends, reconsider his relationship with his old ones and finally become more decentralized, just like those who supported him at the very beginning. Perhaps it will be a small affair, or just a glance in her direction, which will change little in his life.
It is not known whether the blockchain will play a significant role in the life of the Internet, but this technology is still the main contender for the heart of our old man for the movement towards decentralization. Although, it is possible that I am mistaken.
At the Internet, the enthusiasm and thoughts of decentralization are growing stronger, and it is not known how quickly this fire in his soul will go out. We do not know whether this step will be justified in the future, but it can only be said with certainty that excessive centralization has never led to something good.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/442900/
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