It’s not the Internet anymore

It’s impor­tant that we remem­ber what makes the Inter­net so inter­est­ing and unique. There are two cru­cial characteristics:

1. It’s fun­da­men­tal­ly decen­tral­ized, mean­ing you can cut out any part with­out affect­ing the rest,
2. It allows free­dom of access, mean­ing you have the same abil­i­ty to access and write it as any­one else.

Because they per­mit extra­or­di­nary flex­i­bil­i­ty and rapid growth, both of these char­ac­ter­is­tics have brought the Inter­net way beyond any oth­er net­work. Today, they are endangered.

Ones and zeros are boring

Tra­di­tion­al­ly the cost involved with “Inter­net”, for the end-user, was access. It was mea­sured in kB/s and hours per month – the idea was that you paid a com­pa­ny to trans­port data (ones and zeros) from and to your computer.
Pro­gres­sive­ly though, all of these com­pa­nies out there have under­stood that there is not much mon­ey to be made sim­ply trans­fer­ring data. Car­ry­ing ones and zeroes is most­ly a mat­ter of man­ag­ing hard­ware, a domain where com­pe­ti­tion is tough and stand­ing out is hard.

Pro­vid­ing con­tent, how­ev­er, is much more inter­est­ing and lucra­tive. Because there is some con­sumer deci­sion involved, there is brand­ing to be made — and there­fore, room for dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and high prof­it mar­gins. Voilà! Sud­den­ly my Inter­net Access Provider becomes Inter­net Ser­vices Provider (ISP). Reg­u­lar and mobile phone access, dig­i­tal TV or pay-per-view movies, nation-wide wire­less sub­scrip­tion, mobile phone ring­tones, portable music play­er with legal music down­loads… There is no media that they are not into, pro­vid­ing access, and, espe­cial­ly, content.

Controlling both sides of the cables

To keep con­trol of the con­tent, the key idea is to be at both ends of the cables. The result is cur­rent­ly sit­ting in my liv­ing-room. It’s a box that replaces what was for­mer­ly mere­ly a modem; now a sleek device, it stays on per­ma­nent­ly and can man­age eth­er­net, wi-fi, phone and TV.
It’s also the rea­son my mobile phone only surfs “select­ed” web­sites, or why iPods won’t allow to export­ing music.

What hap­pens inside these box­es? How do the oper­at­ing sys­tems inside man­age the data I am send­ing through them? There is no way to know. Because we have no free­dom over that soft­ware, we have no knowl­edge nor real con­trol over it. Com­bine this with our ever increas­ing use of on-line ser­vices (some­thing I have called the dis­ap­pear­ance of the oper­at­ing sys­tem), and you have cre­at­ed a net­work that is dif­fer­ent depend­ing on who you access it with.

Of course, if the infor­ma­tion you can find and read depends on your access provider, there are chances that your think­ing and writ­ing also depends on them.

Do we want the Internet, or just some networking?

So all of this con­curs to cre­at­ing some­thing that’s not the Inter­net. Remem­ber the two key char­ac­ter­is­tics above? When we ask our­selves whether a par­tic­u­lar ser­vice con­tributes or detri­ments to the Inter­net, we have to answer two questions:

1. Does it create a closed private network?

Face­book, Linkedin and their peers aren’t part of the Inter­net. Any­thing you do inside stays inside. If you can­not take your infor­ma­tion home, then you should­n’t give some­body the legal and tech­ni­cal means to man­age it – be it at zero price or for a fee.

Yahoo! Mes­sen­ger, Skype and their sib­lings aren’t part of the Inter­net. When you use a black-box pro­gram to chat, which con­nects to a black-box serv­er, which only accepts peo­ple with a reg­is­tered account with­in that black-box world, you are part of a closed, pri­vate network.

The incen­tive for a com­pa­ny to close up its net­work is great, because it binds users to their prod­ucts. This isn’t manda­to­ry for them to gen­er­ate rev­enue, how­ev­er. For exam­ple, Face­book earns mon­ey by re-sell­ing demo­graph­ic con­sumer infor­ma­tion (ex: how many cam­pus stu­dents under 20 have watched this or that movie) and dis­play­ing tar­get­ed adver­tis­ing. There is noth­ing wrong in that, if the users are free to leave.
But these pri­vate net­works stay under the con­trol of the enti­ty that owns them. Only them can decide and influ­ence their growth and evolution.

2. Does it create a non-removable block?

Imag­ine one sin­gle com­put­er that would be nec­es­sary for the web to work. Imag­ine every sin­gle user in the world sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly turn­ing to this unique giant direc­to­ry, in order to access any­thing in the net­work. Imag­ine every creator/participant in the net­work hav­ing to reg­is­ter in the direc­to­ry to exist inside the network.
Imag­ine that com­put­er rat­ing every page of the net­work with a 10-point grade. Imag­ine the com­pa­ny behind that com­put­er earn­ing its rev­enue from the low­est-rat­ed pages. And imag­ine the grade-attri­bu­tion algo­rithm being entire­ly secret.
You’ve got it! It’s Google, of course.

As strange as it might sound, Google is cer­tain­ly into net­work­ing – but it’s not help­ing the Inter­net. There isn’t an influ­en­tial web­site which can afford not feed­ing Google with its con­tent. There isn’t a low-rank­ing com­mer­cial web­site that can afford not buy­ing their adver­tis­ing. Sim­ply because we users have con­se­crat­ed it as our do-every­thing Inter­net service.

Crumb: a hint of an answer

We can change the course of things. The two keys to suc­cess are open pro­to­cols and a decen­tral­ized system.

Suggestion

Vision: Instead of sign­ing up into dif­fer­ent ser­vices and log­ging in into dif­fer­ent pri­vate net­works, Joe user has all of his social Inter­net uses met by one appli­ca­tion, Loaf. He can do either of the following:
1. Run a lim­it­ed ver­sion of Loaf at no cost, through var­i­ous Inter­net com­pa­nies, sim­i­lar to today’s blog providers.
2. Run the full appli­ca­tion with a web host of his choice (at the cost of a host­ing fee).

Loaf is free soft­ware, and is based on an open set of pro­to­cols called Crumb (for the sake of find­ing a mod­est name). Any­one can develop/adapt an appli­ca­tion to read a Crumb profile.

A decentralized social network

The key idea is to cre­ate a social net­work that does not rely on a pri­vate serv­er. Joe cre­ates his Crumb pro­file through Loaf, and inter­acts with oth­er users who also have a Crumb pro­file. Any of them can host their pro­file where they choose – it is the work­ing prin­ci­ple of the Jab­ber instant mes­sag­ing, applied to social net­work­ing as a whole. Here are a few aspects:

An ID and a bud­dy list — The focus should be on pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tion, reg­u­lat­ed with iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sim­i­lar to that of Jab­ber. Joe lets Janet access his pro­file by adding her Crumb ID (janet@herhost.com) in his bud­dy list.

Text and pic­ture shar­ing — The core of the exchange will of course be text, in the form of blog-like entries, and pic­ture shar­ing, with a sys­tem of com­ments. From basic func­tion­al­i­ty, we can lat­er evolve into more advanced, Face­book-like interaction.

IM inte­gra­tion — Thanks to the matu­ri­ty of Jabber/XMPP, it should not be dif­fi­cult to inte­grate a Jab­ber account into the Crumb pro­file, and an XMPP serv­er into Loaf. Instant mes­sag­ing could be done direct­ly on-line through the Loaf inter­face, or more tra­di­tion­al­ly with a PC client.

Room for plen­ty more — Once the fea­tures above are work­ing, a set of plug-ins could be devel­oped for Loaf. Some ideas include a full web­mail, pri­vate file exchange (ex. allow­ing arbi­trary peo­ple to access one large file), pub­lic blog, and stream­ing video host­ing. In the long term, Loaf could evolve into a com­plete per­son­al work and leisure space, pro­vid­ed by com­pa­nies like Face­book, but which would give users the pos­si­bil­i­ty to leave with their data at any time and host their pro­file elsewhere.

And does it all matter in the end?

Yes it does. More and more of our com­put­ing is net­worked, and the day might come when the only soft­ware used on your per­son­al com­put­ers is a set of hard­ware dri­vers. The core of our activ­i­ties and infor­ma­tion will stay online — it’s now up to us to decide whether this will be inside a few com­pet­ing, closed pri­vate net­works, or with­in a mesh with no cen­ter nor own­er, oth­er­wise known as the Internet.

It’s not that dif­fi­cult. The major­i­ty of what we need is here: RSS for dynam­ic con­tent, XHTML for text, PHP-capa­ble host­ing, XMPP for instant mes­sag­ing, high qual­i­ty blog­ging soft­ware. We’re only lack­ing a sin­gle, attrac­tive plat­form to com­pete with the Face­books out there. Per­haps Crumb exists already some­where; if so, it’s time we heard more about it. So every­one can con­tribute to the Inter­net again.

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