The web is dying, but mesh networks could save it

by André Staltz

My previous article, "The web began dying in 2014, here’s how", raised much more awareness than I thought it would. Many people found it to be an insightful analysis of the web under the control of tech giants, but the article ended without providing anything positive to hold on to.

I actually have hope for the web. There are legitimately viable ways of preserving freedom on the web while taking the platform forward and keeping it competitive against proprietary alternatives from tech giants. But it can only happen if the web takes a courageous step towards its next level. If it stays in its current form, the web has little chance of being relevant while America’s FCC kills Net Neutrality rules, the W3C favors DRM, and tech giants build their web-less vision of the future.

The community of peer-to-peer technologists has brought to the world several revolutionary technologies: USENET, Napster, BitTorrent, Kazaa, Skype, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and actually even the web itself. Once again, we can turn to this community to seek digital solutions that defend freedom. Many months ago I quit my job in order to join a group of peer-to-peer programmers and help build technology that can rescue our digital freedoms. I want to share with you our plan, which in short is:

Build the mobile mesh web that works with or without internet access, to reach four billion people currently offline.

To explain this plan, we need to realize that the web can be independent from the internet. The core weaknesses of the internet have to be recognized, and how exactly they were exploited by middlemen businesses. The problem we are solving is both social and technical, so the solution must be a harmony of these two. Finally, all the tools and opportunities we need to supersede them are already in our hands: smartphones, peer-to-peer protocols, and mesh networks.

[…]

Continua qui: https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/01/02/web-dying-mesh-networks-will-save/