The case for a decentralized internet

Who controls the internet? Increasingly, the answer is large corporations and governments -- a trend that's threatening digital privacy and access to information online, says web developer Tamas Kocsis. In this informative talk, Kocsis breaks down the different threats to internet freedom and shares his plan to build an alternative, decentralized network that returns power to everyday users.

Three years ago,

I started building a decentralized web

because I was worried
about the future of our internet.

The current internet we are using
is about gatekeepers.

If you want to reach something on the web,

then you need to go
through multiple middlemen.

First, a domain name server,

then a server hosting company,

which usually points you to a third party,

to a web hosting service.

And this happens every time
you want to reach a website on the web.

But these gatekeepers are
vulnerable to internet attacks

and also makes the censorship
and the surveillance easier.

And the situation is getting worse.

Everything is moving to the cloud,

where the data is hosted
by giant corporations.

This move creates much,
much more powerful middlemen.

Now, move to the cloud makes sense

because this way it's easier and cheaper

for the developers
and the service operators.

They don't have to worry
about maintaining the physical servers.

I can't blame them, but I found
this trend to be very dangerous,

because this way, these giant corporations

have unlimited control
over the hosting services.

And it's very easy to abuse this power.

For example, last year, a CEO of a company

that acts as a gatekeeper
for nine million websites

decided, after some public pressure,

that one of the sites it manages,

a far right page, should be blocked.

He then sent an internal email
to his coworkers.

"This was an arbitrary decision.

I woke up this morning in a bad mood

and decided to kick them
off the Internet."

Even he admits,

"No one should have this power."

As a response, one of
the employees asked him,

"Is this the day the Internet dies?"

I don't think we are actually
killing the internet,

but I do think that we are in the middle

of a kind of irresponsible
centralization process

that makes our internet more fragile.

The decentralized, people-to-people web

solves this problem
by removing the central points,

the web-hosting services.

It empowers the users

to have host sites they want to preserve.

On this network, the sites get downloaded
directly from other visitors.

This means, if you have a site
with 100 visitors,

then it's hosted
[by] 100 computers around the world.

Basically, this is a people-powered
version of the internet.

The security of the network
is provided by public-key cryptography.

This makes sure that no one
can modify the sites

but only the real owner.

Think of it like instead of getting
electricity from big power plants,

you put solar panels on top of your house,

and if your neighbor down the street
needs some extra energy,

then they can just download
some from your house.

So by using the decentralized web,

we can help to keep content
accessible for other visitors.

And by that, it means

that we can also fight against things

that we feel are unjust,

like censorship.

In China, the internet
is tightly controlled.

They can't criticize the government,

organize a protest,

and it's also forbidden to post

a kind of emoticon to remember the victims
of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

With the decentralized web,
it's not the government that decides

what gets seen and what doesn't.

It's the people,

which makes the web more democratic.

But at the same time,
it's hard to use this network

to do something that is clearly illegal

everywhere in the world,

as the users probably
don't want to endanger themselves

hosting these kinds
of problematic content.

Another increasing threat

to internet freedom

is overregulation.

I have the impression

that our delegates

who vote on the internet regulation laws

are not fully aware of their decisions.

For example, the European Parliament
has a new law on the table,

a new copyright protection law,

that has a part called Article 13.

If it passes, it would require
every big website

to implement a filter

that automatically blocks content

based on rules controlled
by big corporations.

The original idea is
to protect copyrighted materials,

but it would endanger many other things
we do on the internet:

blogging, criticizing,
discussing, linking and sharing.

Google and YouTube
already have similar systems

and they are receiving
100,000 takedown requests every hour.

Of course, they can't process
this amount of data by hand,

so they are using machine learning

to decide if it's really
a copyright violation or not.

But these filters do make mistakes.

They're removing everything
from documentation of human rights abuses,

lectures about copyrights

and search results

that point to criticism
of this new Article 13.

Beside of that, they are also
removing many other things.

And sometimes, these filters
aren't just removing the specific content,

but it could also lead
to loss of your linked accounts:

your email address,
your documents, your photos,

or your unfinished book,

which happened
with the writer Dennis Cooper.

It's not hard to see
how a system like this could be abused

by politicians and corporate competitors.

This Article 13, the extension of these
automated filters to the whole internet,

got strong opposition

from Wikipedia, Github,
Mozilla, and many others,

including the original founders
of the internet and the World Wide Web,

Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee.

But despite this strong opposition,

on the last European Parliament vote,

two thirds of the representatives
supported this law.

The final vote will be early 2019.

The result is important,

but whatever happens,

I'm pretty sure it will be followed
by many other similar proposals

around the world.

These kinds of regulations
would be very hard to enforce

through a decentralized web,

as there is no hosting companies.

The websites are served
by the visitors themselves.

I started to build
this network three years ago.

Since then, I've spent thousands,
tens of thousands of hours

on the development.

Why?

Why would anyone spend thousands of hours
on something anyone can freely copy,

rename, or even sell?

Well, in my case,

one of the reasons was
to do something meaningful.

During my daily regular job
as a web developer,

I didn't have the feeling
that I'm working on something

that had a chance to be a bigger than me.

Simply, I just wanted to make
my short presence in this world

to be meaningful.

Last year, the Great Firewall of China
started blocking this network I created.

This move officially made me the enemy

of the government-supported
internet censorship.

Since then, it's been really
a game of cat and mouse.

They make new rules in the firewall

and I try to react to it as fast as I can

so the users can keep hosting content
and create websites

that otherwise would be censored
by the centralized Chinese internet.

My other motivation
to create this network was worry.

I fear that the future of our internet
is out of our control.

The increasing centralization
and the proposed laws

are threatening our freedom of speech

and, by that, our democracy.

So for me, building a decentralized web

means creating a safe harbor,

a space where the rules are not written
by big corporations and political parties,

but by the people.

Thank you.

(Applause)