<story><title>Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web</title><url>http://brewster.kahle.org/2015/08/11/locking-the-web-open-a-call-for-a-distributed-web-2/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>schoen</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m happy to see this article, and it reminds me of things that others have been talking about for some time (for example, the &amp;quot;Redecentralize&amp;quot; community).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve participated in some file-sharing litigation which has made it very clear to me that decentralized P2P systems are not inherently more anonymous than other technologies. In fact, there&amp;#x27;s a cottage industry of P2P monitoring companies that participate as peers in the P2P networks and record detailed information about the IP addresses of peers that uploaded and downloaded particular files. There are often paradoxes where decentralization helps privacy and anonymity in some ways but harms it in others -- for example, if you run your own mail server instead of using Gmail, then you&amp;#x27;ve prevented Google from knowing who communicates with whom, but allowed a network adversary to learn that information directly, where the network adversary might not know the messaging relationships if everyone on the network used Gmail.&lt;p&gt;I guess a related point is that information about who is doing what online exists &lt;i&gt;somewhere&lt;/i&gt; by default, unless careful privacy engineering reduces the amount of information that&amp;#x27;s out there. Making the simplest kinds of architectural changes could just shift the location where the information exists, for example from Google or Yahoo or Amazon to dozens of random strangers, some of whom might be working for an adversary.</text></comment>
<story><title>Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web</title><url>http://brewster.kahle.org/2015/08/11/locking-the-web-open-a-call-for-a-distributed-web-2/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>Kahle&amp;#x27;s approach works only for static content.  It&amp;#x27;s not hard to distribute static content; BitTorrent does it just fine. The Internet Archive stores static content. Kahle thinks in terms of static content, because that&amp;#x27;s what the Internet Archive does. But it&amp;#x27;s less of the Web today. Despite that, it&amp;#x27;s good to have a way to distribute static content.  Academic publishing, after all, is almost all static content. That should be widely distributed. It&amp;#x27;s not like academic journals pay their authors.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s the problem that distributing content means someone else pays for storing and serving it.  This is part of what killed USENET, once the binary groups (mostly pirated stuff and porn) became huge.  There&amp;#x27;s a scaling problem with replication.&lt;p&gt;Federated networks are interesting, and there are several federated social networks.  A few even have a number of servers in two digits.  You could have a federated Facebook replacement that costs each user under a dollar a month at current hosting prices. No ads.  The concept is not getting any traction.&lt;p&gt;Kahle wants a system with &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;easy mechanisms for readers to pay writers.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt; That&amp;#x27;s either micropayments or an app store, both of which are worse than the current Web.</text></comment>