Decentralization of The Internet: Longread (1/2)

By Jiun Ting Yong

Since the boom of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, enthusiasts and adopters are very fascinated about the potential future of Bitcoin.  The WWW was invented by Sir Tim Berner-Lee. He had addressed his concerned of the potential monopoly if users’ data by Google, Facebook and Microsoft Bing and other niche websites. The internet experts named the new web or the internet as the ‘Web 2.0′ with the rise of social media like Facebook.  With the rise of sharing and consuming content on WordPress, unlike the dawn of blogging, was meant to be like personal web diaries or web blogs.

The world is getting hyperconnected, cybersecurity will be at stakes and the government will be ensuring their citizens’ safety by requesting the giant technological companies to hand over their users’ personal data just like Apple had handed over their users’ data and their cloud storage system to China state-backed data centre. Also, Google and Facebook are doing data mining and feeding users with their advertisement through their advanced algorithms.

A couple of months ago, the world was in shock.  A data company, Cambridge Analytica was allowed by Facebook Inc to do data mining and extracting them for manipulating a state’s election according to their powerful and influential clients who turned out to be ruling elites. This revelation really shocked the world and Sir Tim Berner-Lee and other founding founders of the internet were concerned that the massive surveillance will become the utopian dystopia Orwellian Big Brother as China already had already become by conducting massive social credit scores of her citizens, as well as using facial recognition to scan a Chinese citizen for any signs of ‘anti-government and Maoism.’  The China Communist Party is policing her citizens’ everyday lives by justifying for being the Nightwatchmen, a famous libertarian ideology by Robert Norwich. Furthermore, Facebook Inc admitted that the giant internet company really does scan their messenger platform for security purpose without users realising it!

The founding fathers of the internet and the inventor of the world wide web dreamt of an impenetrable and powerful communication tool that could be free from governments’ intervention, due to the combination of left and right wing ideology, ‘libertarian’ because of the countercultural movement back in the 1960s.  However, as the world is moving to digitisation, the government began to start their own digitised policies by regulating the internet for being a utility and even started their policing.