Tim Berners-Lee ends "Weaving the Web," a book written in the late 1990s, on an optimistic note: "The experience of seeing the web take off by the grass-roots effort of thousands gives me tremendous hope that … we can collectively make our world what we want." Nearly two decades later, the inventor of the web no longer sounds as cheerful.
"The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging," he declared earlier this month at a conference in San Francisco.
Berners-Lee's observation on the web's centralization is not new, yet in recent months warnings such as his have grown louder. Pundits estimate that Google's many sites attract an estimated 40 percent of all traffic on the web. Facebook's apps are similarly dominant on smartphones. Together, these two firms will soon rake in two-thirds of all online-advertising revenue.
In recent years, other "control points" have emerged, says Yochai Benkler of Harvard University. Smartphones, which now generate more than half of online traffic, are not as open a platform as the internet and regulated largely by Google and Apple. Cloud computing, too, is a centralized affair, with Amazon leading the pack.
Now a new band of entrepreneurs and venture-capital firms is emerging with a mission to "re-decentralize" the internet. This is not the first time that new technology has pushed back. Think Napster and Kazaa.
If decentralization is now making a comeback, it is largely because of the rise of bitcoin, a crypto-currency, and its underlying technology, the blockchain. This is a globally distributed database, which is maintained not by a single actor, such as a bank, but collaboratively by many.
Distributed applications are cropping up, too. For example, Blockstack Labs' offering, called Onename, which is also based on the blockchain, allows users to register their online identity. OpenBazaar is a collection of independent online shops.
Such services are likely to multiply. One reason is that investors are showing interest. The second is that the technology to build decentralized applications, which is still in its infancy, will get better. Whether these new businesses will take the world by storm is unclear. A big hurdle — which previous efforts at decentralized technology failed to clear — is to be as convenient and seductive as the dominant incumbents. Decentralization might fit the vision of the web's founding father, but the internet became centralized for a reason.
Copyright 2013 The Economist Newspaper Limited, London. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.
