[arch-d] Can the efforts to fight back against Big Tech Internet Dominance Succeed?

[Hesham ElBakoury <[e-mail]>]

In the early days of the accessible internet, many of its pioneers
championed a free and open internet controlled by its users. Currently this
vision feels naive since the Internet is controlled by Big Techs.

There is desire to fight back against this dominance. For example, Dfinity
Foundation, a non-profit organization headquartered in Zurich is building
what it calls the internet computer [1] a decentralized technology that
allows software to run anywhere on the internet rather than in server farms
controlled by large firms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba,
Tencent, and Baidu. The problem with this approach is that it creates
applications that no one controls.

Dfinity is not the first to try to remake the internet. It joins a list of
organizations developing a range of alternatives, including Solid
<https://solid.mit.edu/>, SAFE Network, InterPlanetary File System,
Blockstack, and others.

Solid (MIT project led by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide
Web) shows how long it takes to change the status quo. Though it is a less
ambitious proposal than Dfinity’s internet computer, Solid has been working
on its core technology for more than five years. Berners-Lee talks about
correcting the course of the internet. Yet overcoming the inertia of an
internet pulled along by juggernauts like Google and Amazon is hard.
Inventing the web is one thing; reinventing it is another.

Is there a hope that such efforts will succeed?

Hesham
[1] https://disco.ethz.ch/courses/distsys/lnotes/dfinity.pdf