More reader-privacy because it is harder to watch or control what one reads. Integrating a payments system into a decentralized web can help people make money by publishing on the web without the need for 3rd parties. This meeting focused on the values, technical, policy, deployment issues of reinventing basic infrastructure like the web.
Mitchell BakerFirst in the opening welcome, Mitchell Baker, head of Mozilla, reported that Mozilla, the company that made open main-stream, is going back to the core values, focusing on what users want the Web to be. , even what a browser should be in the coming age. She highlighted four principles we need to think about when building a Decentralized Web: that the Web should be Immediate, Open, Universal and have Agency–that there are policies and standards that help users mediate buy sales lead and control their own Web experiences. Talking about the values that need to baked into the code turned out to be the dominant theme of the event.
vint1Next, Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet Evangelist and “father of the Internet,” called for a “Self-Archiving Web” in the first keynote address. He described a “digital dark age” when our lives online have disappeared and how a more advanced Web, one that archives itself throughout time, could help avoid that outcome. Over the three days of events, how to actually build a Web that archives itself came to seem quite doable. In fact, several of talented groups, including IPFS and the Dat Project, demonstrated pieces of what could make a Decentralized Web real.
Tim Berners-Lee (father of the Web) opened by saying the current technology and protocols could and should etimvolve to incorporate what we want from of our Web. He told us he created the
Web to be decentralized, so that anyone could set up their own server or host their own domain. Over time the Web has become “siloized” and we have “sold our soul of privacy in order to get stuff for free.” When Tim said rethinking the HTTP specification is feasible–the possibilities for change and improvement opened up for everyone.