Whats wrong with the World Wide Web?
The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.
Tim Berners-Lee — Inventor of the World Wide Web
Just a few months ago, the internet hit a significant milestone.
If you want to play the blame game, there are always ISPs (Internet Service Providers), and we all know there is no love lost there. However, we are going to see many more such outages in future as the structure of internet starts to crumble, not being able to keep pace with the traffic that is being generated. Let’s dig out some history to understand how and why we screwed up so badly.
The Good Old Days
The original idea behind the web was very simple (Like Lego pieces). Let’s get our hands on some computers (there were not many at that time), connect them to each other and create something awesome (for geeks). In technical terms, the original internet was a collaborative network of computers connected to each other to share rich information. In the beginning, it was a closed project with a few computers connected to each other having equal rights (this is important). However, it didn’t take much time for this lab project to spread out to the world. Initially, the content was just a few static pages hosted on ISP run servers that the average web user could access. It wasn’t really close to the vision of the web, but soon we started to march towards next generation of the internet as the low-cost web hosting services started to emerge and more and more web pages were spawned. The downside — the ISPs, the people who actually gave the average user connectivity to the network, grew stronger and stronger with it.
Change is Inevitable
With the advent of social networking sites and personal blogs, the common web user, who uptil now only consumed content, started publishing content, in essence making the web more collaborative. The amount of traffic generated started growing, and users started demanding more and more content. Enter Google and the search paradigm. This had a profound effect on not just the internet economy but also the architecture of the network and interconnections between different ISPs. Since Google gave millions of web users the ability to easily find content and hence brought more and more people online, the ISPs were forced to have more interconnections in between their networks and the structure of the internet became flatter.
Roughly around the same time, peer to peer file sharing platforms like Napster were shaking up the music industry. Napster eventually was sued, but their popularity debuted the concept of peer to peer sharing (P2P) — not needing to rely on bulky servers to operate a web service and connecting users to each other directly. Guess who was pissed? The big players like ISPs and content providers — for some reason they did not like the idea of control of the network passing out of their hands.
Web 3.0 and challenges
We are soon going to enter a new era of the web where it’s all about personalization and real-time integration between different platforms. However it also has a price tag associated with it. The number of devices connected to internet are growing so quickly that the scale of this problem is even more bigger than we can see today. With the main focus of web 3.0 being on personal assistance, all of these new devices would need to talk to each other — to create intelligence out of the information being generated. The amount of traffic generated out of these new devices will be unimaginable.
What can we do about it?
In order to survive this Internet of Things generation, we need to have a major shift in the way our devices talk to each other. Soon your devices are going to generate massive bits of data. It could be your location, your eating habits or even your information about your health. It would be a major risk to trust our existing internet infrastructure to support this data and traffic. The structure of internet needs to change from a client-server model to a peer to peer model where all our devices should be able to communicate directly with each other. With this new structure, all the devices that you own would be able to connect to each other directly creating distributed intelligence, independent of some servers sitting at the other end of the world. It would also mean that the user will have the power to be a real contributor to the internet without any unwanted restrictions. The personalization and real-time integration of devices would be easier and the whole idea syncs very well with the new age idea of world wide web. That being said, the change is not simple. With the existing routers and firewalls in place all over the world, it will be a nightmare just to make these devices talk to each other seamlessly.
Gain control
The major players like Apple and Google have already started to build their own ecosystems of devices and protocols. The players in the war for autonomy and control over internet have shifted from ISPs and network providers to the Apples and Googles of the world. Meanwhile the ISPs are trying to regain a foothold by regulating access to the services and content they will provide to the end user. It seems that the new age of internet is also bringing with it a new cause to fight for — to reclaim the internet.
Solutions?
The entire debate about net neutrality has created an interesting idea. Users have always paid ISPs for using the internet, sort of a tax on using the pipes. With the net neutrality debate, what became apparent was that nobody wanted to have to pay different prices for using different pipes. All roads on the internet should be priced the same. Airtel/Facebook (internet.org) flipped the conversation on it’s head by saying: the internet is free for the consumer the service pays. This is a pretty good idea, just one problem, the internet they were offering for free was not the internet as we know it but a carved up version of it based on their whims and fancies.
However, it might not be right to throw the baby out with the bath water. What if there were a dramatically different internet, where everybody paid for hosting their data on the internet. If a service wanted to go up on the internet they can, for that they pay a fees to the telcos (they already do, an increased fees if you will, the issue is that Airtel doesn’t make enough money in this model as most of the services are not hosted in India, but overseas, think Facebook, Google, Netflix etc). The user gets the service for free. The important point is that every service should be able to sign up, not a select bunch as is on internet.org or airtel zero. If a customer wants to host his own data he can and just pays telcos for this, only his authorised devices access this data. The internet once again becomes the magical place it once was where everybody can talk to everybody else, all of the internet is made free for the user unless he wants premium. The internets currency now becomes the data.
“Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
– Margaret Mead
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