The Open Internet Boom’s Golden Opportunity

Tech visionaries joined Forbes and DFINITY for a special event to discuss this pivotal moment in the internet’s evolution.

The internet is on the cusp of a game-changing transformation. Emerging decentralized technologies are equipping developers and entrepreneurs to pioneer new business models and services, enabling them to restore an open internet and unlock a new era of opportunity. The coming years will be hugely consequential as this vision becomes real, unleashing a wave of possibilities to rival those of the dot-com and mobile web booms.

Blockchain technology is catalyzing this movement. The Internet Computer, developed by the not-for-profit DFINITY Foundation, is the world’s first web-speed blockchain network with unbounded computational capacity. It reimagines software and IT, fostering interoperability and permissionless innovation through permanent APIs. Recalling the early days of the web, creators and inventors can build code freely and deploy it on the open internet, exploring the limits of their imaginations.

To examine this pivotal moment, Forbes and DFINITY recently partnered on a special virtual event, “How a New Internet Will Completely Reimagine Your Business Model.” Participants included Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys; Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation; Alan Emtage, who originally developed Archie, the first internet search engine; Brad Templeton, who founded ClariNet, the world’s first dot-com; and DFINITY founder and chief scientist Dominic Williams.

Discussions ranged from the challenges of a closed internet and the value of decentralized technology to the open internet boom’s potential to transform businesses and services and revitalize the web ecosystem.

Watch videos from the event below:

A Glimpse Into the ConsenSys Membrane

Joseph Lubin discusses his introduction to blockchain and his growing involvement with the field. “Decentralized protocol technology enables us to move value to the internet and to build these trustworthy collaboration platforms so that people and small companies can participate with full economic and political agency,” he says. “I think in decentralized protocol systems we found the foundation of a new business model.” He recounts how he co-founded Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin and went on to launch the blockchain software technology company ConsenSys, and how they support the vision of an open internet.

Dangerous Technology

Cindy Cohn recalls how encryption was once classified along with munitions in the US, as well as her experience in successfully challenging such federal restrictions — an effort that continues today against legal blockers to encryption, interoperability, and reverse-engineering. “We’ve become so worshipping of this platform model that we’re really locking out the ways that you continue to innovate in this world,” she says. “I think what we need to do is to make [Big Tech giants] not so giant — make them a node on our giant distributed world.”

Jim Zemlin explains how the Linux kernel is the basis for a variety of open-source operating systems (e.g., Android and Chrome), which together power virtually all server-side software while dominating supercomputers and smartphones alike. He also discusses how entrepreneurs can disrupt Big Tech and still make money doing it while being open and working cooperatively. “Our organization,” he says, “sees billions of dollars in market cap made through startups that base a new company on an interesting, new open-source project.”

The Open Internet Boom

Dominic Williams explains how the Internet Computer extends the functionality of the internet from a global network to also operate as an end-to-end public computer. This open environment can be used to build enterprise systems, hyper-scale internet services, websites, and DeFi applications that are secure by default. “We want people to abandon traditional IT,” he says. “That means we want people to abandon cloud services, content distribution networks, firewalls, databases — all of that, the whole stack — and just begin building by writing smart contracts and pushing them to the Internet Computer. We think that this will provide humanity with immense benefits.”

How to Avoid Repeating History

Alan Emtage and Brad Templeton discuss their experiences fostering the early internet, Emtage having developed the world’s first internet search engine and Templeton having founded the world’s first dot-com. They provide perspective on the explosion of network technology over the years and the negative effects we’ve seen. “One of the things I regret the most about what Google did to the world was that we only really found advertising as the way to monetize activity on the internet,” says Templeton. “It’s driven the internet to be responsive to the wishes of advertisers more than the wishes of users…. Where your money comes from is going to control what you do.”

Emtage noted the internet’s loss of transparency, with no public insight into how seemingly omnipotent companies like Google operate, as well as the rise of misinformation and “the ability to manipulate large swaths of the population in ways that are fundamentally undemocratic.”

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