Why The Cloud Will Dissipate

Monthly costs, annoying ads, spyware, lack of privacy, lack of control, limited storage, limited use of media, corporate centralization. At Daplie, we believe cloud services are advertently and inadvertently limiting our personal Internet freedom. It’s time we got the Internet we deserve.

The Internet is an oligarchy and users are, well in the words of Don Henley:

We are like sheep without a shepherd/We don’t know how to be alone/So we wander ‘round this desert/And wind up following the wrong gods home.

Those wrong gods we so willfully follow? Amazon. Google. Facebook. Dropbox, et al. In short, we traded our privacy and freedom for convenience. Internet freedom: sacrificed on the altar of marketing. Idealism died and the Internet has become so integrated into our lives that we can no longer live without it, regardless of what it costs.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, spoke about creating a Magna Carta for the Internet based on openness, privacy, and control; while limiting corporate centralization and warning against the filter bubble. (You can see his Ted talk from 2014 here)

Sir Tim is right to envision a sort of user revolution. Here’s why:

A Few Humongous Entities Control So Much

In light of privacy changes, and surveillance overreach, we should be very concerned about nearly all data travelling through or residing on a handful of centers. And not just for privacy and security reasons. Centralized cloud computing is akin to dial-up: all data roads lead to one central location first, before going off to their real destinations. Think of a letter mailed to your neighbor down the street going first to a central processing plant in Lichtenstein to be coded and rerouted back to your neighbor. Lot’s of inefficiencies, a single point of failure, low bandwidth, congested pipelines — -and no other options. An example is the recent acquisition of Yahoo by Verizon. Now all your spending and location habits are gathered into one place so more advertising can bombard you, wherever you go. Do we really want one company to know so much about us?

In a December 12, 2013 article in New Yorker Magazine by Janus Kopfstein, he writes:

In 2010, a team of young programmers announced Diaspora, a privacy-centric social network, to challenge Facebook’s centralized dominance. A year later, Eben Moglen, a law professor and champion of the Free Software movement, proposed a similar solution called the Freedom Box. The device he envisioned was to be a small computer that plugs into your home network, hosting files, enabling secure communication, and connecting to other boxes when needed. It was considered a call to arms — you alone would control your data.

The right idea, but not many answered the call. Mostly because convenience is priority one among us Internet-dependent humans. We want access to our stuff and to our friends with nothing more than a thumbprint. Mini-computers like Raspberry Pi could give us a personal server, but it would require some basic computer skills and we masses don’t even want to change our own oil, let alone configure a mini-personal server that does everything Dropbox does. Why bother?

We Bought Into The Benefits. We Just Don’t Know The Consequences.

Devices are no longer integrated into our lives; they are our daily lives. Conglomerate cloud services are much like early power companies daisy-chained across the country. For now, most of us don’t mind that our data is being harvested, floating around at risk, and costing a monthly fee. We don’t mind that a few monopolies are governing the flow of information on massive tunnels with millions of access points. We’re willing to take that slow, unsafe train because it stops right outside our door. We don’t even protest much when our music and movies don’t play well across platforms. Convenience trumps everything. And decentralizing to build a much better experience would be a painful process. Or so it would seem. Underlying that “make it easy” mindset is an alter ego that wants “Make it cool, make it mine, give me a Tesla experience.”

It’s A Performance Economy, Stupid.

Think of the history of electric cars. The first editions were gutless golf carts, but hey, you didn’t have to pay for gas. So, people bought them. Enter Elon Musk. He understood consumers really want performance first, so he made the fastest car. And by the way, it’s electric. Brilliant. Personal servers are the future of the Internet. They deliver freedom and control, lower cost, more storage, better privacy and security, cross-platform performance and access from anywhere. They enable us to create useful federations: decentralized networks that are more relevant, more private and secure, more intuitive to the way we use the Internet. A personal server can do everything the virtual cloud can do; it costs less and gives you total control. Oh, and it is convenient. Isn’t that exactly how we want the Internet to perform?

Daplie. The World’s First Home Server for Everyone.