Does the internet need an update? At our latest TechTea, Adam Uhlíř addressed the growing question of whether the entire infrastructure of the internet should be changed. The world wide web is roughly 25 years old, and while much has evolved, the core mechanism has stayed the same. Some say the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a form of distributed web begun in 2014 by Protocol Labs, may be the answer.
There are three main different types of networks possible. The categories in question are as follows:
Centralized — A system where a single hub controls all branches of a given system. The central controlling node is thus a single point of failure, which will cause the whole system to break down if it stops working properly.
Decentralized — This model is closest to what we currently have. There is no central point of control, but many individual nodes act semi-autonomously within the system. However, our internet is becoming increasingly centralized, in part due to our reliance on a few cloud providers.
Distributed — In this model, many different computers work together to solve a given task or request. This is potentially more efficient than the other models. The IPFS(InterPlanetary File System) is an attempt at a distributed web.
Distributed web
It’s not really new. The earliest example of distributed computing actually goes back to the 1960s with ARPANET (the predecessor of the internet). The original intention was to have a fully distributed network, but with the advent of the world wide web, the architecture shifted to a more decentralized topology.
A distributed system functions on P2P (peer-to-peer) architecture where various nodes combine forces and share resources. Computers “talk” between one another to send and receive content, as in file-sharing platforms like BitTorrent. This system could ultimately improve transfer speeds and save a lot of bandwidth, in part because it prevents unnecessary duplication of a single file every time it’s transferred on a network.
The crucial contribution of IPFS is utilizing content addressing. The internet’s current HTTP-based system uses address URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), which specify where to find a file (i.e. some specific computer on a network that has the file you need). IPFS aims to replace HTTP with addresses that uniquely identify a file and then ask the entire network for the file (picture BitTorrent where many users host a given file). To achieve this, it uses cryptographic hash functions which uniquely map any content to a predefined size string.
Current problems with the internet and uses of distributed web
It’s better for a system not to be reliant on a single backbone. In 2012 a ship dropped an anchor that cut off internet for six African countries. With a distributed system, some content would still be accessible during that kind of accident, even when offline.
A more centralized system is also easier to censor. During the Arab Spring, social media was used to coordinate and spread the word about protests. The government eventually blocked access to these sites. Such censorship relies on the fact that there are only a few outgoing channels for sharing information. In Europe, for example, the internet is more distributed than in the Middle East, which would make this censorship harder to enforce. During the recent Catalan independence dispute, certain websites were blocked by the Spanish government, but were available on IPFS.
Annual internet traffic is increasing rapidly. It will be at 3,300 EB (exobytes) by 2021. For reference it was 1.2 EB in 2016 and 120 PB (petabytes) in 2008. A distributed system would be better equipped to handle the increased traffic.
And as for preparing for the future? If we set up colonies on Mars, accessing information from the Mars network would be much more efficient with a distributed system, where you can fetch a photo from Mars from an Earth-bound computer it’s already being hosted on, instead of waiting six to 45 minutes for the file to travel between planets. Hence, InterPlanetary File System.
Blockchain technology has been a hot topic of late. Blockchain is a prime example of distributed computing put to use. While originally developed for financial purposes with Bitcoin, this is the most popular current use of distributed technology, and if its followers increase, it would be reasonable to assume the general distributed-web shift would be one step closer to happening. Another cryptocurrency called Filecoin is built on top of the IPFS to create a monetized market for file storing.
While switching to a distributed web would be a fundamental change, the transition should be one the average user wouldn’t really recognize. Given the aforementioned issues, one starts to see how a distributed web might be the natural evolution of the internet.
