World Wide Web founder wants to combine blockchain and internet technologies

Rage Review : Recently, Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, and Vint Cerf, an Internet legend, attended the first decentralized Internet Summit held by Internet Archive in San Francisco. Quentin Hardy of the New York Times attended the meeting and made a brief summary. The mainstream view is that the current Internet is actually decentralized, but it is still hindered by individual social problems. Therefore, it calls for the establishment of unified norms, which involve the World Wide Web itself. The main views of the meeting were warmly welcomed by the masses.

Translation: Annie_Xu

World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and other top computer scientists recently gathered at the Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco to discuss the next phase of the internet; attendees included Brewster Kahle, director of the nonprofit Internet Archive, and internet activists.

Tim Berners-Lee

The founders of IPFS, Dat Project, WebTorrent, Tahoe-LAFS, zcash, Zeronet.io, BitTorrent, Ethereum, BigChainDB, Blockstack, InterledgerMediachain, MaidSafe, Storj, and others demonstrated their technologies and answered questions.

This is the first decentralized Internet Summit held by Internet Archive, calling on dreamers and doers to work together to steadily achieve a better Internet environment. Internet legend Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet consultant and vice president, and well-known author Cory Doctorow can be seen at the conference.

Quentin Hardy

Quentin Hardy of the New York Times attended the summit and summarized the key points.

"Computer scientists at a conference on Tuesday discussed ways new payment technologies could give individuals greater control over their money. Musicians might be able to sell their work directly, bypassing middlemen like Apple Inc.'s iTunes, if they tinkered with the so-called ledger system that underlies digital currencies. New websites might be able to offer micropayments for new articles, rather than relying on revenue from Web ads."

Berners-Lee said:

"The Internet is already decentralized; but it is monopolized by large search engines, social networks, Twitter, etc.; so we don't have a technical problem, but a social problem."

Doctorow opened his speech by saying, “Stupid laws and benevolent monarchs can ruin the decentralized internet”; it’s like “Ulysses pacts”: when your willpower is strong enough to resist the temptations you encounter when you’re tired or demoralized, you’re bargaining with yourself; so how have these improved the internet so far, and how can new and better norms ensure a decentralized internet in the future?

Cory Doctorow

Doctorow's Boing Boing blog post says that Jeremy Gillula and Noah Swartz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) were on hand to demonstrate Certbot, a tool for issuing free encryption certificates, and they documented the event and my talk in detail, with the following excellent summary:

“He called on the audience to build the Ulysses protocol for a decentralized internet now, because everything fails when times get hard. If we want to protect the principles and values ​​we hold dear, we need to design systems that embrace those principles so they can’t be weakened or compromised. In other words, we need to build systems now so that five, ten, or even twenty years from now, when the systems we build succeed or can track users, no matter how much pressure we face (whether technical, legal, or monetary) it won’t happen.”

After all, "the reason the Internet is closed right now is that you and I made the most appropriate compromise at the moment; then they made another compromise, a small concession; and then another concession." "All of us are a mixture of short-term and long-term planning, and we need to give each other moral support. Use words to support the ethical norms of the decentralized Internet and unify the form of an open decentralized Internet." Only in this way can we resist the advocacy of restoring centralization.

"What principles should we unify? Cory proposed two categories. The first is that when a computer receives contradictory instructions from its owner and a distant source at the same time, the owner's subjective will will take precedence; that is, no digital rights management (DRM), that is, no World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The second is an absolute legal prohibition on revealing the truth about the security of the systems we rely on; this means we must eliminate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), because it makes it legally uncertain for security researchers to disclose vulnerabilities in DRM internal systems."

"How did the crowd react to this loud call for action? A standing ovation."

Giulio Prisco of Bitcoin Magazine noted that the summit website has information on current projects, reading material and links to the Decentralized Internet discussion group, and all summit talks, panel sessions, and FAQ discussions are recorded live and available on the Internet Archive’s YouTube channel.