Our lives are intertwined with the Internet. Our media, our communication, our favorite services, all live online. The "cloud" has evolved from a novelty to an intimate part of our everyday reality. People have already started wondering if our dependence to being online is healthy. But now that we're here, how can we ever go back to living without it?
Let me start with a short disclaimer. This is not going to be an essay infused with nostalgia of the "good ol' days" and cynicism towards the Internet. I love the concept and potential of being online. Everything I produce is published online. My main concern is the way my work is planned and executed, so it is relevant in the upcoming years. Hope you feel the same...
Some think of it as a network of servers, some as a "series of tubes" but truth of the matter is that the Internet has been reduced down to a few destinations most people frequently visit. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Netflix to name a few of a short list of services really, that gather the bulk of Internet traffic. The so called information superhighway is nothing but a few main roads and a slew of pathways.
At the same time we're witnessing a booming startup community. Thousands of startups around the world have blossomed and their online projects are gaining, more or less, encouraging traction. Unsurprisingly, the main objective for every one of these startups is to dominate the market and become the leader in their product category. This is the proposed practice, established by their predecessors, setting up their business model so there are a lot of "losers" and only one "winner".
Without a doubt, centralizing is closely related to monopolies.
Analyzing this business practice can be a long discussion but just to tap on the reasons for this behavior, we can find its origins in both the public, that values brand recognition, and the business investors that felt shaken by the 90s dot-com bubble, thus requiring "guarantees" for business growth by the "millennial" startups.
If we are to look forward, lets take a step back and think with first principals, focusing on what users want. In an abstracted way, for any online service, lets very broadly say that users basically want:
- A simple service with an intuitive UI
- Immediate access to their data
- Their personal safety while interacting with the above
Reviewing the first of the user requirements, this is the one area current generation apps are trying to excel and there's a healthy competition between companies to offer the best product. Considering how rapidly evolving this industry is, its surprising how most developers are up to speed with the latest standards.
You can argue that web technologies are still immature and there's a long way before we can call these services "real" apps, but the road is wide open and things are only going to improve in the future.
Admittedly online services are passing this requirement with flying colors, truly catering to their users needs.
It seems like there's always a caveat to delivering content these days. You can have availability of some content, under certain conditions. The Netflix catalogue is constantly updated but never includes everything you like. You can listen to any track on Spotify but you can't own any of the tracks. You can use your iTunes collection only where iTunes is available...
In addition, content that you own on one platform isn't available on another. Choose a different client and you'll have to repurchase all your apps, music or games. Content is locked and guarded and I'm not the first to say that the time is imminent when users will stop tolerating walled gardens.
In this regard, online services are failing the second user requirement.
Things get a bit worse when it comes to user generated content. Not only is user content not available between platforms, but in many cases it's out of the user's control. Very famously, Instagram stirred the waters by contesting author rights, although they publicly retracted their policy. Even so, most services host their users data and have every liberty to "manage" that data any way they want.
Owning the user data was one of the aforementioned "guarantees", so investors feel their money translates to real property. With that in mind, it is obvious that for as long as you upload data to a third-party server you have no real control over it.
To add to this, there are an increasing number of mishaps where private data found their way to the public. Services have tried to openly address this, especially after a few "unfortunate" incidents stirred reactions from the mainstream audience. The level of security users expect though cannot be achieved when the data is so closely tied to each other and with the service.
The above assumes that the administrators of these services sincerely regard highly their users privacy. Lets role-play for a minute and try to indulge ourselves into their mindset. Think:
"I will lure people into creating accounts with heavy marketing. I will record their activity and own all their data. I will lock them down into doing things my way and make it really difficult for them to move away. My primary goal is to dominate the market. And if someone leaks anything, I'm not responsible."
It's obvious that what might've started as cautious business practices has turned into a villain recipe. Services are remarkably failing the third user requirement.
A pessimist would probably assess that any reaction is pointless and the only "true solution" is abstinence. Just go off the grid and stop participating in this charade...
Before we make any hasty decisions, there is a pattern here that's commonly repeating throughout history, and if we identify it maybe we can stop demonizing the current state of the Internet.
The pattern can be outlined like this: Given the source of a specific phenomenon, we initially observe concentrated growth at the source's origin until it is saturated; and then the phenomenon spreads out in its periphery, creating a wider area with a decreased growth rate, but with a broader impact.
We see this in city development; A small town builds up around a center until its population reaches critical mass and then its people flee from the city and relocate to its suburbs. We see it in biology, in how viruses or insect infestations spread. We also see it in higher intellectual aspects of our civilization, most notably how knowledge itself was spread.
It's hard to believe that for centuries, knowledge was reserved in central locations; big libraries that contained only original works and hand-written copies. Knowledge was centralized and in the hands of the few. With the advent of the printing press we were finally able make book copies with ease and humanity saw knowledge become widespread and highly available. More importantly, this change increased the freedom of the individual and liberated knowledge from the hands of the few.
The printing press decentralized knowledge — and it was the natural step in its course in history, following the same pattern. Similarly, the centralized nature of the Internet we know now is not a grim reality we should fear or avoid but merely a necessary step towards its natural evolution; a more mature, decentralized Internet that will be liberated from the control of the few.
So if the natural progression of the Internet is to be decentralized, why not just focus on that, right? Lets just wipe the board clean and start thinking in those terms. In fact, this has been the interest of a lot of programmers and in recent years many articles have sprung supporting this idea; talking about NAS ecosystems, P2P ecosystems and so on...
It is clear, from the existing discussion on the subject, that many people have different takes on how this reality can be viable in the future. Although I find all the concepts I came across interesting I think there are two common obstacles that will block any of these ideas in practice.
First, the requirement that someone needs to own and power their own private equipment to run these systems. This kills mobility and neutralizes one of the main benefits of the Web: the ability to free us from the physical and allow access in an abstracted way. As an example, if I leave on a trip I shouldn't be expected to keep my equipment online back home, if I want access to my media.
The second is the interface. Any data requires an interface and that's created with software. Installing software locally on private equipment to access the data, possibly different types of software to create interfaces for different types of data, throws us back to the PC era. Simply put, installing applications locally will be a thing of the past.
In the brief history of computing there was never a time where the mainstream audience adopted a solution that required a lot of technical skills and maintenance needs. This should not be expected to change any time soon.
Lets return and review our current Internet with a different eye, considering the above. Why do we really want to discard the one thing services are doing right? Interfaces.
Online services that have become popular offer good solutions to common problems, like sharing your photos or sending text messages. The issue is not what they are offering but how they deal with the data and in general their terms of service. A marriage between a centralized UI and decentralized data might strike the right balance we are looking for.
We already have a significant example of how this decentralized concept could work, and it's been here for a while: Google. Technically Google is a search engine but practically it plays the role of an info desk for our everyday questions. You ask Google a question, and Google answers you. The information you're looking for is managed mostly by third-parties but there is a common interface for everyone, aggregating all public information under one, familiar UI. Needless to say that Google doesn't own, nor takes responsibility for the search results it presents. It just offers a convenient UI and plays the role of a middle man, pointing you in the "right" direction.
To highlight media management specifically, this is how iTunes Podcasts work today! The content is decentralized and aggregated automatically using RSS feeds, then presented to all users with the same unified UI. Imagine the same concept being used for other types of data, even private data, using similar interfaces. Anyone could host their media in a private folder on the cloud and then pick one service or another based on the UI they wanted to use.
With that arrangement, everyone would own their personal data but the interface is common for all, and yet optional. The user doesn't get locked down to any specific service and the data can move from one platform to another seemlessly. Servers will adhere more closely to their name, instead of playing the role of bulk data stores. On the business end, services like this could be ad-supported with a paid upgrade path to an ad-free UI, using online subscriptions. A decentralized service that provides a common interface can keep both the users and the business happy.
Even if it's a common pattern and it seems to address all three basic user requirements, it's still under debate if a decentralized Internet is the future. What seems apparent is that creating services that accommodate users by connecting to remotely hosted data may grant us the freedom to be online on our own terms.
The Internet was touted to be the most significant human invention since the printing press, and it may well be so, but it has some way to go till it reaches the maturity to achieve what the printing press has: decentralizing our lives.