"The struggle over digital infrastructure": Commentary by Robin Berjon, deputy director of the IPFS Foundation. InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol for a peer-to-peer distributed file system.
"By and large, the Internet seems more akin to a failed state, at best an undergoverned space where fragments of essential infrastructure are provided at the whim of local warlords."
"The cyberlibertarian vision of yesteryears is at the root of the myriad problems confronting global digital governance today."
The cyberlibertarian vision of yesteryear was that bad, huh?
"One important property of the Internet is its adhesion to the end-to-end principle, one formulation of which is: 'Nothing should be done in the network that can be efficiently done in an end-system.' This may seem somewhat abstract, but we can see the end-to-end principle at work in other infrastructural systems. For instance, if you invent a new type of light bulb or toaster, you don't need to change the lighting or toasting functions of the electrical grid."
"Seen from 2024, this might strike readers as obvious but it wasn't always so. Before the Internet emerged as the more successful alternative, it was competing for funding and attention with a much more telecoms-centric model. Under the telecoms model, intelligence resides in the network rather than at the edges."
"Crucially, intermediary capture does not only describe the world we had when networking was dominated by telecoms operators, it is also an apt description of the world we now have in which many infrastructure layers of our digital spaces have been captured by tech platforms."
"Global majority countries (as well as most global minority ones) are entirely right to feel colonized by Google and other platforms, in a very literal sense. The Internet is 'the infrastructure of all infrastructure' and having one's critical infrastructure controlled and exploited by a foreign entity is colonial. But the way forward does not lie with a reversal to the telecoms model."
Ok. What do to, then?
