Will Distributed Data Networks Bring Digital Freedom?
Distributed data networks hold the promise of unfettered free speech. They could liberate us from the big tech company monopolies and reduce the tyranny of censorship. But are we ready?
How Did It Begin?
The Internet was born with big promises of freedom. It was to be a place where people could freely share data with one another, freed of the shackles of our fleshy substance. It was considered a promised land, where individuals were sovereign, with their words existing in a space beyond states and their borders. It was a noble aspiration. The frontier spirit encapsulated in world without physical limitations.
Few have said it better than John Perry Barlow, in A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace¹ from 1996:
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” ¹
What Went Wrong?
Typing in 2020, clearly it didn’t go according to Barlow’s plan. Data has become siphoned, segregated and siloed. Governments have strengthened their grip on the gateways providing access to the Internet, blocking servers, spying on data in transit and suffocating freedom in the name of keeping people safe.
While the Great Firewall of China may have received the focus from those in The West, restrictions are happening all around us. Barely a month goes by without government officials calling for encryption back doors, to allow their spying on our lives to continue.
It isn’t just the rules and regulations that are choking off the Internet either. Those who run the gateways are also given enormous power.
Search engines are the on-ramps for many people, with their results dictating what they learn. They can censor or promote traffic to meet their own agenda.
Social networks have also created walled gardens where your data becomes their data. You become their asset, to maximise their profits. They control your feeds, restricting it as they please, diverting your attention for their benefit.
Intellectual property laws have been stretched to the limits. Laws which were originally intended to protect the consumer and encourage invention, now frequently have the opposite effect. Data is corralled, metered and monopoly control of it is traded for profit.
These centralised systems also provide the perfect honey pot for those in power. Ordering these behemoths to hand over data about you, based on little more than a suspicion, becomes easy. While governments may bemoan these monopolies, they provide turn-key intelligence gathering services, that they can tap at any time.
Must We Be Kept Safe To Maintain Our Freedoms?
Freedom and Safe are loaded words. They can mean many things to many people.
Should we have our more extreme views curtailed for the perceived good of society? Should we be encouraged to vote for the right party or person for the same perception? Who decides what should be perceived?
Few would disagree that some data is extremely sensitive. Abusive images are deeply disturbing. Videos of loved ones being tortured or decapitated is disgusting. Instructions on how to create weapons of mass destruction is despicable.
Then there is the moral argument for protection from terrorism. No one wants their lives ruined or taken away by extreme, violent, actions. Spying on those who may perpetrate such acts would seem like the compassionate thing to do.
While ever there is a choice, governments will make a moral decision to protect people at any cost. It would be remiss for them not to do so. Citizens will demand it. There is a cost though — it impacts on the liberty of everyone who is not a threat.
What If We Have No Choice?
“First they ignore you; then they abuse you; then they crack down on you and then you win.” ²
We have seen distributed systems becoming more popular over the last decades. The first big revolution was peer-to-peer file sharing, primarily for music and videos. Technical progress had made copying digital audio/visual formats trivial. In a response to aggressive profiteering by the intellectual property holders, this new technology was put to work and freed films and music to the masses.
Eventually, the intellectual property holders capitulated, after spending many years bleeding money in the courts. Official digital distribution channels opened up, at a price which was affordable to consumers. This wasn’t before many iterations of peer-to-peer sharing software were made, each being more resistant to censorship. The official distributors must continue to compete on value with these channels.
More recently, we have seen Bitcoin bring the blockchain to the world. This has led to a proliferation of distributed currencies, tokens and smart contracts. Given currencies are usually within the remit of the state machinery, regulation has been used to curtail access. Despite this, the blockchain has remained steadfast and has put pressure on banks and governments to improve their financial solutions.
What we see here, is a progression from resistance to acceptance. Was there ever a choice to stop these technologies from flourishing or was it inevitable that they were here to stay? Co-opting them or working around them seems to have been the only viable long term solution.
What Happens Next?
“Everything that can be decentralized, will be decentralized.” ³
There is a passage of thought that everything leads towards decentralisation on the Internet. Maybe this is in response to an ever present force of centralisation and control? Regardless, it is a theme that has been repeated many times in the short history of the Internet.
What could be the next big decentralisation? With blockchains decentralising small, transactional, data, I feel this is just the beginning — the next step will be decentralising and distributing large, bulk, data too.
In some ways, we already have large decentralised data. The likes of BitTorrent, Sia, Storj and others have attempted to use peer-to-peer technologies in various forms. So far though, they have not displaced the traditional web, founded on the classic client-server architecture. Ease of use, data security, data availability, and programmable features seem to have limited their appeal so far. Maybe a combination of these technologies with others will bridge these gaps, but I suspect it will take another technological leap instead.
There is one promising alternative to using blockchains or simple peer-to-peer solutions in the shape of Maidsafe’s SafeNetwork. While long in the works, the promise it shows is tantalising. A concoction of new approaches make the design unique in many ways, beyond the scope of this article (The SAFE Network Primer is an excellent resource). What is within scope, is the impact on what it — or an alternative solution — will deliver.
This new technology goes way beyond decentralising simple transactional data. When data is uploaded, it is encrypted, sliced up, then scattered across the network. There is no single point of failure, as the network is a patchwork of many sections. Each of these sections is responsible for its own security and the storage of data allocated to it. Section nodes can be started anywhere, resulting in data being geographically dispersed for data security and censorship resistance. All of this is managed autonomously, with the network self-healing when nodes come and go.
What Will The Technology Deliver?
When either SafeNetwork or another technology of a similar scale is launched, the need for the existing client/server architecture will be reduced. While data will be addressable directly, the physical location of where it is stored will not be known and nor will users care. The shredded data will simply exist nebulously in a distributed cloud.
While the blockchain may seem fast compared to traditional banking — taking minutes instead of days to clear funds — it will seem pedestrian relative to a fully distributed data network. Transactions will take moments instead of minutes, with only the related sections needing to do any work. As the rest of the network does not need to know, duplicated effort is limited to only that which is required for security.
Transactions could also be any size. They wouldn’t be limited to a small payload, as with a traditional blockchain, they could be as big as the network itself — terabytes of data. As every node does not need a copy, there isn’t the same storage constraint as a blockchain. No time delay to allow a decentralised system to sync up is needed, in contrast with blockchains. As soon as a section has processed the transaction, the data is ready to be accessed. When data is to be made public, it will be held in perpetuity.
What Will The Impact Be On Society?
In short, massive.
We are used to a world where anything which risks the safety of citizens is shut down. Anything which flies too close to the law is removed. Anything which is considered extreme is blocked and user accounts are disabled.
None of this is possible in a world with decentralised data networks.
Are we ready? I don’t think so, but history has taught us that it may be impossible to stop. Much like with peer-to-peer file downloads and decentralised currencies, these technologies are designed without a single point of failure. They exist to thrive, even when powerful groups would wish them to die.
So what can be done? I believe humanity must mature to take full ownership of their actions. We cannot continue to expect governments to act as our data guardians indefinitely. We must use a combination of self control and common sense to decide what data we and our children consume. Ideally, by distilling a user’s wishes in software, to filter out the obscene. Some of this may align with the law and in other cases it will not — the law may need to follow where society leads.
Are we not at risk without mass surveillance? I suspect we are already well beyond this point. Criminals must already use encryption, especially sophisticated ones. Their communication channels must be difficult to monitor and it isn’t going to get any easier, with or without distributed data networks. Encryption has been with us for decades and its use has steadily increased.
What will we gain? Freedom and empowerment, free of censorship. A platform which everyone can share to either broadcast their message or keep it to themselves and their friends. A place where money is separate from the state and is simple and easy to use. A technology which needs little maintenance, self healing or scaling up, when required. A network which anyone can participate in, without fear of their data — their identity — being compromised and monetised.
It will be a brave new world, where we can all be sovereign when storing, accessing or sharing our data.
The new home of Mind.
[1] John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996).
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
[2] Workshop Of Nonviolence Institute summed up Gandhi’s philosophy in an issue of WIN Magazine (1982).
[3] David A. Johnston, Johnston’s Law (2014).
http://www.johnstonslaw.org/
