Solid and the re-decentralization of the Internet

Summary

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has launched a new project aimed at re-decentralizing the Internet.

The Internet is a core part of modern life, and any technical characteristics affect the user's experience, thus forming an ideological norm. Decentralization itself is not a characteristic that the Internet must have. In fact, with the development of Web 2.0 and the mobile Internet, the degree of centralization of the Internet is getting higher and higher, and the surplus that ordinary users can obtain is getting smaller and smaller. In response, many new technologies target the re-decentralization of the internet. The Solid project is a reinterpretation of account and data ownership. However, such an attempt conflicts with the Internet shape shaped by large companies, and thus develops slowly. Raising public awareness is the most important step in the battle for Internet ownership. This article will describe the origin and current status of the Solid project, with some comments.

Email and phone change

Changing phones is probably the least smart part of the entire "smartphone" experience. Backup and restore of contacts is easy. The app list is a little harder. Crossing the Apple/Android boundary, if there are no two versions, only functional alternatives can be found. App data is even more of a headache. Through the application of account management data, it can be retrieved from the server side. If you don't provide it, you'll have to figure it out yourself. Phones from the same manufacturer may offer "phone clones" to transfer data from some common applications. If it is a niche software, it can only rely on the backup and import functions of the software itself, and there are very few software that provide such functions.

In this way, the application of managing data through the account is indeed more convenient. But this convenience does not come without a price. First, accounts provide a convenient way to track data. Second, applications such as WeChat, even if they have an account function, do not provide data storage. Finally, there are some apps that require additional fees for data synchronization and backup.

The above are just the difficulties encountered with the same software. What if it's a different software?

Want to communicate with friends on different platforms, so you need to install several social networking software. Playlists on one music software cannot be transferred to another music software, which makes the latter's recommendations completely unappetizing. A place saved on one map software needs to be marked again on another.

All of these may be very annoying to some people, but most of them have become accustomed to it. Mobile Internet, it should be like this, isn't it?

Žižek pointed out in "Violence" that the purest form of ideology is the absence of ideology (Žižek, 2008). That is to say, when an ideology has taken such a dominant position, it is difficult for people to regard it as a specific ideology and think that things should be the way they are. Without awareness, there is no way to think. This is particularly evident in technology. Technology is often seen as an ideologically neutral tool. People who use software often forget that software is also written by people. The way software works is also a human invention, not a natural one. The theory of technology neutrality not only ignores the historical background of technology generation, but also ignores an important factor affecting the development of technology: path dependence. To illustrate this point, we only need to think about it, is the usage scenario of the mobile Internet described above necessarily so?

In fact, there is an application of the mobile Internet that is used in a completely different way - e-mail. Email is no problem at all when changing phones. Because any client can log in to any email account. Switching to different clients on the same phone, whether it is contacts or emails, can also be automatically synchronized. You can receive mails in one mailbox from another mailbox, forward one mailbox to another mailbox, and even transfer all the data in one mail to another mailbox. E-mail is rated as the best application in the entire mobile Internet, I think no one will object.

There is only one small problem, though. That is, e-mail is not a mobile Internet application. Long before the invention of the smartphone, e-mail began riding the currents across the web. That's what makes the email experience so good. The Internet has developed so far, but it has found the best experience on one of its earliest applications. The resulting reflections will help you understand the goals of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project.

What's the problem

Simply put, the crux of the matter is the account . Let’s first think about it, what is an account? Why do you need an account?

The original account, an avatar of a person in the digital space, served as an identity marker. The simplest account is a nickname. Many people's nicknames are different from their real names, indicating the difference between real-space and digital-space identities. On different platforms, they tend to use the same nickname. Such nicknames are also called "handlers", which reflect the coherence of the same identity in different application spaces. In the early applications such as IRC and BBS, the account is nothing more than password-protected, the right to use a certain name.

The rise of modern accounts is accompanied by the arrival of the Web 2.0 era. Different from the early static websites, the biggest feature of websites in the Web 2.0 era is dynamic. Different users access the same address and can obtain different content. Personalized customization brings new business models. To achieve personalization, the server needs the ability to distinguish between different users and remember previous interactions. Thus, state was first introduced to the World Wide Web. The earliest technology to maintain state is the cookie. But what the cookie actually lets the server remember is the interaction with the machine, not the human interaction. Therefore, when multiple people use the same machine, or when one person uses multiple machines, cookies cannot be used.

In this context, modern accounts are designed to help servers differentiate between different users. This is achieved by using an identity that has a strong correspondence with the individual. Typically, this refers to a mobile phone number or email. It is not difficult to see that if the accounts that can be logged in through the same email address are counted as one account, it is believed that most people do not have many accounts.

The emergence of such accounts facilitates data migration. All data can be stored on the server as long as it is guaranteed that the server can clearly distinguish users. Transfer to local when needed. Only one cache is kept locally for acceleration, but it is not necessary. The only limitation of data backup is the storage capacity of the server and the transmission speed of the network. From the early days of only a few megabytes of mailboxes, to the current cloud services that can back up the entire mobile phone data, the technology is very similar.

But that's not the whole story. Internet companies have gradually found another use for accounts: access to users' data. Why get data? Because the data itself has value.

As a shopping site, knowing which items are viewed the most is valuable, but knowing who is viewed the most may be even more valuable. A simple example can illustrate the benefits of personalized recommendations. Suppose a shopping site has an advertising space. A milk powder company and a cartoon company both want to compete for this advertising space, bidding 110 yuan and 100 yuan respectively. According to the principle of second-price auction, the milk powder company finally won the advertising space for 100 yuan. But the shopping site later discovered that its users were made up of two groups, one parent with new children and one teenager. Since it is difficult to sell milk powder even if it is shown advertisements to teens, it is also wasteful to show cartoons to parents. At this time, the shopping website can only display milk powder advertisements to parents and cartoon advertisements to teenagers, and charge 60 yuan each.

Before and after comparison, the same advertising space, due to the personalized advertising, the shopping website will earn 60 * 2 - 100 = 20 yuan more. The milk powder advertiser saves 100 - 60 = 40 yuan. Comic book advertisers also got the chance to place ads at lower-than-expected prices. And users can also see advertisements that are relevant to them, that is, closer to their needs. Isn't it a perfect win-win situation?

The question is the last point, what is "close to need" advertising? This statement is self-contradictory. Because of real demand, no advertisement is needed to create. Even without advertising, parents buy milk powder to meet their needs. The point of the advertisement is not to kindly remind parents that it is time to buy milk powder, but to "persuasion" parents to buy this brand of milk powder, not another brand. In fact, there may be another brand of milk powder that is more in line with parents' needs.

The same can be used to facilitate the production of data itself. Facebook, for example, found that if it made users angry, users would use it more often, so they could get more opportunities to place ads. Such an algorithm rewards recommending content that makes it angry, and what content can make users angry more than fake news with opposing political views? Similar recommendations, autoplay, these are all efforts to keep users on the platform forever. Netflix bluntly points out that its biggest competitor is the natural sleep of humans .

Advertising and addiction mechanisms, in the final analysis, are not to meet the existing needs of users, but to "convince" users to believe that they have some needs that they did not have before. They use psychological weaknesses to interfere and interfere with rational thinking. attacks, thereby exploiting users for their own benefit.

One of the most important links is to manage the user's data through the account. Manage, not just store, but analyze and utilize. It is not difficult to find that all big companies in the mobile Internet era use this as their business model .

Analysis of this is not uncommon. A description of the three-way marketplace that has been handed down since the days of television: when you use a free service, you become the product. It’s just that with the development of technology, the size and power of the attention economy has grown far beyond what it used to be. On the Chinese Internet, there is a more succinct statement: traffic monetization. Therefore, after careful consideration, it is not difficult to find that the user is actually doing labor when using the product. The product produced is data. This data is used to personalize ad delivery, or to increase usage time, thereby increasing ad placement.

How is email different?

The format of the email address is "username@servername", such as username@example.com. In general applications, only the user name is written, for example, there is only the expression "username on Facebook", and there is no format such as username@facebook. On Twitter, just use @username to mark this as a username.

Explicitly writing out the hostname means that the same client can handle users on different servers, and it also means that the server relinquishes control over the client's choice. In contrast, to use Facebook's server, you must use Facebook's client (web page or application).

Email user data is kept on the server, decoupled from the client. Between servers, between servers and clients, follow open mail exchange protocols (such as SMTP, POP3). And never heard of the public "WeChat Agreement", or "Facebook Agreement".

It is through the internal secret agreement that the Internet company has realized the monopoly of the entire service process. Users cannot see that data is collected, transmitted, used, and naturally cannot be managed.

All services with network effects also have a natural monopoly. The so-called network effect is that the value of a product to users depends in part on the number of users who use the product. The value of an apple to me does not increase because thousands of people eat the same apple, but thousands of people who use the same iPhone as me increase the value of the iPhone. Because this scale will attract more developers to develop on this platform. In contrast, social software with only one user is worthless.

Products with natural monopoly should be provided as public services. For example, tap water, a person does not want to install five sets of tap water systems at home, check the water price and quality every day, and let them compete. On the contrary, tap water, as a public service, has a legal monopoly status by a service provider, and accordingly, such a service cannot be aimed at profit.

Social networks also have network effects, so they also have natural monopoly. Why can't they be used as public services?

In fact, absolutely.

Solid's response

Decentralization doesn't mean like running water with government-certified service providers, but rather a network of many individuals. The so-called Solid is to separate the application data mentioned above from the client. Everyone chooses their own data server, called a Pod in Solid. Equivalent to the server address in the mail. Various structured application data are stored here. For example, messages that can be used by Twitter and information used by Weibo; friend relationships that can be used by WeChat and friend relationships used by Telegram.

Solid applications are equivalent to mail clients. You can log into any client, such as Twitter, using your Solid account (called WebID in Solid terminology). When you log in, you can choose what data to provide to Twitter, such as which friends are connected, whether to allow access to geographic information for each message, and more. It is also possible to customize how it is used, such as whether it can be used for personalized advertising and, if used, whether to pay the data owner. Whether data is allowed to be retained when leaving a service, or must it be deleted.

Whenever Twitter generates a new piece of data, such as adding a friend. This information is passed back to the Pod and added to your data. This way, when switching clients, you can automatically import it into another application.

In addition to decoupling from the application, controlling the data yourself can also provide more management possibilities. You can see what data you have generated, delete unwanted data, and even sell data for profit.

For developers, Solid's vision is also very good. Applications can be developed as long as data standards are followed. Data generated by different brands of health management hardware (bands, sphygmomanometers, scales, etc.) can be used by a variety of software. You can even develop the software you want to meet your needs.

From this report , you can see what a personal data management page might look like.

where is the obstacle

Solid's vision is so beautiful that it is considered to have the potential to reshape the Internet. But since it was proposed, there has been little response. No mainstream application provides a WebID login method, and even among developers, it is not very popular. r/SOLID has less than 2,000 subscribers, and most repositories have less than 100 stars on the project's GitHub page . Needless to say, to reshape the Internet, Solid itself has a very weak presence on the Internet.

Why is this so? Same Tim Berners-Lee, same simple yet powerful idea. One sparked the information age revolution, the other was almost unnoticed.

The answer lies in the social context in which it was presented. When the World Wide Web was introduced, the Internet was primarily a facility for exchanging data in military and research institutions. Therefore, a group of technology enthusiasts can use technology to shape the form of the network according to their own idealism, and this form has also survived to the present due to path dependence, forming the open nature of the World Wide Web. Same goes for email.

But now, when companies have come to the forefront of technology, they have decided not to make that mistake again. They are fully prepared and fully control the barriers to entry, forming a closed walled garden ecology, preventing their users from using any other services. And to a large extent, they did succeed.

This success is not only reflected in technology, but also in changing people's entire perception of the Internet. This effect is also caused by path dependence. Just imagine the value of a Gmail account that can only send mail to other Gmail users? But people don't see a problem with a message that can only be seen by other Twitter users.

This cognitive change has formed the biggest obstacle to the decentralization of the Internet, and this obstacle will be self-reinforcing. Snowden shares fond memories of the original internet in "Permanant Record." But the generation growing up in the current Internet situation takes it for granted.

The key to the Solid project is to develop a set of application-neutral standards, which is not technically difficult. Tim Berners-Lee and other researchers have done a lot of research on semantic networks. The result is consistent with Solid's data semantics. In fact, the data format basis of the Solid project is RDF (Resource Description Framework).

But the question is, what company is willing to accept such a standard? For large companies, accepting the standard is tantamount to giving up their monopoly. For startups, should they choose to support Facebook login with hundreds of millions of users, or choose to support WebID login methods that even developers have never heard of? Now every startup, if not thinking about being acquired by a big company, is thinking that it can become the next big company? Who is willing to accept that they are only a decentralized public service provider?

So getting companies to embrace Solid from the top down, I think it's already a losing battle. Redistributing the Internet can only rely on a bottom-up approach. That is, a content network composed of a large number of users forces Internet companies to join the open ecosystem. The final form is not necessarily Solid. Other P2P networks attract users with their own characteristics, and it is entirely possible that they will become an important part of shaping the future of the Internet. For example, the anonymous property of the onion network, the distributed immutable property of the blockchain, and the currency property of the cryptocurrency on it, etc.

How to do

If you are also moved by the vision of a re-decentralized Internet and want to take action, the following points are for reference.

The most direct, of course, is to make technical contributions. Open standards rely on open technologies, which are based on general intellect and then contribute back to general intellect.

As a product with network effects, another way to support it is to use . Choose open applications, choose decentralized applications, at least among Matters users, this consensus is not a problem.

Another point is also very important, that is, to expand the use, that is, to publicize it. Of course, that's what I'm doing. One of the hardest steps was making the public aware of the problems with the current state of the Internet. When one is able to think clearly, the conclusion comes naturally.

In the process of publicity, liberals in particular like to use the term "privacy". In the technical context, "privacy" refers to the control over the degree of data disclosure, not the act of data disclosure itself. A privacy-conscious person will also actively share data, as long as the way of sharing is under their control. The word "privacy" is often considered to oppose any form of data sharing, so it is not taken seriously. "What's wrong with exchanging data for convenience?" The question is, is this exchange a clear choice of oneself, or is it a choice made by deceived companies, or a last resort in a monopoly position? The same result, the moral implications of the two approaches are completely different.

in conclusion

This paper presents the problems of the existing mobile internet and presents the motivation, vision and current state of the Solid project. It can be seen from this that the re-decentralization of the Internet is of paramount importance to the public interest. The way to achieve this depends on awakening the public's new awareness of data. Path dependence once created the open World Wide Web, but also realized the centralized, closed mobile Internet. The shape of the next-generation Internet will be determined by existing technologies. Efforts to fight for data power require more participation.

References

Žižek, S. (2008). Violence: Six sideways reflections.

https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_next_web

https://solidproject.org/