The second generation of distributed Internet led by blockchain technology is coming

A lot is happening with data in the walled gardens of the internet. It's being shut down by the sites we rely on. Now, there's a protest on Facebook about this. A Turkish journalist says his account has been blocked inside the country at the behest of the government, and Palestinian journalists have similar problems. YouTube users feel their videos are increasingly being unfairly demonetized by mindless bots.

On a more macro level, publishers have been working hard to build Facebook-driven traffic strategies, and when they saw a significant drop in traffic, the social media giant decided to prioritize user-generated content. These decisions will cut capacity even more, as many organizations are completely dependent on the relevance of the large social network site. Some of them don't even have a standalone website.

NowThis celebrated in 2012 the creation of a news organization that took on all its capacity distributed across massive social networks, but it was not celebrated as a cultural force. Social networks drove growth as a way to reduce friction in marshaling web data to build audience databases, which made it easier for content to go viral. That said, publishers seemed to forget to consider the potential downside of allocating capacity depending on someone else’s mere property rights.

Blockstack, a startup backed by Union Square Ventures and Y Inc., has finally broken through and designed an alternative browser to power the bitcoin blockchain network. Muneeb Ali, the company’s chief technology officer and co-founder, told Observer in an interview at his office:

“Investors actually think, in the long term, that this is the future.”

In other words, investors want good market positioning even if a different kind of Internet undercuts previous investments.

Blockstack's browser is a fork of Google Chrome, which an economist described in an Observer article as the first application working for the Internet. Initially, it will only access this new Internet. In the future, it can work for both Internets at the same time.

Ali described an uncensorable internet at the 2016 TED New York conference. "The new internet takes power away from these big companies and brings it back to where it belongs, to people." The architecture the team has built is completely open source.

We met Ali and his co-founder Ryan Shea. In their view, the data generated by users through the use of the service will not be stored in the service database, but all articles and information will be stored in their own cloud website, such as Dropbox. The improved website will only be accessible to those who created the data.

Shea said,

“You are the only one who can see and share the data, no third-party companies.”

It’s invisible to most users, but there are third-party companies in almost every online interaction now. VeriSign registers all .com domains. You have to trust the company you’re really locating the site. Blockstack uses the blockchain to record data that can be discovered and authorized to view, but it doesn’t store the data itself. That’s the user’s job.

The founder of crypto-powered database social network Steemit has gone further than that, allowing users to earn bonuses for logging into the system, but ultimately all content is stored on the Steem blockchain, which is owned by users in the STEEM currency.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping websites from creating plaintext copies of user data just for Blockstack, but if the originals are stored in people’s digital boxes, that gives more power to their rightful owners. We recently reported on another decentralized web product, the Universal Media Library, which makes it easier for creators to track the ownership of the work they create on the internet.

Blockstack sets out to make shutting down a network or blocking a specific website more challenging. Domain registrations go to the blockchain (that’s the original Bitcoin blockchain), and there are no private interests involved. There’s no single point that tells computers where to find a website. Many places and more people use it, and more will use it in the future. If one path is shut down, there are other paths that can be used to find the information.

In the Internet world, no one will need to log in to a website, because your browser will use its built-in public-private key pair to authenticate each website you visit. Online payments will not require middlemen, such as PayPal, or because they will use the browser's built-in cryptocurrency wallet. With all this, it will also be easy to build websites, according to Ali and Shea, because the developer is not responsible for protecting your data or your passwords.

Shea said,

"You can imagine an application that's 200 lines of code."

Their first product is onename, a decentralized identity service. When the system is activated, each person will have an identity, and each browser and each application will have an identity. This allows every part of the system to be managed by permissions. Shea said,

“Signing up is easy and it’s very similar to logging into Facebook if you use an app.”

To date, 60,000 identities have been registered on OneName.

Recently, it was reported that Microsoft has been convinced that blockchain will become the first real killer app. Blockstack has entered the ecosystem of the software giant company, although it is not the only company working to create a better and more secure digital identity service. In addition, the United Nations has set a goal of universal access to official identity by 2030.

Other companies are building their own products for this distributed internet. The team also told us to stay tuned for their work, as did the media when the team opened up the browser to the public, for example. After all, who wants an internet where you can't blog?