A Shrinking Internet and Decentralized Web
The Internet is shrinking, that is the theme of the recent Global Internet report from the Internet Society :
https://www.internetsociety.org/globalinternetreport/.
This conclusion seems counterintuitive, going against all the statistics showing a steady rise in the number of connected users, devices and things.
The report points out that while the number of Internet users is increasing, the number of organizations providing critical services that make the Internet work is consolidating. Most individuals who work in the Information Technology industry are well aware that a hand full of players such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are dominating the Cloud space. Consolidation in Internet Service Providers is also obvious with fewer large organizations able to leverage economies of scale to provide global network connectivity. What is interesting to consider; however is that at the same time we see this trend of Internet consolidation, we see a movement in the form of Web 3.0 towards decentralized services powered by new trust-based technologies such as Blockchain. To some degree, this dichotomy speaks to a distinction many don’t understand between “the Internet” and “the Web.” The Internet is the collection of networks and services that allow data to move around the globe; the Web is a set of services that run across those networks. The set of services that make up the Web have gone through two general phases during their evolution. Web 1.0 was primarily static content, linked together through hyperlinks and rendered to end-user browsers via HTML. Web 2.0 saw the transition of end-users from information consumers to information creators. Web 2.0 services connected individuals and allowed them to communicate and share information in new ways. Web 3.0 is a loosely defined set of technologies that looks to remove the middlemen present in Web 2.0 technologies and allow end-users, governments, and businesses to interact directly in a verified fashion. Technologies such as Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies are instrumental to the Web 3.0 transition.
It is interesting to consider that these new Web 3.0 technologies that aim to decentralize the Web find themselves running on an Internet that is becoming more and more consolidated. While technologies such as Blockchain get distributed across nodes located throughout the Internet, those nodes must run somewhere; and as we know, more often than not those nodes are running on Cloud services provided by fewer and fewer dominant players. How will the shrinking Internet impact the movement towards decentralized, trust-based services? While it is too soon to tell, it is certainly an interesting trend to follow.
