Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Decentralized Web Summit

Brad Shirakawa/Internet Archive
This is a quick report from the Decentralized Web Summit. First, Brewster Kahle, Wendy Hanamura and the Internet Archive staff deserve great praise for assembling an amazing group of people and running an inspiring and informative meeting. It was great to see so many different but related efforts to build a less centralized Web.

Pictures and videos are up here. You should definitely take the time to watch, at least the talks on the second day by:
and the panel moderated by Kevin Marks, in particular this contribution from Zooko Wilcox. He provides an alternative view on my concerns about Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks.

I am working on a post about my reactions to the first two days (I couldn't attend the third) but it requires a good deal of thought, so it'll take a while.

3 comments:

David. said...

Tekla S. Perry at IEEE Spectrum has one of the better reports.

David. said...

The Economist shares my concerns about the centralizing force of economies of scale:

"More fundamentally, an internet that eschews control points may be one that affords firms less opportunity to build profits. To create a return that makes venture capitalists happy, the new tech firms will almost certainly come under pressure to get ever bigger. Decentralisation might fit the vision of the web’s founding father, but the internet became centralised for a reason."

David. said...

Dan Gillmor and Kevin marks have written the best overview of the summit I've yet seen.