Re: [liberationtech] Decentralization/Federation

[carlo von lynX]

TL;DR: Distributed systems have the potential of providing
the sort of Internet that we really need, but they cannot
come about and win over cheap cloud services if we don't 
embrace policy that will make the old surveillance economy 
model illegal within a reasonable time frame.


On Tue, Oct 03, 2017 at 07:29:03PM +0200, Alberto Cammozzo wrote:
> I think this technical analysis should open a more wide debate before
> jumping to "will work/ will not work" conclusions: issues of such
> complexity could not have a purely technical solution.

Full ack.

> Economic, social, juridical, political issues should also be taken into
> account.

Yes please. We know that distributed tech can work, but the
market is so borked, we can only establish the right thing
by acknowledging how much the status quo is against human and
civil rights and needs to be forbidden by policy. Only then
industry would have to pick up what scientists and enthusiasts
have been working on in the past decades, and turn it into a
product. Turn it into the Next Generation Internet protocol
stack that is shipped with your new phone.

Back in 2011 we published papers and even cartoons to
explain how federation would not work out, but -alas-
big players like W3C were too immersed into promoting
the legend of the federated social web that there just
was no way to get through. Here's some stuff, tell me
if there's anything wrong about what we said back then:

Comic: http://my.pages.de/dsn-vn/
Paper: http://secushare.org/2011-FSW-Scalability-Paranoia 

We even predicted how servers would not be trustworthy
to maintain our data, which is now confirmed by all the
rage about "hardware trojans". So can we now finally
contribute our knowledge to tech and policy-making after
five years of distraction?

> Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future?
> 
>  
>  
> 

Citing its conclusion:
"The challenge is not just building decentralized software or creating 
alternative platforms, but creating options for users that are financially 
sustainable, usable and compelling."

And here the simple lesson to learn is that you cannot
compete with players that offer a better service by
monetizing on everybody's civil and human rights.
As soon as this is no longer legal, several alternatives
become financially sustainable and compelling.

The thing that remains to find out is whether federated 
technologies can ever become usable enough to compete
with distributed ones, and whether the fact they depend
on large corruptible servers makes them just as non-
compliant to strict civic data protection as the silo
offerings.

Whereas for distributed systems, they are damn hard to
develop, but once they work they are super-easy to use
and do not need to put civic data into any wrong places.

"Today’s advocates of decentralization tend to view any third party 
intermediary as a threat, a choke point that could be used to censor speech. 
For them, the ideal web landscape is one of self-publishers, who can directly 
reach their online audiences without the need for a third party service to host 
and curate their content."

And that is exactly what you can achieve with distributed
technology, not federated.

"But as our case studies illustrate, values of individual empowerment and 
autonomy need to be balanced by a recognition that most people are going to 
experience the web through a set of trusted third party services."

Whoops, dear authors, here's your mistake: you are falling
for the market fallacy: assuming things will remain how they
are because that's how it has always been. You are not taking 
into account that legislation policy can eliminate such third
parties as there is no way they can be entrusted with the power
to manipulate individuals, groups and entire populations. Once
those are gone you still have companies that want to sell
devices to you - and they can sell them to you equipped with
a Next Generation Internet that does not need trusted third
parties. The precondition for seeing that happen is to impede
the easy and cheap solution which is threatening the future
of democracy, by law.

"Rather than striving for censorship-proof technology, a better goal would 
be to pursue strategic structural, legal and normative shifts that support 
greater experimentation and user choice in the way platforms curate content and 
govern community interactions."

Don't know what's wrong about censorship-proof tech, but
it certainly isn't the biggest issue at stake.

"We recommend two umbrella strategies for achieving this goal: 1) 
developing a robust set of tools and legal frameworks for establishing consumer 
rights over the content and data users generate on platforms and 2) increasing 
transparency and experimentation around methods of content curation and 

[liberationtech] Decentralization/Federation

[Alberto Cammozzo]

Hi,
an interesting position from MIT Media Lab that is at least in part
relevanto to a thread launched by Yosem in Frebruary on this list [1]
Defending​ ​ Internet​ ​ Freedom​ ​ through​ ​ Decentralization: Back​ ​
to​ ​ the​ ​ Future?

 
 


I think this technical analysis should open a more wide debate before
jumping to "will work/ will not work" conclusions: issues of such
complexity could not have a purely technical solution.
Economic, social, juridical, political issues should also be taken into
account.
For instance the report does not consider the innovations introduced in
a global data market by the EU GDPR.

Bests,

Alberto


[1]


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