More than 3.5 billion people lost access to one of the world's most influential and widely used data storage, communication, and information-sharing platforms, all because of a single server system failure at Facebook. While the outage was only momentary, it underlines the hazards of entrusting online data and digital life to massive, centralized companies. Instead of depending on such centralized depositories, we should embrace decentralized internet computing's democratizing power and return authority to individuals.
The locus of control is the distinction between old, centralized IT platforms and emerging, more flexible decentralized networks. When anything goes wrong, or a hacker breaks into the system, all of the data posted must transit through one of the company's data centers, creating a single point of failure. Control is distributed network among hundreds or thousands of users in a decentralized network, each providing storage capacity to the system. There are a lot of users and access points; thus, there's less of a chance of a single point of failure. Other participants can respond to fill up the gaps left by the compromised node if one of those participants is compromised.
These networks also bolster digital security. Hackers would have to identify and break a whole network of secure servers using decentralized protocols, a prohibitively tricky undertaking. However, decentralized networks are about more than just data security. They're also about keeping your data in your hands, where it belongs.
Almost every aspect of our life is tracked online. The barrier between the real and digital worlds blurs; fully secure networks should be the minimum need. Users should not just demand spotless, safe networks but also solutions that don't support the monopolistic activities of digital companies.
Even though the internet is being used by approximately two-thirds of the world's population, only Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Facebook, and Google Cloud hold the great bulk of the data that populates the websites we use on a daily basis. That's changing with decentralization. Using a user-based peer-to-peer network, people can opt out of storing their data in giant tech data farms. Users can have complete control over where their data is stored and utilized in this developing ecosystem.
A decentralized internet would also allow users to report problems, make improvements, and build new tools that would improve the internet for everyone because it is open source. There are two perspectives for the future of our online lives: continue to rely on the power of a few overbearing, centralized businesses or embrace the promise of decentralized networks and begin to define the rules for our digital selves. It's a decision we've never had before, and it's one that an increasing number of internet users are making.
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