Can We Build A Better Internet?

In the HBO show Silicon Valley, protagonist Richard Hendricks and his company, Pied Piper, are trying to change the world with a revolutionary new version of the internet that takes the power out of big companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, and the show’s fictional Hooli, and replace it with a peer-to-peer network where the internet runs off of everyone’s smartphones instead of dedicated servers.

- James Lu

"If we could do it, we could build a completely decentralized version of our current internet, with no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. Information would be totally free in every sense of the word." – Richard Hendricks

But what if Silicon Valley wasn’t just a TV show? What if we really could build a decentralized Internet?

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE INTERNET WE HAVE TODAY?

The internet you know today can be traced back to the 1960s when the US Department of Defence funded the development of ARPANET, a network that allowed multiple computers to communicate with each other. The next big step came in 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, the protocol that introduced the concept of websites and hyperlinks. Today, everything you see online, from websites to social media updates to streaming services uses that protocol. Every online resource has an address; Berners-Lee’s protocol allows you to open a web page, type in that address, and your browser will connect to the nearest server, find out where that address points to, and return its information to you.

We’ve used this system for nearly 30 years, so what’s wrong with it? The problem is that most addresses today are static: they always point to the same servers. And most of those servers are owned by a small number of mega corporations, who essentially control the internet. Companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google operate huge, physical web hosting and cloud computing servers that are responsible for keeping websites, email servers, and social media feeds all online. So what happens when one of those servers goes offl ine?