Rethinking the Internet

1. It is time to rethink
the Internet
Moshe Y. Vardi
Rice University
vardi@cs.rice.edu

2. What is the Internet?--I
Internet= global system of interconnected
computer networks
A brief history:
 1961: Packet-switching theory
 1969: First two nodes of ARPAnet
 1973: TCP/IP
 1986: From DARPA to NSF
 1995: Privatization

3. What is the Internet? - II
Internet= a set of applications that utilize the
network, including email, the Web, search
engines, social media, and the like.
A brief history:
 1972: Email
 1989: WWW
 1994: Yahoo (directory)
 1998: Google (search)

4. What is the Internet? - III
Internet= The information and communication
infrastructure of modern society
 1994: Amazon
 1997: Netflix
 2004: Facebook
 2007: iPhone

5. Internet 2018: $3.5T in market capitalization!
 Apple -- $1009B
 Amazon -- $980B
 Alphabet -– $859B
 Netflix -- $159B
 Facebook -- $502B
And yet, there are problems in paradise 
Unparalleled Wealth Creation

6.  New York Magazine, April 2018: “Even those
who designed our digital world are aghast at
what they created. A breakdown of what went
wrong — from the architects who built it.”
 Vanity Fair, July 2018: “I was devastated”,
Tim-Berners Lee, The who created the World-
Wide Web, has some regrets.
 Vanity fair, August 2018: “Silicon-Valley
engineers fear they have created a monster.”
Deep Disappointment!

7. The Internet was supposed to be a distributed,
democratic, system, but:
 Key elements of the architecture of the
Internet are centralized. A central IP
address database is maintained by Network
Solutions in the U.S.
 De facto, Google and Facebook are the
gateways to most of the content on the
Internet.
Problem 1: Centralization

8. The WWW was supposed to give us access to
world-wide information, but, de facto, Google
and Facebook decide what information is visible
to us.
 Google’s search ranking is opaque, and users
rarely browse beyond first screen.
 FB post ranking is opaque, and FB decides
what we will see.
Centralization Suppresses Dissemination

9.  An early ideology of the hacker culture that
gave rise to the Internet was that
“information wants to be free”.
 But “free” is a lousy business model!
 To the rescue: advertising!
 But advertising is not free to consumer, it is
invisible to consumers.
 W/O price transparency, there is no price
discovery, and information has no intrinsic
value.
Problem 2: Business Model

10.  Clickbaiting: content that generates mouse
clicks – anger drives engagement!
 Centralization: online advertising is dominated
by Google and Facebook
 Surveillance: to target advertising companies
collect data on users
 Personalization: user profiling leads to
personalized webpages – different users see
different realities
 Value: Data/information are the new oil, but
owners have little control.
Problems with Advertising

11. The real business model of the Internet is
surveillance!
 March 2018: Cambridge Analytica harvested
personal data on close to 100M Facebook
customers for political purposes.
 August 2018: Google and Mastercard cut a
secret Ad deal to track retail sales. Google
found the perfect way to link online ads to
store purchases: credit-card data.
Old Quote: “If you're not paying for the
product, you are the product!”
The Surveillance Society

12.  “Mining personal data has become a trillion-
dollar business — which is why activists are
pushing laws to curb the practice, and why
Facebook and other companies are desperate
to stop them.”
Big Tech’s War on Privacy

13.  So far, people have relied on trusted third
parties to facilitate the transactions that
define our lives – e.g., banks, title companies,
etc. But trust in institutions is declining!
 Today, we can create a global, irrefutable
ledger of transactions and events such that
"rewriting history" is computationally
infeasible.
 Goal: empower individuals to have more control
over their personal data and its use by others.
Solution 1: Distributed Trust

14.  Blockchain: a protocol for a global, trusted,
ledger
 Each block contains a cryptographic hash of
the previous block, a timestamp, and
transaction data.
 By design, a blockchain is highly resistant to
modification of the data (“Byzantine
Agreement”).
 Challenge: Can blockchain decentralize the
internet? Can we create a genuine information
market on top of Blockchain?
Blockchain

15.  A micropayment is a financial transaction
involving a very small sum of money.
 Ted Nelson, 1960s: “A Thought for your
pennies: Micropayments and the liberation of
content.”
 1990s’ micropayment systems, e.g., IBM Micro
Payments -– failed 
 2010s’ micropayment systems, e.g., PayPal –
not widely popular yet
Challenge: A non-advertising business model for
the Internet.
Solution 2: Micropayments

16.  It is very hard to compete with “free”.
 But Facebook makes only 1c per user-hour
time.
 Will users be willing to pay 1c per FB hour?
 How much will users be willing to pay for one
Web search?
 What is the transaction cost of collecting 1c?
 Users: consumers vs businesses, e.g., Reddit
Gold, Google Enterprise
The Micropayment Challenge

17.  Problems: Centralization and Surveillance
 Solutions: Distributed trust and
micropayments
 Challenge: Wide deployment of solutions
The Internet: Past and Future