In 1996, John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Internet rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote "A Manifesto for the Independence of Cyberspace."

The manifesto began: "Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of the mind. I ask you on behalf of the future to pass by and leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Barlow was reacting to the Communications Decency Act, an early attempt to regulate online content that he believed went beyond the law. But his broad vision of a free and open internet controlled by users was one shared by many internet pioneers.

Fast forward a quarter century, and that vision is naive. Governments may have struggled to regulate the internet, but new sovereign nations have taken over.

Today, Barlow’s “house of ideas” is dominated by the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, a handful of the world’s largest companies.

Yet listening to computer scientists and technology investors speaking at an online event June 30 hosted by the Dfinity Foundation, a nonprofit based in Zurich, Switzerland, it’s clear that a revolution is brewing.

“We’re bringing the internet back to an era when it provided an open environment for creativity and economic growth, a free market where services could be connected equally,” said Dominic Williams, founder and chief scientist of Dfinity. “We want to bring the internet back to life.”

Dfinity is building the so-called Internet Computer, a decentralized technology spread across a network of independent data centers that allows software to run anywhere on the internet rather than in server farms increasingly controlled by large companies such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud.

Dfinity will release its software to third-party developers in the hope that they will start making killer apps for the Internet Computer. It plans to release it publicly later this year.

Rewinding the internet isn’t about nostalgia. The dominance of a few companies and the ad tech industry that supports them has distorted the way we communicate, plunged public discourse into a gauntlet of hate speech and misinformation, and upended basic norms of privacy.

There are few places online that these tech giants cannot reach, and few apps or services that thrive outside of their ecosystems.

There is also an economic problem, where these companies’ effective monopolies stifle the kind of innovation that gave rise to them in the first place. It’s no accident that Google, Facebook, and Amazon were founded when Barlow’s cyberspace wasn’t even a thing.

Internet Computer

Dfinity's Internet Computer offers an alternative. On the regular Internet, data and software are stored on specific computers, servers on one end and laptops, smartphones and game consoles on the other.

When you use an app like Zoom, software running on Zoom's servers sends data to your device and requests data from your device.

This traffic is governed by an open standard called the Internet Protocol (the IP in an IP address). These long-standing rules ensure that a video stream of your face finds its way across the internet from network to network until it reaches someone else's computer in milliseconds.

Dfinity is introducing a new standard called the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP). These new rules allow developers to move software and data across the internet. All software requires a computer to run, but with ICP, the computer can be anywhere.

For example, the software does not run on dedicated servers in Google Cloud and has no fixed physical address, but instead moves between servers owned by independent data centers around the world.

“Conceptually, it’s all over the place,” said Stanley Jones, Dfinity engineering manager.

In practice, this means that it is possible to publish applications that no one owns or controls. App developers will charge data centers in crypto tokens for running their code, but they will not have access to the data, making it difficult for advertisers to track your activity on the internet.

“I don’t want to spoil the data privacy angle too much because, honestly, ad tech continues to amaze me,” Jones said. Internet computers should be a game changer, he said.

A less welcome consequence is that a free internet can also make it hard to hold app makers accountable. If you need illegal or abusive content removed, who is on the other end of the line?

Jones said that's a problem, but noted that it's really not that easy with Facebook: "You say, hey, can you remove these videos? They say no, and it depends on how Zuckerberg feels that day."

In fact, a decentralized internet could lead to a decentralized form of governance where developers and users alike have a say in how it’s regulated, just as Barlow hopes. This is ideal for adoption in the crypto world.

But, as we’ve seen with Bitcoin and Ethereum, it can lead to infighting between groups. It’s not clear that mob rule would be better than a recalcitrant CEO.

Still, Dfinity and its backers are confident they can work through these issues. In 2018, Dfinity raised $102 million in a crypto token sale, valuing the network at $2 billion.

Investors include Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital, both major players in the Silicon Valley venture capital club.

It’s also growing fast. This time, Dfinity showed off a TikTok clone called CanCan. In January, it demoed LinkedUp, which is similar to LinkedIn.

Neither app has been made public, but they convincingly demonstrate that applications developed for the Internet Computer can rival the real thing.

Transforming the Internet

But Dfinity isn’t the first to try to transform the internet. It joins a list of organizations developing a range of alternatives, including Solid, SAFE Network, IPFS, Blockstack, and more.

All of these draw on the techno-libertarian ideals embodied in blockchain, anonymity networks like Tor, and peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent.

Companies like Solid also have all-star backing. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the basic design of the web, and he gave people a way to control their personal data.

Instead of users handing over their data to apps like Facebook or Twitter, it is stored privately and the app has to request what it needs.

However, Solid also shows how long it takes to change the status quo. Although Solid’s proposal is less ambitious than Dfinity’s Internet Computer, Solid has been working on its core technology for at least five years.

Berners-Lee talks about correcting the course of the internet, but overcoming the inertia of an internet driven by giants like Google and Amazon is hard. It’s one thing to invent the web, another to reinvent it.

Other projects tell similar stories. The SAFE Network, a peer-to-peer alternative to the internet where data is shared across all the hard drives of participating computers rather than in a central data center, has been in the works for 15 years.

An open-source community of developers has built several applications for the network, including a Twitter clone called Patter and a music player app called Jams.

“My only goal is to take data away from companies and give it back to people,” founder David Irvine said. But he admitted that the SAFE network itself is still far from a public launch.

Lalana Kagal, Solid's project manager at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, acknowledges that progress has been slow. "We haven't seen as much as we could have taken in," she says.

Even when Solid is ready for a full launch, Kagal hopes only people who are truly concerned about what will happen to their personal information will make the switch.

“We’ve been talking about privacy for 20 years, and people care deeply about it,” she said. “But when it comes to actually taking action, no one wants to leave Facebook.”

Even within the community of developers working to build the new internet, awareness of rival projects is scant. None of the three people working on Solid whom I emailed (including Kagal) had heard of Dfinity, and no one I spoke to at Dfinity had heard of the SAFE Network.

Whether the average user cares or not, the internet may be forced to change. “Privacy regulations may become so strict that companies will be forced to move to a more decentralized model,” Kagal said. “They may realize that storing and collecting all this personal information is no longer worth their time.”

But all of this assumes that the internet can be divorced from its core advertising business model, which dictates the details of data collection and the balance of power at the top.

Dfinity believes that making the internet a free market again will lead to an innovation boom like we saw during the dot-com era.

Startups are exploring new ways to make money that don’t rely on the casual handling of personal data. Kagal hopes more people will choose to pay for services rather than use freemium services that make money through advertising.

None of this is easy. In the years since Barlow published his polemic, the data economy has taken root.

“If you replace it with Solid, that’s great,” Kagal said. “But if you replace it with something else, that’s also great, you just have to do it.”

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