What is Decentralized internet and why it is needed?

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the Internet today is owned by 3-4 Big companies. Amazon servers hold a large chunk of the Internet. By 2018 they were controlling about 40% servers of the cloud market, servicing Netflix, Pinterest, Slack, and dozens of other connections. Google holds about 5 million terabytes of data whereas Contributes to 12% of the total internet traffic.

All our data is concentrated in these few companies which creates a profound risk of security. Then there are companies with their business model, which uses our information we provide freely to target customer-centric ads. Moreover, Governments having the power of conducting surveillance and imposing censor dominantly is a big loophole in the current web. Political Censorship is when the government tries to falsify or manipulate news which is being received by their citizens.

Decentralized internet is a kind of a people-powered internet that provides the user their freedom as there is no hosting company. This type of internet is based on a technology called Blockchain. Its a distributed network, shared across a peer to peer computing network called as nodes. These nodes carry their own immutable ledger to carry information. To know more about blockchain visit "How Blockchain works and how it can be a revolution?"

"You can imagine today's internet as a monopoly while the decentralized internet as a democracy."

For example, If you watch a movie through amazon prime, Your laptop connects with amazon servers and these servers send you that video data of the movie you want to see. If some error occurs with amazon prime or their servers, the service gets down and no way of streaming your movie.

But instead of that, if you downloaded your movie with the help of software like BitTorrent which is a peer-to-peer network, then your laptop obtains that movie or any file directly from another person who has that file and is willing to share it with you.

When you start to download a movie you might be connected to 20 other nodes(or say computers) simultaneously, which uses some of its bandwidth to send you the data. While downloading the file some nodes might go offline while new nodes come online. As long as you are connected to at least one node you have the luxury to download.

1. User will have no fear of his/her data breaching. They will have the freedom to surf the internet without any concern about security.

2. The Domain name system will profoundly strong as there will be no attack on the DNS server which translates website names into IP address and are connected to the host.

3. Decentralization will lead to less censorship. Governments will not able to shut down an individual's social media handles or control any online media house.

4. Blockchain technology brings up an interesting concept where it allows economics to be get designed into the network by themselves, the first participant gets incentives and the people who contribute to the network get ownership or economic stake in the network

5. No single point of failure. In a centralized network scenario, we have seen the bank server going down or your Gmail going down and you are stuck with your online work. But here disruption of one node can affect the other so that we can continue running our application.

There are some disadvantages which can be overcome gradually.

1. This technology is very new so the problem of inexperience and training occurs in the employees. If not done properly can harm the organization

2. Companies or organizations at their initial stage can't afford to use decentralization as they haven’t established their goal and moreover its too heavy to invest in this technology.

According to Statista worldwide spending on blockchain solutions is expected to grow from 1.5 billion in 2018 to an estimated 15.9 billion by 2023. Global Fintech report states that 77% of financial sector functionaries will adopt blockchain as a part of their processes by 2020. Moreover, Countries like the UAE are all set to run their government on blockchain and will be imbibing cryptocurrency culture. Now watching all these events we can predict that centralization will be replaced by decentralization soon.

The future is decentralized internet.