Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive (me) ventured we wanted a Web that baked our values into the code itself– Universal Access to all
Knowledge, freedom of expression, reliability, reader privacy, and fun.
To build reliable access requires serving websites from multiple places on the net. We heard proposals to build “multi-home” websites using content-addressible structures rather than contacting a single website for answers. There were demonstrations of ZeroNet, IPFS, and DAT that did this.
Protecting reader privacy is difficult when all traffic to a website can be monitored, blocked, or controlled. The security panel that included Mike Perry of Tor and Paige Peterson of MaidSafe, said that having one’s requests and retrieved documents “hopping around” rather than going straight from server to client can help ensure greater privacy. seems like a good start.
We can start making a smooth transition buy sales lead from the current Web to leverage these ideas by using all of our current infrastructure of browsers and URL’s–and not requiring people to download software. While not ideal, we can build a Decentralized Web on top of the current Web using Javascript, so each reader of the Decentralized Web is also a server of it, allowing the Web naturally to scale and reinforce itself as more readers joined in. The Internet Archive has already started supporting this projects with free machines and storage.
BK and TBL“Polyfill” was final bit of advice I got from Tim Berners-Lee before he left. Polyfill, he said is a kind of English version of Spackle, that is used to fix and patch walls. In this case, Polyfill is Javascript. He said that almost all proposals to make a change to the Web are prototyped in javascript and then can be built in as they are debugged and demonstrated to be useful.