Why we say "Free the Web"
On January 1st, 1983, the internet was born. We started building, fast, doing whatever it took to make an application work in the age and limits of early computer hardware. The easiest (and probably only) path at the time was centralized servers and databases. The idea was that the centralized database was the source of all truth, and you put up walls to keep people from reading or writing that data unless they were authorized. This works quite well, and almost the entire internet runs on this model today.
On January 3rd, 2009, Bitcoin was born. Initially, it was seen as a novel architecture to enable unmitigated p2p trade of digital money. The concept of something digital being scarce without a trusted 3rd party, became possible for the first time. But there’s something even more interesting about Bitcoin, which is that it is actually an adversary-resistant decentralized database. The Bitcoin database exists in the open, and is not behind a wall that would enforce that only authorized parties can read or write to it.
This may just seem like a neat trick, but it actually enables a beautiful flourishing of permissionless innovation that is impossible in centralized systems. When you create a post on Facebook, it lives in the Facebook centralized database. Facebook permits access to this database very strictly and narrowly, and even if you wanted to give permission to another application to see all your Facebook data, you couldn’t. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you? In a decentralized system, anyone could build a new Facebook replacement that would include all your existing posts, friends, and groups. You could pick an application to use with your own data, for example, a newsfeed that rarely shows political content because you aren’t interested in politics.
I don’t think that people see how bad the centralized database concept is for the Internet, and for humanity at large. Regardless of what you think about Capitalism, it’s generally agreed that there is a weakness in it: monopolies. The thing that makes Capitalism work is open, free competition. Monopolies are essentially a loophole in Capitalism, so we patch it up with laws to break them up.
Right now, most companies on the internet have data monopolies. You can’t compete with Facebook, because they keep your data locked down. They have a monopoly on your list of friends, your posts, and your groups. And to be fair, this was probably the only way to build and scale to their level given the technologies they had at the time.
If you want to build an app that can read people’s Gmail with their explicit permission, then that’s $20k for the Google “oauth scopes” and Google has final approval on your application. You must go through a centralized gatekeeper that can decide to kill your app on a whim, for example, if you threaten their business with competition. The same is true of Instagram, X, Reddit, Amazon, Apple, and even Visa. It’s easy to see how data monopolies can lead to and empower monopolies.
The way to break up these data monopolies is via open databases and decentralized systems. These types of systems enable permissionless innovation and competition with no gatekeepers, remove the risk of large database hacks and leaks, and are designed in an adversarial secure-by-default model instead of a "build walls around our sensitive database" model. And to be clear, by “open databases”, I don’t mean all the data has to be public. Encryption technology can mathematically hide information, and is what's used to secure your credit card number when you buy something online. Encryption makes it possible to keep your data private but store the encrypted data publicly. Anyone can download your encrypted data, but they cannot read it without the decryption key. Sharing the data is your choice, because you can share the keys to decrypt it. New encryption technologies like Lit Protocol make this easy for typical users, and practical at scale to solve these problems.
We have to build these decentralized systems and make them easy to use, as fast as possible, to ensure we have a free and open internet for future generations. Tim Berners-Lee famously said that the original vision for the internet was “an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries.” The Internet is no longer an open platform, because the data is closed.
At Lit Protocol we are working on solving these problems every day, which is why we say "Free the Web".