Can you imagine a world with 40 Facebooks competing for you?
Unstoppable Domains co-founder Bradley Kam believes that neither the anti-encryption bills nor the technology giants present a real threat to the future of the Internet. In his opinion, both, the governments and the giant platforms are helping to usher the era of the decentralized web, he told Cointelegraph:
“There was a narrative in a popular narrative that the Internet was working pretty well, I think even a few years ago, and I thought that narrative is almost completely gone now. And there’s a lot of things there’s the anti-encryption laws you mentioned or Barack Obama getting hacked on Twitter. <...> So I think that broadly speaking, the more that the tech monopolies abuse their power, the better an argument and clearer an argument there is for a decentralized Web tech.”
Technology platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been criticized simultaneously for censorship and not enough censorship. Kam said that the decentralized web will be able to solve both issues. In his opinion, in the future, there will be dozens of DApps like Facebook, which will compete with each other. One of the differentiation points between them will be the different ways they will be handling freedom of speech:
“Right now, if Facebook decides to filter you, you’re gone, you’re off the Internet, you have no choice. So what Facebook decides is the definition of free speech. That’s the end of the line for free speech. Whereas in this future world, there’s going to be 40 Facebooks and they’re going to have different lines for what they say is the appropriate line for free speech. So if you get filtered out of one, you can still be on another.”
He thinks this may lead to chaos, but it is essential to securing the future of freedom of speech:
“And that’s going to be a chaotic Internet. There’s going to be maybe dozens of versions coexisting at the same time. But it’s also going to be one that protects the speech that absolutely needs to needs to get out there while at the same time still being able to filter out the things that 99.999% of us object to.”
However, one thing to consider is that one of the reasons why Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google have become, in essence, monopolists — network effect. The more people were joining those platforms, the more useful they were becoming. A new social network similar to Facebook with better technology cannot compete with the original because no matter what incredible features it would offer if no one is using it, it is useless. That is why decentralized clones like Steem have struggled mightily to escape the confines of the crypto ghetto. Thus, in order for those “40 Facebooks” to dethrone the original, at the very least, they would have to be interoperable.
Recently, Unstoppable Domains has introduced a few new features like dChat and Unstoppable email.
