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% THIS IS SIGPROC-SP.TEX - VERSION 3.1
% WORKS WITH V3.2SP OF ACM_PROC_ARTICLE-SP.CLS
% APRIL 2009
%
% It is an example file showing how to use the 'acm_proc_article-sp.cls' V3.2SP
% LaTeX2e document class file for Conference Proceedings submissions.
% ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
% This .tex file (and associated .cls V3.2SP) *DOES NOT* produce:
% 1) The Permission Statement
% 2) The Conference (location) Info information
% 3) The Copyright Line with ACM data
% 4) Page numbering
% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
% It is an example which *does* use the .bib file (from which the .bbl file
% is produced).
% REMEMBER HOWEVER: After having produced the .bbl file,
% and prior to final submission,
% you need to 'insert' your .bbl file into your source .tex file so as to provide
% ONE 'self-contained' source file.
%
% Questions regarding SIGS should be sent to
% Adrienne Griscti ---> [email protected]
%
% Questions/suggestions regarding the guidelines, .tex and .cls files, etc. to
% Gerald Murray ---> [email protected]
%
% For tracking purposes - this is V3.1SP - APRIL 2009
\documentclass{amsart}
\usepackage{lmodern}
% \renewcommand*{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}
% \renewcommand*\rmdefault{ppl}
\begin{document}
\title{Re-Decentralising the Web}
%\subtitle{[A Proposal]
% \titlenote{A full version of this paper is available as
% \textit{Author's Guide to Preparing ACM SIG Proceedings Using
% \LaTeX$2_\epsilon$\ and BibTeX} at
% \texttt{www.acm.org/eaddress.htm}}}
%
% You need the command \numberofauthors to handle the 'placement
% and alignment' of the authors beneath the title.
%
% For aesthetic reasons, we recommend 'three authors at a time'
% i.e. three 'name/affiliation blocks' be placed beneath the title.
%
% NOTE: You are NOT restricted in how many 'rows' of
% "name/affiliations" may appear. We just ask that you restrict
% the number of 'columns' to three.
%
% Because of the available 'opening page real-estate'
% we ask you to refrain from putting more than six authors
% (two rows with three columns) beneath the article title.
% More than six makes the first-page appear very cluttered indeed.
%
% Use the \alignauthor commands to handle the names
% and affiliations for an 'aesthetic maximum' of six authors.
% Add names, affiliations, addresses for
% the seventh etc. author(s) as the argument for the
% \additionalauthors command.
% These 'additional authors' will be output/set for you
% without further effort on your part as the last section in
% the body of your article BEFORE References or any Appendices.
%\numberofauthors{5} % in this sample file, there are a *total*
% of EIGHT authors. SIX appear on the 'first-page' (for formatting
% reasons) and the remaining two appear in the \additionalauthors section.
%
\author{
% You can go ahead and credit any number of authors here,
% e.g. one 'row of three' or two rows (consisting of one row of three
% and a second row of one, two or three).
%
% The command \alignauthor (no curly braces needed) should
% precede each author name, affiliation/snail-mail address and
% e-mail address. Additionally, tag each line of
% affiliation/address with \affaddr, and tag the
% e-mail address with \email.
%
% 1st. author
% \alignauthor
% Ben Trovato\titlenote{Dr.~Trovato insisted his name be first.}\\
% \affaddr{Institute for Clarity in Documentation}\\
% \affaddr{1932 Wallamaloo Lane}\\
% \affaddr{Wallamaloo, New Zealand}\\
% \email{[email protected]}
% % 2nd. author
% \alignauthor
% G.K.M. Tobin\titlenote{The secretary disavows
% any knowledge of this author's actions.}\\
% \affaddr{Institute for Clarity in Documentation}\\
% \affaddr{P.O. Box 1212}\\
% \affaddr{Dublin, Ohio 43017-6221}\\
% \email{[email protected]}
% % 3rd. author
% \alignauthor Lars Th{\o}rv{\"a}ld\titlenote{This author is the
% one who did all the really hard work.}\\
% \affaddr{The Th{\o}rv{\"a}ld Group}\\
% \affaddr{1 Th{\o}rv{\"a}ld Circle}\\
% \affaddr{Hekla, Iceland}\\
% \email{[email protected]}
% \and % use '\and' if you need 'another row' of author names
% % 4th. author
% \alignauthor Lawrence P. Leipuner\\
% \affaddr{Brookhaven Laboratories}\\
% \affaddr{Brookhaven National Lab}\\
% \affaddr{P.O. Box 5000}\\
% \email{[email protected]}
% % 5th. author
% \alignauthor Sean Fogarty\\
% \affaddr{NASA Ames Research Center}\\
% \affaddr{Moffett Field}\\
% \affaddr{California 94035}\\
% \email{[email protected]}
% % 6th. author
% \alignauthor Charles Palmer\\
% \affaddr{Palmer Research Laboratories}\\
% \affaddr{8600 Datapoint Drive}\\
% \affaddr{San Antonio, Texas 78229}\\
% \email{[email protected]}
% }
% There's nothing stopping you putting the seventh, eighth, etc.
% author on the opening page (as the 'third row') but we ask,
% for aesthetic reasons that you place these 'additional authors'
% in the \additional authors block, viz.
% \additionalauthors{Additional authors: John Smith (The Th{\o}rv{\"a}ld Group, email: {\texttt{[email protected]}}) and Julius P.~Kumquat (The Kumquat Consortium, email: {\texttt{[email protected]}}).} \date{30 July 1999}
% Just remember to make sure that the TOTAL number of authors
% is the number that will appear on the first page PLUS the
% number that will appear in the \additionalauthors section.
}
\maketitle
\section{Introduction}
% The intent of the original decentralised design of the Web was to make it easy for individuals to share and access information by simply setting up a web server and using a browser. Yet, instead of individuals running their own servers, today, most people primarily use one of several large platform service providers. Such platforms are continuing to grow at exponential rates, with some, such as Facebook, exceeding 1 billion users at the time of writing. In exchange for this convenience, these platforms have assumed a critical place at the centres of people's information environments, creating not only an inextricable dependence on their services, but also the ability to manipulate individuals through targeted advertising, behavioural manipulation, and nearly constant surveillance. Having now amassed a bulk of the world's personal information traces, such platforms now have the unprecedented capacity to further increase their dominance, through large scale statistical insights.
The Web was designed as a decentralised system to make it easy for individuals to share and access information with each other, simply by running a web server and using a browser. It has revolutionised the ways people share and access information, creating entirely new industries and economies of information sharing. These industries have spawned a huge variety of sharing-rich applications and services that both people and businesses now rely on for many aspects of their daily activities.
Yet, instead of staying decentralised, a handful of large, commercial social and data platform providers have come to host a vast majority of end-user information. In exchange for this convenience, people have ceded control to these platforms, granting them places of unprecedented importance at the centres of their information ecosystems. These services, in turn, have sought to take advantage their positions of influence, such as to monetise it through targeted advertising and behavioural manipulation, while simultaneously establishing further long-term dependence on their services.
Many have written previously about the many potential dangers of centralisation on the Web, but there is seemingly no end in sight; despite growing concerns over privacy (e.g. \cite{}), loss of control and long-term access to one's personal information \cite{}, and calls for stronger data protection legislation~\cite{}, platform providers continue to see their user bases grow exponentially year after the next. Capitalising on their already immense momentum and strategic positions, these platforms are now swiftly entering new sectors to further aggregate new dimensions of truly personal information; for instance, through the emerging ecosystem of Web-connected embedded and wearable sensors being called the ``Internet of Things'' \cite{}, these data controllers will soon harbour massive, high-fidelity data about people's homes, environments, and even physical bodies.
While these platforms may be connected to and through the Web, they are, in many ways, antithetical to the original spirit of it; instead of embracing interoperability and open innovation, these platforms have increasingly sought to keep end-users from easily linking with competing platforms, and restricting what they, both as users and third-party developers, can do with them. In response, there has been a growing initiative among makers and hackers to try to `re-decentralise' the web, that is allow end-users to rely less on such brokers, and retain greater control over their data. Despite the concerted efforts of many, little consensus has emerged on how to achieve such a goal; projects labeled `re-decentralisation' have been as widely varied as tools for anonymised messaging and routing, to vocabularies for information interchange, to consensus protocols for distributed cryptocurrencies.
In this paper, we that the ultimate goal of re-decentralising the Web should be singular: that of (re-)enabling end-users to be information controllers. We argue that doing so is both sufficient and necessary to eliminate end-users' constant dependence on third parties, while simultaneously increasing overall autonomy, privacy, safety, and securing a future of continued open innovation.
While there are many methods and avenues towards achieve such a goal, one practical approach is to identify and eliminate the barriers that deter end-users from self-hosting their data themselves. In particular, one potential way to give \emph{every single person accessing the Web} autonomy as an information controller is to simply start at what they all have: a web browser, and to put into it capabilities that let them host, manage and control data: a web server. In the following sections, we first review what might mean for end-users to be information controllers, then provide a brief overview of how a server in the browser might work to achieve these goals. Finally we discuss the key practical obstacles to making this happen.
% While some of these proposed projects may play a part in the future information networks of the world, the position of this paper is to preserve, rather than abandon the fundamental architectures, protocols and conventions that have made the Web the world's most open and successful architecture for information exchange. Instead of replacing one decentralised architecture with yet another, we propose that a more constructive approach is to directly address the problem of letting end-user individuals exercise greater control over the information they create, need and use on the Web, to restore the once-assumed ability for individuals to act as autonomous information controllers on the Web once again. We propose that while there are many ways to accomplish this goal, one simple one is to reduce barriers towards letting people run their own Web servers and Web-based applications. An
\section{What is an Information Controller?}
The term \emph{information controller} refers, in the legal sense, to any entity that assumes the responsibility for a particular collection of information, including how it is stored, secured, maintained, shared and used~\cite{}. Under this general definition, people act as information controllers all the time both offline and offline - from one's personal paper notes, documents, and diaries, to files and folders locally stored on their computers. However, on the Web, people rarely act as information controllers; while people may produce information (e.g., write an email, compose a Tweet or Facebook status message, post a YouTube video and so forth), they do not determine where and how this information is stored and handled. This is left to the platform owners themselves, who have fundamentally assumed the responsibility of managing people's various data, in exchange for certain rights and privileges to it itself.
This important shift from being information controller of one's information to not, has largely gone unnoticed to end-users, except in a few notable and important instances where service providers most visibly violated end-users' expectations about their data. In the case of Amazon's Kindle reading device, for example when Amazon, in a dispute with a publisher, removed copies of books that individuals had previously purchased from all customers' Kindle devices who had purchased them, people were taken by surprise. The violation of the expectation that an ebook would, like a real, physical book, continue to be owned unless they lost it or gave it away shook many's confidence in digital goods. Similarly, when Facebook launched a campaign that allowed them to use photos from individuals' Facebook photo collections in advertisements targeted at both friends of the individual as well as complete strangers, people's expectations of their privacy using the service were violated, leading many to protest.
While such examples serve as, perhaps, among the most visible cases where massive information controllers on the Web upset or surprised individuals, people have slowly started to become aware to the extent at which platform providers are capitalising on their positions, sometimes at their expense. The entire field of ``digital marketing'', for example, which has sought to manipulate individuals through the careful use of their own personal information, has brought a nearly constant stream of advertising into people's lives.
Since so many of these platforms offer services that people value and even find indispensible, many have come to see giving up their status as information controller a \emph{necessary tradeoff} for a digital lifestyle~\cite{}. Those who want to continue to socialise with their friends as provided by platform X, have few alternatives besides to migrate to yet another social network, powered by the same business model, with similar information controller policies. What happened to open innovation?
\section{Efforts to ``Take Back the Web''}
Fortunately, civic efforts to re-balance power back to individuals are far from dwindling, with many projects and hackathons dedicated to ``taking back the web''. As mentioned earlier, there are two major approaches that have been pursued.
One are decentralised applications which more or less necessitate, to some extent, end-user participation as a data controller. Examples include applications for file sharing such as WebTorrent, social networking platforms such as Diaspora, real time chat and videoconferencing applications over WebRTC, and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and cryptocurrency applications such as NameCoin.
The other approach has been to simplify self-hosting of critical Web and Internet infrastructure easier. Projects such as FreedomBox\footnote{}, Cozy Cloud\footnote{} and Sandstorm.io\footnote{} are examples of such projects that are varieties of Linux with utilities designed to make it easier for people to self-administer and self-hose own web, mail and chat servers on simple physical hardware they own, such as plug or stick computers, or on virtual hosts they control. Sandstorm, in particular allows web application back-ends, such as WordPress, Etherpad, Ethercalc, and so on to be installed simply and easily by the owner via a web-based interface.
Yet, a significant barrier to these latter approaches it that they still require people to set up and administer a host. In particular, they need the following:
\begin{itemize}
\item A computer that's available all the time
\item A persistent (static) internet connection with an external IP address
\item A domain name for that address
\item A Web server software stack, and time and expertise to configure it.
\end{itemize}
Among these three needs, the first, and fourth are virtually solved; in increasing parts of the world, most people have access to one or more computational devices throughout their day, whether they be smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or game consoles. Access to an internet connection has similarly continued to increase, with several countries in Europe, for example, declaring access to high-speed broadband (at the 100Mbit or higher) a fundamental human right. With regard to the fourth concern, free, open source web servers such as Apache, lighttpd, Nginx are not only readily available but have also become secure, easy to configure and deploy thanks to the collective contributions of thousands of and projects such as FreedomBox, CozyCloud and the Rasperry PI NOOBS project.
With respect to external persistent IP addresses, however, there are several challenges. NAT devices, organisational firewalls, mobile network provider gateways make such devices invisible to the external Internet, thereby impeding end-users's ability to set up servers on the machines in their homes for sharing with others. A second factor has exacerbated this problem is mobility; mobile devices often rely several different methods for accessing the Internet throughout the day. This means that for the various kinds of mobile devices people use, carry, wear or drive will be constantly peering with new providers that provide new addresses.
The lack of a simple unique IP address per device means that each person's devices change not only addresses, but names as well. While services like DynDNS allows individuals to register persistent domain names for devices that dynamically change IP addresses, DynDNS remains a monthly for-pay service that most ordinary users would not see as essential, and expertise still out of reach of most end-users.
\section{A Server in Every Browser?}
\bibliographystyle{abbrv}
\bibliography{redecentralise} % sigproc.bib is the name of the Bibliography in this case
%\balancecolumns
% That's all folks!
\end{document}