IEEE Spectrum November, 2017 - 23

REFLECTIONS_BY ROBERT W. LUCKY

OPINION

THE LURE OF DECENTRALIZATION
IN THE MOST RECENT SEASON of the TV comedy "Silicon Valley,"
lead character Richard Hendricks is obsessed with trying to create his dream vision of a decentralized Internet. This theme did
not go unnoticed in the print media, as a number of publications,
including IEEE Spectrum, noted that there do exist ongoing efforts to build
a decentralized Internet. This provoked me to consider the relative advantages of centralization and decentralization * Until the 1980s, most communication networks were relatively centralized. In the United States, AT&T
had a monopoly that was regulated by the government. Connections were
dedicated, point-to-point channels, and the attachment of foreign devices
(meaning anything not manufactured by AT&T's Western Electric Co. subsidiary) was forbidden. I remember with embarrassment my testimony at the
federal antitrust trial, trying halfheartedly to justify AT&T's fallback strategy
of allowing digital connections to such devices via a Western Electric "data
coupler." * The antitrust trial resulted in the dismantling of AT&T. At the same
time, the rise of the Internet was causing centralized communication networks to unravel. The Internet was designed to be open and decentralized.
Packet switching ensured robustness, and the Internet Protocol enforced
open and universal interconnection. The end-to-end principle-whereby
the network's job is simply to move data from one point to another while
making the existence of all the points in between as invisible as possible-
became a guiding philosophy of network transparency. * After almost
a half century, the plumbing of the Internet is still decentralized, but
the overlay of the World Wide Web is not. A handful of giant companies
ILLUSTRATION BY

Eddie Guy

has virtual monopoly control of traffic
and commerce. And governments censor
the Web, control access, and are one of
many sources of surveillance. But, I ask
myself, Is Hendricks's peer-to-peer network the answer to these ills?
We technologists have some powerful
tools to create distributed systems, including mesh networks, peer-to-peer protocols,
cryptography, and blockchains. Ongoing
efforts like blockchain-based Ethereum
offer exciting potential. One review asked
readers to imagine "facebook without
Facebook, uber without Uber." This is
possible, but it does seem rather unlikely.
In a way, we've been there, done that.
Napster was a peer-to-peer network not
unlike Hendricks's. For a while it was a
supernova on the Net, but it had a central directory and thus someone to sue,
and is no more. BitTorrent, however, also
employs a peer-to-peer protocol and has
been widely used for quite a few years.
Richard Hendricks envisions his peer-topeer network storing data on a distributed
swarm of cellphones. I've been wondering about this. Do I want my data stored on
random cellphones? I'd have no problem
if it were transient data or entertainment
files, but what about my family photos? Ten
years from now, when the photos might
be wanted, all those cellphones would be
gone. The data would have probably been
erased years earlier. The problem with
systems implemented with peers is that
no one is responsible. Whom do you call
when your mesh network is out? Or who,
ultimately, stands behind a blockchain?
On the other hand, distributed architectures have an engineering appeal. They
offer organic growth and resilience and
are a cradle for democratic usage and control. Sometimes having no one in charge
can be a good thing. However, as legal
scholar Larry Lessig has pointed out, regulation is achieved through four means: law,
norms, market, and architecture. We engineers usually control only one of these,
and that's something we should always
keep in mind. ■
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https://www.ethereum.org/ http://www.bittorrent.com/ http://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/internet/hbos-silicon-valley-joins-the-push-for-a-decentralized-web https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/the-end-of-att http://www.lessig.org/about/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_switching http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1092259/ http://spectrum.ieee.org/ http://SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum November, 2017