The Internet and the protocols such as TCP/IP, DNS, URL, and HTTP/S are firmly recognized as a broadly available resource offering an array of possible benefits. Users have superior access to data of all kinds, and various governments and industries had the right platform for providing information and services.
Users of all groups embraced the Internet as a medium for self-expression, making it easier for individuals to independently create and disseminate news, information, opinion, and entertainment.
However, many challenges continued as the Internet arrived new frontiers. Users confronted with abusive practices such as viruses, spam, break-ins, and identity theft. Some government agencies are strictly limiting and monitoring the online actions of their citizens. Big players such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others are gathering personal data and then allowing probable relevant answers.
Data Ownership and Control
It is increasingly evident that the Big Four of the Internet (Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple) are in control of commerce, content, and online communications. The availability of data in a data-driven economy becomes increasingly strategic, and the capacity for analysis and processing has created forms of economic exploitation of the data and generated an enhancement of it for the algorithmic profiling linked to the different commercial purposes.
The result is the creation of concentrations of power that go to harm the fundamental rights of the person, competition, pluralism, and democracy, which also includes the protection of national sovereignties.
Are we willing to give up our free will? Are we willing to allow the ownership of the data we generate in the hands of the platforms that can process it according to their purposes? Hence the need to protect privacy is equally urgent to safeguard the rules of proper competition.
A Possible Solution
It would be desirable to give back to the user the owner of their data, attributing to them a market value. The exchange of the data needs to be more explicit based on an adequate regulation of the data market that helps to counteract the bargaining power of the Internet giants.
To overcome the challenge, a big shift in the current Internet protocol architecture is required, where the processing is currently being done at the application level. The processing needs to be done at the lower level protocols to make the Internet more open and transparent.
Cyber is one such example of the protocol in designing with the promise of removing the problems of the conventional protocol stack. Cyber is well-defined by web3 agents and runs on top of IPHS (Interplanetary File System). Cyber is an information consensus system for answers and a search engine. The permission-less crypto and blockchain architecture is aiming to develop an open and general-purpose search engine in a way unapproachable to previous architectures.
Additionally, the current search engine has the adversarial examples problem (which is also being acknowledged by the Google engineers), which is tough to reason whether or not a particular sample is adversarial algorithmically. A blockchain-based approach, such as cyber, can change this tactic and effectively remove possible Sybil attack vectors.
The first protocol implemented with cyber technology is called Cyberd. Cyberd protocol is based on the cosmos-SDK and tendermint BFT Consensus. The goal of the protocol is to decrease the progress of the daily network to a given constant with a consensus computer.
The Prospects
Data that have significant economic value and whose improper use can be a source of substantial financial and other advantages. The blockchain-based open approach, such as cyber, could lead to valued, censorship-resistant, and a correct search of the web.
The decentralized search system can have equal participation from all irrespectively of political, regulatory, or any other restrictions; it can prevent privacy and provide the option to develop precise and transparent distribution following best industry practices.
Developers have the chance to develop a new and decentralized search engine (not like Google) with associated services and applications. Some of the possible applications that can be developed for the decentralized search engine are Web3 browsers, programmable semantic cores, search actions, offline search, command tools, autonomous robots, language convergence, self-prediction prediction markets on link reference, private cyber links and others.
For content providers, the open search system can give them the prospect to change their valuable content to web3 and protect it from any type of censorship.
Conclusion
The unique features of blockchain technology make its application a striking impression for many businesses and groups who are exploring ways to make the Internet more open and decentralized. The aim is to provide a provable search that is censorship and privacy resistant for any intelligence agency. The blockchain-based search engine and associated apps run on the web3 agent can open the door to create a decentralized Google with affiliated services.
Above all, it is necessary to avoid the implementation of systems capable of acting not only to condition the preferences of citizens as users but also their emotions and their choices in the social, institutional, and political sphere.