Technology

After the Death of Net Neutrality, We Need a Decentralized Internet 11 65

Net neutrality died more quietly than expected. It’s been almost two months since the FCC’s ruling to make internet access vulnerable to corporate meddling, thanks to FCC chairman and Verizon advocate Ajit Pai. And not much seems to have changed on the web browsing citizen’s end. Major ISPs Comcast, Verizon and AT&T have all indicated that they have no plans to block or throttle traffic, or to prioritize paid content. So rest easy, dear ones. The sharks have promised not to bite.

Of course, that’s really no reason to celebrate. As of June 11th, “there is nothing legally preventing companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T from arbitrarily censoring entire categories of apps, sites and online services, or charging Internet users expensive new fees to access them,” notes Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit advocating for digital equality.

Fight for the Future is just one organization working for a free digital world. All around, and in part thanks to the FCC’s ruling, people are switching on to the notion that open connectivity should be a right and not a privilege. And some folks are getting a crazy idea: if we can’t have net neutrality, we may just have to build another internet.

Building Our Own Internet

That’s exactly what people have been doing in Detroit. To combat the emergence of a “digital class system,” and in response to the scarcity and prohibitive costs of ISP connection, residents and volunteer members of the Equitable Internet Initiative, or EII, are building their own internet infrastructure.

Over on the Pala Reservation in Southern California, meanwhile, indigenous communities are tired of waiting for a connection. So they’re taking matters into their own hands and repurposing unused analog TV channels to broadcast their own free and neutral internet across the rez. They call it Tribal Digital Village.

Efforts like the EII and Tribal Digital Village are proving that we can take control of our connectivity and decouple it from the stratification of economic privilege.

Reinventing the Internet Altogether

Radical community efforts to build DIY networks are inspiring and powerful. But perhaps we can go even farther. The internet still works on an old model that has plenty of room for improvement. Let’s say you’re sitting in a public library, messaging your zine collaborator across the table. There’s no direct internet connection between your phones, so your message has to go up into the nebulous cloud of internet before it bounces back down to their phone. Not entirely efficient, considering they’re sitting right there.

If you had a direct connection, the signal could just travel across the table. That would be possible using a mesh network, like the one proposed by RightMesh. In their mesh network model, every device becomes a hotspot in a decentralized connective network.

Why volunteer your device as a public hotspot? Because you get tokens, of course. This is blockchain! Like the EII and Tribal Digital Village, this is a cooperative and participatory system that relies on no centralized authority (like a corporate ISP). Everyone volunteers their device as a hotspot, gets rewarded with tokens, and just like that, we have a decentralized internet.

Without the need for ISPs, we would be free from Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T. We could run open-armed through the proverbial fields of digital wildflowers. The possibilities of this go well beyond urbanite convenience. A global mesh network could bring internet connection to any part of the globe where there are phones—even phones not connected to wifi. In this system, the phones create the wifi.

An Off-the-Grid Internet

RightMesh’s stated goal is to “connect the next billion people and lift 100 million out of poverty.” They claim to be the first P2P network that requires neither infrastructure nor network connectivity to operate.

That said, they’re not alone. Blockmesh is doing something similar. Moeco’s ‘global IoT connectivity platform’ uses mesh network principles for IoT gadgets. And Open Garden allows ISP customers to ‘sell’ your underutilized connection (extra bandwidth at home, or unused data from your mobile plan) to your neighbors for tokens.

All these ideas are packed with possibility. But the point is, with the grassroots efforts of groups like the EII and Tribal Digital Village, and with blockchain innovation pushing the definition of the internet forward, we’re looking at a future where the connection is universal, accessible, fast, cheap, self-generating, decentralized and off the grid. Someday soon we might be thanking the FCC for spurring these advances.

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I grew up in the Silicon valley under the technological mentorship of Steve Wozniak. I'm a proud member of the Choctaw Nation, I've lived, worked and traveled all over the world, and I now write in the Pacific Northwest.

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These Entrepreneurs Are Building the Blank Canvas of the New Internet 5 2890

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

We need a new internet. This HTTP stuff is left over from the ‘90s. It’s corporate controlled in the post neutrality world, susceptible to government censorship, inaccessible to many with nearly half the world’s population still unable to connect. It increasingly needs a more streamlined makeover.

Or at least a little house cleaning. How many apps can we possibly have? How many passwords and accounts? How much content can we cram in here? What do we do with the ever growing graveyard of dead links, old MySpace accounts and cat memes, to say nothing of the emptying, generic cruise ship we call Facebook drifting steadily away from relevance? One possible answer: clean the slate. Start again. This time with something more efficient.

Imagining the Internet 2.0

By some indicators, blockchain could be the thing to supplant the internet as the de facto way we create, communicate and store data. But how will we see it widely implemented without it first becoming more user friendly to the layperson? SMBs and entrepreneurs don’t necessarily have a background in programming, nor have the skills to set their business up on the blockchain. Learning to program or hiring a team of blockchain devs isn’t always within reach to the average SMB, to say nothing of individual artisans or small nonprofits.

By contrast, consider how easy it is to start up a website. You can do it in a few hours, thanks to software platforms that make it easy. You get your URL from GoDaddy, a visual template from WordPress or SquareSpace, who also might bundle in your ecommerce space if you haven’t set that up with Shopify already. It’s because of these SaaS and PaaS third parties that we can web.

If we want to go blockchain, we’ll need a third parties like these to help facilitate it. So where are these platforms? Who’s building them?

The Deregulated Ecommerce Toolkit

Well, Eric Tippetts, for one. Tippetts expects the 2020s to see a shift to blockchain much like the 90s shift to the information superhighway and the 2010s shift to mobile. To speed things along, his company NASGO has created a toolkit called BlockBox, the goal of which is to be the ‘GoDaddy of blockchain’ so people and businesses can start building.

Through BlockBox, which Tippetts cocreated with a development team, you can find and secure a blockchain domain address, like you would with a URL, adapt your existing website for blockchain, and create a custom token. Instead of having to wrap your head around lines of code or hire a dev team, it just takes a couple minutes and a couple hundred bucks.

Tippetts describes NASGO itself as “a decentralized hosting environment that allows content to be seen in every part of the world, opening up blocked boundaries for communication and collaboration.” It also includes a platform for decentralized apps (DAPPS) that could compete with Apple and Google’s app stores.

Their website repeatedly emphasizes the deregulated nature of the product, ostensibly gearing their platform toward the “businesses, developers and consumers” of a sharing and open ecommerce.

A Platform for Public and Private Good

Amber Baldet’s company Clovyr has similar goals, but with a distinctly different tone. She wants people to use their DAPP platform to “build the systems we want to see in the world.”

Baldet left JP Morgan Chase, where she was hired to spearhead their out-of-character blockchain experiments, to found her startup. She recently testified before congress about blockchain regulation and the importance of protecting human rights and privacy early on, while the technology is still in its infancy.

She says that there needn’t be a divide between public and private interests when it comes to blockchain. “It’s very divided, the people that are building things for public chain and people that are building things for ‘permissioned’ or business enterprise kind of chains,” said Baldet in an interview with Fortune. She says that nomenclature isn’t helpful, “because it creates this kind of animosity where we’re saying that big business is on one side and the people or the proletariat are on the other side, when really it should just be about information residing where it makes sense and creating security boundaries that are logical.”

Building a Blank Canvas

In a way, the blockchain is a platform much like the internet itself, a canvas available for anybody to use, whatever their interests and intentions are.

So whatever direction the blockchain internet-nouveau of the future takes, if that’s really what we’re in for, people like Tippetts and Baldet are the architects of its structure. It’ll be up to the rest of to fill it up with content. Hopefully good content. Bring the memes, leave the corporate derelicts.

VEZT Wants You to be Able to Own Shares of Your Favorite Songs 6 2792

Mr. Cheeks has been producing music since the early 90s, under the mentorship of his late uncle, the legendary Gil Scott-Heron. He started with the Lost Boyz, won a Grammy for his work with Stephen Marley, and has released a handful of solo albums since.

Now, royalties for his singles will be available to his fans, thanks to the blockchain. Mr. Cheeks’ songs will be available on a platform that allows fans and investors to claim a slice of the rights to pop music they believe in. When the song is licensed for use, in advertising or film for example, you, the investor, get a cut.

It’s made possible through an app called VEZT, which is positioning itself to revolutionize the way music relates to money as the world’s “first music rights marketplace.” VEZT partnered with a long time Mr. Cheeks producer, Bink, to offer shares of the song “Lights, Camera, Action” which is currently available on the company’s website.

The Problem of Selling Music

Mixing music and markets is an old problem. How should musicians get paid? Who pays them? What about their support teams? How do we keep track of the flow of money and make sure everyone’s fairly compensated? Among the music world’s financial obstacles, one of the biggest issues is navigating licensing and royalties.

In Austin, for example, one of America’s most proficient music hubs, almost a third of musicians make less than minimum wage, and 70 percent are earning less than $10k per year on their work. That’s below the poverty line even for a household of one. It’s been like pulling teeth trying to get royalties from companies like Spotify, who generate income off their songs. Meanwhile even more expensive lawsuits pile up, or go completely unpursued from lack of funds, as marketers continue to ape good music with copyright infringing fakes. It’s a constant headache for musicians, producers and labels, and it makes it prohibitive to eke out a living in the music world.

Under VEZT’s model, royalties are simple. Music is intellectual property owned by the artist. The artist can sell a portion of those rights to fans, who become investors when they purchase a percentage of shares. Fans and musicians make an agreement to co-own the songs they both care so much about. If you love a song and want to see it do well, you invest. If it does well, you have a share in the artist’s success. Royalties are split based on percentage of ownership.

The concept comes from cofounders Robert Menendez, a former Wall St. financial trader/analyst, and Steve Stewart, an industry regular with entrepreneurial tendencies, whose accomplishments include ushering Stone Temple Pilots to fame in the early ‘90s and managing the band for a decade. They say they founded VEZT as part of a vision to “detangle a lot of the financial problems in the music industry, and connect fans more directly with the music they love.”

And now, they’ve expanded across the Pacific from VEZT’s headquarters in Los Angeles, and opened an office in South Korea.

‘The Perfect Environment’

“The fans of music in Korea are quite possibly the most enthusiastic and active fans on the planet,” says Stewart. “Combine this with a robust tech community and a government leading the way in adopting blockchain technologies and you have a perfect environment for VEZT.”

The ROK’s new legislation legitimizing crypto exchange, Dapps, and blockchain systems will take the peninsula farther into a brave new technological world, where many others have so far feared to tread. Combined with their now-world-famous maximalist pop industry, and it’s not hard to see why VEZT moved in.

Construction recently finished on their new 2500 square foot office in the Gangnam district of Seoul. VEZT has enlisted a host of professionals to their C-Suite, including veterans of major Korean record labels, Kpop producers, marketing and PR executives and, of course, tech experts.

Fixing Music With Blockchain

If their model works in Seoul and LA, VEZT could bring a more harmonious rhythm to an industry still trying to find its groove in the digital age. The world needs music, and musicians need to get paid. As with anything blockchain, cutting out some of the middlemen could be the Occam’s razor with the solution. When fans are directly invested in their music, everyone will want to see it succeed.

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