The Internet: from decentralization to corporatocracy (Tech of Decentralization week 1)

Wide-ranging interview on the origins of the Internet and its decentralization, and how it declined to its current corporatized, controllable state.Show more

With Web pioneer, Jean-Francois Groff, and Silicon Valley executive/apostate, Peter Magnusson, by Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger.

This is WEEK 1 of "The Technology of Decentralization" seminar, free from the Knowledge Standards Foundation. For details and to join, please go to: https://encyclosphere.org/seminar

Questions discussed:
- What’s wrong with the Internet today?
- Let’s talk about the original killer app of the Internet: the Web. What problems did HTTP and HTML solve?
- Was it essential to the early development of the Web and other Internet tools that they were open-source and non-proprietary?
- Why, for example, were HTTP and HTML protocols open-source and non-proprietary?
- Is it fair to say that early open standards helped the Internet to be “decentralized”? What does this term mean?
- What enabled Silicon Valley startups to evolve into massive giants? Why didn’t this happen sooner?
- What psychology, ideology, and motives generally characterized the Big Tech executives as they seized more and more of the digital rights of their users?
- Were we naive about the prospects of Internet freedom in the 1990s and 2000s? Why think so?