Happy Birthday World Wide Web!
My name is Nick Briz
and I'm Jon Satrom
and we run an event series called
D.R.E.A.M. or Data Rules Everything Around Me
presented by Mozilla in partnership with Netizen
[music]
It's hard to believe that the web is 30 years old
Now, that's the web, not the Internet.
The Internet is a bunch of computers
connected together with cables and was pretty
niche until the web came along.
The web brought the rest of us online to share,
learn, experiment, and connect with one another.
Anyone could carve their own little piece
of cyberspace just by making a simple HTML page
And you could do whatever you want with your
website or sites.
And you could share it with the rest of the
world by putting it on a web server.
That way, anybody could visit your site–which
really just means requesting
a copy of your HTML page over HTTP.
But this is where things get a little tricky
because, technically anyone could set up a
home server and connect it to the Internet,
but it's not as easy as writing an HTML page
and even setting up a server with a cloud-based
company is a little tricky.
That's why these days lots of folks have opted
to create profiles on other people's websites
instead of on their own.
For example, billions of us have create profiles
on a single website run by this nervous looking
android named Mark.
Though the web was built to be a wildly decentralized
platform, this whole tricky server situation
has gotten things looking a lot more centralized.
Yea, the wider web is a great place for self
expression,
but on Mark's site there are a lot of rules.
For example, he hates it if you don't use
your government name.
And this isn't MySpace or Tumblr so no animated
GIF backgrounds, or colors, or images at all...
you get white.
This isn't because of Mark's aesthetic preferences,
the reason for all the conformity is because
it's easier to commodify our online identities
which consist of
way more data than just our real names.
If you're watching this video, you're likely
already aware that Mark isn't the only android
in town that monetizes your online identity
and the behaviors associated with it or that
they're even able to influence that behavior
for further monetization.
So now, we're in a mess and people are split
on what to do about the web.
Some have given up completely and welcome
our new robot overlords and say things like
"Privacy is dead." and others are like, "This
is so screwed up, let's torch it and start over."
But some believe that there's a middle ground.
A little over a couple years ago, Paul Frazee
Tara Vancil started working on a new project
called the Beaker Browser.
Beaker is really similar to the web browsers
that we know except it has a few unique properties.
Instead of requesting websites from servers
over the HTTP protocol, Beaker uses the DAT
protocol to request websites directly from
other peoples computers.
No servers!
That means less barriers to making your own
website and more decentralization online.
I don't think it makes much sense to talk
about completely rebuilding the web.
The plane is in the air we have to fix it
as it's flying
and I think that's awesome.
I started to think: "What do I want the web to look like?"
"What do I want social media to look like?"
Those are some of the questions 
that inspired building Beaker.
On the web today, with HTTP,
we depend on a lot of intermediaries.
I have a Twitter account, but it doesn't belong to me. It belongs to Twitter.
Most of the activity on Twitter's servers is secret.
It lives on their servers and there's not much we can do about it.
But, we said: "What if the web used a peer to peer protocol instead?"
"How would that change how applications are built?"
So, we built an application called Fritter.
Which is very similar to Twitter, but monumentally different.
What if, instead of your profile being stored in a database on Twitter's servers,
it was just some files that lived on your own computer.
What if your profile was a website?
And what if you could use that profile–that website–to connect to your other friends' websites?
Fritter is simply a skin over user profiles.
It just helps you view your feed and your friends' feeds
and to post to your feed.
and gives everybody control over their own identity.
Now here's the cool thing
If me, the author of Fritter, if I were to start putting some
privacy infringing code into the application
you would be able to see it
and you would be able to strip that code out
or actually change the algorithm that defines how the feed works.
Anyone could layer on top of an existing application
and fine tune it to their interests and their tastes.
And we don't have that on the web today.
If you sign up for Instagram,
You have a few fields that you need to fill.
Add a photo. What's your name? What's your bio?
But that's it,
and I think that's really sad.
Because, the web is an infinite canvas
It's really easy for me to dream about what the future of the web looks like.
The browser is something more than just a tool for consumption
but a tool for creation and exploration as well.
and peer to peer protocols make that possible.
And if we look back to the days of MySpace
and even further back to the days of GeoCities,
we have historical evidence that people want to express themselves on webpages.
and they're capable of it
even if they're not professional developers
and I'd really love to get back to that
and cherish the weirdness and the beauty that comes out of
giving people the opportunity
to paint on the web.
[music]
