NDL ArcaNet: THE POST INTERNET OMNIVERSE

The current internet, as we know it, is a tree-like infrastructure that connects servers and individual devices through communication lines on a global scale. Users can utilize any of its branches and leaves, routers and servers respectively, to both host all types of digital content and access that published by any other user regardless of their real location on the network.

This freedom to choose the physical location of files and pages has created the false impression that the internet is a decentralized system when in reality it is a hierarchical and centralized data storage and transfer system that is maintained by concessionary institutions and companies.

Over the past twenty years, the content hosted on the internet has become concentrated around a reduced number of large providers that offer users high value-added hosting and services in private server farms: the cloud. So much so that in 2020, 95% of the content indexed by search engines was already hosted by four US providers. The internet, therefore, is not only this hierarchical network at the hardware level, but it has also become a centralized environment at the software and content level.

One might think that the centralization of content could have fostered interaction between network participants, but nothing could be further from the truth. Each platform, application, or web page has been designed and built as if it were an independent and isolated island that defines its own operating and access policies.

These islands, lost in a giant ocean, are usually totally independent and autonomous. In the best of cases, the visited web page will offer a navigable link to locate some other platform on which it delegates part of its conceptual functionality, but little more. That is, we have an internet full of entities that barely interact and when they do, it is usually on a superficial level.

The network is so large that the platforms that regularly exchange data and processes are almost testimonial. However, the need for massive information exchange not only exists but is one of the main demands of user communities. The demand for the development of APIs that facilitate communication between web systems, for example, has seen exponential growth in recent years.

The network is transforming to create a symbiosis with the physical world, thus expanding its scope, objectives, and horizons. This growth, far from being orchestrated by a single actor or authority, actually responds to the chaotic advance derived from the effort, trial and error of the different user communities.

It is not surprising then that there are different perspectives or visions of what will be the optimal way that the internet should take when the transition to the new model is complete.

WEB 3: THE BLOCKCHAIN INTERNET

Web3 is a 'banked' vision of the internet in which certain pieces of information become digital goods that users should be able to buy and sell in public and global markets.

From the perspective of Blockchain-based platforms, the priority objective is not to protect the state or nature of digital properties themselves, but to register how many units of each asset belong to each user at a given time and to guarantee that ownership changes are made in a secure and reliable way.

For these platforms, in reality, the form or semantic meaning of the assets is not relevant and that is why they treat them as collateral or secondary objects. The real content will either be hosted on an external platform or will simply not have a physical form, as is the case with cryptocurrencies.

Blockchain networks, when implemented correctly, trap assets under their power in perpetuity and begin to audit any possible interaction with them. Users generally have to demonstrate with their private keys the ability to authorize the change of ownership - or state - of each digital asset.

This perspective, if globalized, would turn the internet into a network of 'prisons' for digital property: Blockchain networks.

Each of these networks would be managed by an unattended, autonomous, and automatic entity whose behavior is governed by the source code developed by its community of developers, as well as by the configurations that the miners apply to the hardware equipment that keeps them running.

If it becomes a reality, humanity would be handing over for the first time in history the three typical powers of a State, the legislative, the executive, and the judicial, to an autonomous and unattended machine. A machine without an apparent owner that only responds to the criteria applied by its programmers in the source code, at least, as long as this code is not developed by an equally autonomous artificial intelligence.

WEB 3.0: THE OMNIVERSE INTERNET

Led by Tim Bernes-Lee, the creator of the Web, the actors who gave rise to the current Internet follow a continuist trend and defend postulates that are quite far from the proposals of the Blockchain world, for which this technology is actually not a viable alternative.

For them, the Web has always been linked to the distribution of content among different users and its natural evolution is the transformation into an Omniverse in which physical reality merges with digital platforms to offer a mixed and enriched experience by artificial intelligence (#IA), virtual reality (#VR), and augmented reality (#AR) technologies.

Digital goods - understood as indivisible and private data sets that are valuable to a third party - become the true protagonists of the new Web and the foundation on which to build everything else.

Web 3.0 stands at the opposite end of the Blockchain proposal. Private data, instead of being external or insignificant entities, becomes the engine of the new society, while public data becomes the scenery that will dress the scenarios of the different metaverses, platforms, and websites of the Internet.

In an environment as insecure as the network, guaranteeing the absolute and global acceptance of digital assets requires not only ensuring the origin of the data and its current content, but also certifying, in a non-repudiable way, all the milestones in its history.

For users, it is important to know what the digital asset contains, who created it, through whose hands it has passed, and if during these custody periods the asset was modified, in which case they will also demand a record of the nature of the changes.

In essence, this change registry could be carried out by distributed global registry technology. In fact, since 2015 there have been countless attempts to expand the capabilities of Blockchain technology to accommodate this need, which, in general, have either resulted in the collapse of networks or have had a very negative impact on the long-term viability of projects, both in terms of costs and technology.

The reality that prevents Blockchain technology from being successfully adapted for this purpose is that we cannot eliminate any part of the global change registry (the ledger) if we want the entire ecosystem to remain reliable. Therefore, all Blockchain networks degrade with use without anything that can be done about it, and they do so much faster the larger the storage size required for each transaction.

To explain it simply, if each of us were a digital asset and a complete report of our global physical state were generated every time we breathed, the storage needs to safeguard all the historical states of all the inhabitants of the planet would be immeasurable. If we also want to replicate all this information on thousands or hundreds of thousands of independent machines, the environment becomes unmanageable, both due to the complexity and costs of the hardware required and the difficulty of orchestrating the actors involved to keep the service active.

When the universe of discourse encompasses all the valuable content of the Internet, that is, those that have an owner, the previous example ceases to be an extreme case and becomes an average case. Incorporating complex and variable-sized content into the internal storage of these platforms would entail an extremely high energy cost and consumption, both in disk and bandwidth, totally indefensible from a technical and economic perspective. The resulting platforms would also have serious sustainability and performance problems, which would become more complex over time and with use.

Basing the proposed development on Blockchain platforms would lead, consequently, inevitably and exponentially, to the final collapse of all the systems, platforms, and metaverses of the new Internet.

Web 3.0, the Omniverse, needs a new paradigm that protects digital assets, their owners, and the systems themselves that will exploit them from all network participants, that is, from humans and their artificial intelligence-based assistants, who will multiply by millions the volume of interactions to be secured in the coming years.

The proposal is clear. Private data, the true value of the future, must be encapsulated (#pods) and protected from the risks of the Internet, from the bad faith of users, and from the undetectable impersonation capabilities that artificial intelligence will offer shortly.

The alternative is #NDL, a technology that starts from the premises of Web 3.0 and applies the objectives of Blockchain to give a unified response to the needs of both worlds. A response in the form of a secure, virtualized Internet over the current one, where private data is the absolute center and participants act on their own behalf.

Do you agree?