Abstract: Today’s Internet scarcely resembles the mythological image of it as a fundamentally democratic system. Instead, users are at the whims of a small number of providers who control nearly everything about users’ experiences on the Internet. In response, researchers and engineers have proposed, over the past decade, many systems to re-democratize the Internet, pushing control over data and systems back to the users. Yet nearly all such projects have failed. In this paper we explore why: what are the goals of such systems and what has caused them to run aground?
@inproceedings{liu2017barriers,
title={The barriers to overthrowing internet feudalism},
author={Liu, Tai and Tariq, Zain and Chen, Jay and Raghavan, Barath},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks},
pages={72--79},
year={2017}
}