In the modern example of life imitating art, one nonprofit Mozilla Foundation has partnered with the National Science Foundation to award a total of $2 million in rewards for ideas that will make a decentralized internet a reality. The goal is to bring reliable internet connections to those who need it extremely rural communities and disaster victims.
Although utmost of us probably take our consistent connectivity for granted, the majority of the world some 4 billion people don’t hold access to a reliable internet connection. Even in the rural US, connectivity continues to be a serious problem in 2017 and if internet access is available, it is often slow and unreliable.
Then there’s the obstacle of maintaining internet connectivity in the aftermath of a physical disaster that wipes out the local foundation, like in the aftermath of the flood that killed several climbers on Everest in 2015. In these matters, internet access can be critical to organizing rescue efforts and allowing survivors to get in contact with their families to let them know they’re okay.
Fortunately, answers are beginning to emerge. There is a growing alliance of Redditors dedicated to creating a decentralized mesh net, or peer-to-peer networking protocol, in an effort to challenge the total limitation that Internet Service Providers have over our access to the web. Other networking researchers are growing decentralized internet solutions for more exotic use cases, such as tracking zebras in the wild or bringing the internet to Mars, despite these efforts may also prove to be incredibly useful a little closer to home.
If anyone can further usher in the era of decentralized networking, it’d likely be the Mozilla Foundation, which works to create the internet easily accessible through open-source browsing software, and the NSF, the real steward of the World Wide Web. To get the ball rolling, the Mozilla blog highlights plans such as turning backpacks into roaming routers or repurposing old phone booths or other under-utilized infrastructure as WiFi hotspots
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