The Internet, today
As more and more of our daily lives happens online, the value of the data we amass, as well as our reliance upon them, also grows: the memories we record in digital photos, our communication in email, messengers, or social media platforms, our financial transaction history, legal documents, calendars, ... the list goes on. But while it seems clear that this data is our data, do we really own it?
If you are like most people, your photos, email, and calendar are probably stored in some cloud service. This is extremely convenient: data can be accessed from all your devices, and you do not even have to bother with mundane things like backups. It all happens automatically. But it also means that the company that actually stores your data, and takes care of all the operations on your behalf, can revoke your access to your data at any point in time. And that may happen for reasons beyond your control. For example, in a past incident a faulty bot at Google blocked hundreds of user accounts in error. In such a case, you are at risk of losing access to major parts of your private data, including photos, emails, and calendar events. What would your life look like if you lost access to all that data today?
A lot of platforms and companies do not work in your best interest either. Their offers may seem cheap or may not require any monetary payment at all, but you end up paying in a different way: with your data. Social media sites require you to give up any and all ownership rights you have on the content you post. Every crumb of data you leave across the web is used to influence your behavior via advertisement. And nowadays, most services require you to sign off on them using your private data to train their AI models. What will the data be used for and may any of your data leak throughout the process? You never know. But it is someone else's profits that will drive the decisions.
In today's web, you do not actually own your data.
The Internet, tomorrow
Pioneered by Bitcoin, the introduction of decentralized protocols built on blockchain technology restores end-user agency and removes the reliance on traditional and proprietary IT systems. It also removes the need for expensive legacy intermediaries, for example for financial applications.
Bitcoin encodes ownership for a monetary token that can be used for payment across the Internet. Ethereum and other second-generation blockchains use smart contracts to generalize the types of tokens that they managed and implement additional functionality, like trading. Due to their technical limitations and the resulting transaction prices, however, the smart contracts as well as the objects stored on such chains are very small. A non-fungible token (NFT) representing an image, for example, generally does not contain the image itself but merely a reference to the image stored on a traditional web server, which comes with the downsides mentioned above. As such, blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum can truly encode ownership for a very small fraction of tasks we perform on the Internet.
The Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) goes one step beyond by realizing the vision of a World Computer. That is, extending the Internet's functionality so that it becomes a universal platform upon which the ownership of all code and data can be encoded. Users can truly own the data they store online, and validate all code that is accessing or manipulating that data. This also enables new and novel systems, such as community or DAO-owned services without the need for any centralized intermediaries. ICP achieves this through a blockchain network that uses node machines operating from independent datacenters worldwide, creating a fast, seamless, and scalable network. The Internet Computer thus extends the Internet's technology stack, enabling developers and other creators to build decentralized applications and other systems that respect the users' ownership of their data.