Dfinity, the platform without owners

Lately we often heard to talk about informatic monopoly, especially about the social networks. Dfinity is the project of Dominic Williams, which proposes to challenge all the social networks, and not only, with a free platform without owners.

Digital monopoly

We studied and we learnt from the errors of the past (and of the present) how much deleterious a monopoly can be for the economy.

However today we are seeing one between the biggest monopoly ever happened: the digital one.

We don’t realize it, it passes unobserved and in silence, but the World Wide Web is a very big monopoly. It it a place where it’s hard to innovate without let the biggers of Internet become richer. An example for all, who ever will monetize his own activity on a search engine different than Google?

“As well as we don’t accept the absolute power of a king, at the same way we shouldn’t accept that it is a king to carry, produce and to sell all we need to live”. – Sherman Act, during the cause against the monopoly of the Standard Oil Company of J.D. Rockefeller, 1911.

We didn’t change our way to think about the monopolies, but they still exist, they move furtive between the real and digital world, but there is who dreams to change all of it.

What is Dfinity

Dfinity is a no-profit organization, settled in Zurigo and with offices in the Silicon Valley, in Palo Alto and in San Francisco. It was founded in the 2016 by Dominic Williams, with the purpose to replace the World Wide Web.

Dominic Williams was focusing to eliminate the monopolies created inside the internet, by uncrowning the undisputed kings of the web, like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook. According to Williams they taken over internet by making it today an affordable place for the smallest ones.

Dfinity was born as the archenemy of Internet. A still virgin platform, without monopolies, decentralised. A dream as it was Internet in the ’90s, when it wasn’t taken over by the big multinationals yet, when there were still low entrance barriers and the innovators that wanted to enter into this world shouldn’t be subject to the rules made by a hidden monopoly.

The main purpose of Dfinity is the one to eliminate the “platform risk”, which is the risk that comes from build our own technology of a platform of another person.

How does Dfinity work

Dfinity should work exactly like this, as well as the World Wide Web, but free, decentralised, without owners. It’s like being able to make a technological revolution without Amazon, for example.

Williams, with its platform, wants to replace the IP (Internet Protocol) with the “Internet Computer Protocol”. Inside this new protocol the softwares can freely work.

In Dfinity don’t exist services of cloud computing, centralised servers, Dns, nothing that constantely keeps us connected with the big multinationals. But we can use internet straight as a massive platform, by writing straight on it.

Dfinity seems a beautiful dream, but the problem of a such free platform will be the one of the safety. And the problem of the safety, today, is managed right by that multinationals that Dominic Williams wanted to fight.

The project of Dfinity

Dfinity, though, already did something. A couple of projects to replace some between the most important (and monopoly) social networks of the web.

At the beginning of the year has been presented LinkedUp, the LinkedIn without owners. The calculation power of LinkedUp doesn’t come from Amazon AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. This platform is based, instead, on the architecture of Dfinity itself.

At the beginning of the summer, instead, has been presented the replacement of Tik Tok: Can Can. It is an application very similar to Tik Tok, but that will work on a platform that doesn’t have a owner.

This post is also available in: Italiano