Workshop on the Decentralization of the Internet at ACM CoNEXT 2024

This trend has economic as well as technical implications for attributes commonly associated with the Internet, such as user-centricity and permissionless innovation. The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)’s Decentralization of the Internet Research Group (DINRG) has been working on identifying the root causes and consequences of Internet centralization. Discussions at DINRG sessions held during previous IETF meetings and past focused workshops have led to significant insights, especially with regard to the centralization of infrastructure and control over user-owned data.

The recent DIN workshop at ACM CoNEXT-2024, organized by DINRG co-chairs Lixia Zhang and Dirk Kutscher, provided a forum for academic researchers to present and discuss on-going efforts on this topic, and to create a greater awareness of this important issue in the broader network research community. The workshop attracted a diverse set of researchers who are working on Internet decentralization in fields such as Internet technologies, economics, and law-making. The workshop featured two keynotes, two technical paper presentation sessions, and an interactive panel discussion.

The keynotes were presented by two renowned experts:

Cory Doctorow, an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Special Advisor, gave a talk titled, “DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How computer scientists can halt enshittification to make a new, good internet and condemn today's enshitternet to the scrapheap of history.” Cory’s talk vividly explained the historic development of a process that he called enshittification, a process in which the providers of online products and services changed their policies subtly and gradually over time, grabbing control of user data for profitability. Doctorow also discussed potential remedies and countermeasures, including removing the barriers for users to exit platforms and reinstalling the end-to-end principle in future application developments.

Michael Karanicolas, the Executive Director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, talked about the “Fediverse Papers: Constitutional, Governance, and Policy Questions for a New Paradigm of Networking”. Michael provided an overview of the history of digital speech and content governance. He highlighted the challenges in supporting effective content moderation in today’s Internet contexts, including issues around monetization, legislation, privacy, and the need for governance mechanisms to meet users, content owners, and governments’ expectations. He emphasized the importance of intentionality, and a structured process to identify the essential policy questions and to evaluate various design choices for the future of decentralized platforms.

The workshop also featured technical sessions on Decentralized Systems and Technologies for Decentralization. The papers included topics such as a description of the Bluesky AT protocol and proposals for providing platform-independent DNS names to empower end users. Interested people can access all the workshop papers via the online ACM Proceedings of the workshop.

An interactive panel discussion with Cory Doctorow (EFF), Michael Karanicolas (UCLA), Dan Massey (USC ISI, NSF), and Paul Mockapetris (ThreatSTOP) articulated various next steps for countering Internet centralization. Among many things discussed, the panel and audience identified the notion of enabling direct user-to-user communication without reliance on third parties, and the required functionality to support that, such as how to provide user owned identities, tools for user mutual authentications and secure communications.

These and additional related topics will be further discussed at the IRTF DIN research group, which is a forum with open participation to serve the purpose of continuous international collaborative research on Internet decentralization.

Videos of the keynote presentations are below. A more detailed report on the workshop with photos, links to more videos, and links to papers is available at on Dirk Kutshcer’s website.