Mission Statement for InternetWide.org
Our goal is to get more internet technology available to end-users, ranging from individuals to corporations. There are thousands of internet standards, but the facilities available to end-users are pretty much limited to web sites and email. Given the innovative constructions that have been built on top of just these two protocols, we see great potential in adding more valuable internet standards.
The Internet functions best when it is fully distributed, without central points that could jeapardise the infrastructure if it failed, for instance due to a bankrupcy, bombardment or a technical failure. Many protocols have been devised to function that way; for 20 years now, we have seen hosting providers offer web sites and email services to individuals and companies, large and small.
Beyond email and web however, not much innovation has been added; it has been limited to things running on top of this infrastructure. The resulting system has a number of serious drawbacks that can be overcome by expansion by making more Internet protocols generally available:
- Trust and security are very much ad-hoc structures
- Personal privacy is being challenged by concentrated (web) services
- Automation is one-sided, with self-help websites that require manual handling by users
- Commercial services are setup in isolation, without crossover to similar services elsewhere
The clear answer to this is to provide more technical innovation to end-users, small and large. The obvious approach is to upgrade hosting solutions, which in practice are stuck with the situation that they created 20 years ago; hardly any of them offers the services mentioned below. One reason for this is the network problem: the impact of a single hosting provider is limited, because protocols only work when many others migrate to them at the same time. And there are so many to choose, how to get everyone on the same line? This has turned out to be very difficult to do.
We intend to resolve this through a hosting platform that can be installed by many hosting companies at the same time. This would lead to the same-time introduction of these new protocols, and resolve the core problem.