Facebook, the world's largest social media network, is facing a backlash from advertisers over claims it has failed to remove racist and hateful content from its platform.
Microsoft, Starbucks, Coca-Cola and Unilever are among the major companies that have stopped advertising on Facebook, wiping out about $60 billion in value from the company's stock and heaping heavy pressure on Facebook's already spooked investors.
Dfinity, a blockchain-based cloud computing platform valued at nearly $2 billion in 2018 amid a growing Facebook ad boycott, has opened its network to third-party developers in the hope that it can “reboot the internet” and exit tech’s “monopoly” en masse.
Instead of a monolith holding the personal information of its users, platforms like Dfinity can be used to build applications that empower users to own and benefit from their information.
Dfinity founder Dominic Williams said: "The open version of the most popular large-scale applications will replace today's most popular applications, and the company aims to make its network available to the public in the fourth quarter of 2020."
Dfinity has built an open alternative to video-sharing app TikTok called CanCan, claiming it was built with less than 1,000 lines of code (compared to Facebook’s 62 million) to highlight what it calls “the ease of building the next generation of large-scale apps” based on its blockchain network.
Earlier this year, Dfinity demonstrated at the World Economic Forum in Davos that LinkedUp, an open alternative to professional networking site LinkedIn, was running on independent data centers in Switzerland, and the company is now expanding to a “global network” of independent data centers across the U.S. to Europe.
“These applications will not be controlled by large corporations, governments or any central entity, and the users will be the custodians and decision makers, rather than the current situation as we know it today, and they will have voting rights,” Williams said.
Since raising $102 million in 2018 from investors including major venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital, Dfinity has been building what it calls the “Internet Computer,” a decentralized, non-proprietary network that it hopes will run a multitude of next-generation “Web3” applications.
The idea of Web3 is that, starting with the first early versions of the internet, and then the second generation internet that was controlled by Silicon Valley, the third generation internet will allow users to control their data and enable transparent monetization.
“One of the really exciting things about blockchain is that we’re now entering the era of Web3, where we think you can take the best of the advanced capabilities and richness of Web2 and combine them, which is why we have people love Twitter and Facebook and Gmail and all these other types of modern applications. But the openness and lack of platform risk of Web1 is something that startups can really build on top of,” said Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz in a statement.
Platform risk is a developer term for the risk associated with building an application on another company’s platform: that the platform could disappear, or its owners could change the rules.
"It's a huge problem ... I think it really stifles innovation, it really stifles startups," Dixon said.
He believes Dfinity’s Internet Computer could play a similar role to the iPhone’s release in 2007, opening up the possibility of a new, uncontrolled ecosystem.
As companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have grown and taken over the internet, platform risk has increased dramatically.
Social media companies that were early adopters of blockchain have rushed to meet demand, including Minds, which has 2.5 million registered users, Block.one, the company behind the EOS blockchain, and Revolution Populi, led by Yale professor David Gelernter and Goldman Sachs veteran Rob Rosenthal.
“One of the biggest problems that has emerged in technology is the monopoly of the internet by big tech, with these companies consolidating control over almost all of our technology,” Williams said.
“They collect vast amounts of information about us, which they sell for profit and leverage to grow market share and acquire or sell off competitors at an alarming rate.”
“The Internet Computer offers a way to reboot the web, creating a public alternative to proprietary cloud infrastructure. It will enable the next generation of developers and entrepreneurs to adopt big technology through open internet services, and it aims to bring the internet back to its free and open roots, free from the domination of a few companies.”
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