We held a "what should a free Internet be like" activity in Shenzhen, China on Sep 18, 2021. We invited software developers, internet product manager and content creators, who are relevent to free internet, to discuss The Free Internet Manifeso draft.
We cannot live without the Internet nowadays, but we are suffering from invasion of privacy, no ownership of our data and accounts, control of internet tycoons, etc. The original intention of the Internet is to create a free online world, However, do we really have freedom on it now?
The basic reason of all these situations is that we do not have methods to retrict internet tycoons technically. Internet companies can have full control of their internet services and user data because the services are all cetralized run in their own servers. They have absolute power to have monopoly of the digital world, exploiting content creators and open-sourced software developers who are actual producers of the Internet.
The solution to solve all these problems is to rebuild the free internet. However, what should the free internet be like? What should it include? All these topics need to be discussed and decided with community. We confirmed the three essential freedom of the free internet during the meeting:
Freedom 1: The freedom to fully use internet services. The fully control over the internet service and fully access to the source code is a precondition to this.
Freedom 2: The freedom to change the Internet service publish your own version as you wish, while other users have the freedom to choose whether to accept the version accroding to Freedom1.
Then we discussed the relationship between free internet and web3.0 and got the conclusion together. The key points of web3.0 are decentralization，self-owned identity and ownership of data. The idea of free internet shares the same vision with web3.0 while the vision of free internet is more ambitious. Internet services which meet the requirements of free internet will definitely be web3.0 servces, not the other way around.
In the future we will invite more people around the world to paticipate in the discussion of The Free Internet draft and Free Internet DAO desigin. Let's build free internet together.