Compiled and produced | Baize Research Institute

"Internet Archives" is a non-profit digital library that provides Internet data archives reading services. It was founded by Brewster Carley in 1996. The digital materials provided by the "Archives" include websites, web pages, graphic materials Permanent storage of music, video, audio, software, motion graphics and millions of copies of books. In addition, the archive is also one of the advocates of Internet openness and liberalization.

One of the most important services in the archive is the Wayback Machine, translated as "Website Time Machine", which has more than 300 billion web pages as early as 1996, and is a place for researchers and historians to preserve digital cultural relics; It can also be used for entertainment, such as seeing what Google looked like back in 2001; or visiting some websites that were closed and no longer exist.

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The vision behind the Internet Archive

Can a decentralized web really help with this information on the internet?

Internet Archive Brewster:

We started out as an attempt to archive the internet, but really the goal is to be the archive on the internet and move towards storing "everything in the world". How do we go about building a digital library? Can we make all knowledge accessible to all? This is my vision for the Internet decades ago. With the technology we have now, we can actually make this happen.

I remember walking into the library when I was young and it seemed to be "infinite", with several floors, and the shelves on each floor were "stretching infinitely". But it's not actually infinite, it's even a tiny fraction of the human books, not to mention periodicals, TV shows, and everything else you can access. So my idea is that the Internet is where anyone can be a publisher, and everyone's voice can be published on the Internet, and there will be libraries to record them, organize them, and make them have lasting value.

So the web is a great step in that direction, but it actually has a lot of downsides. An Internet movie, for example, can actually only be fetched from the web server they came from, and you can only get a URL address (Uniform Resource Locator). Even though the movie is available from many different places, it only has one URL, so when the URL at the source is taken down, or deleted, it disappears from the web. This is not a proper way of dealing with culture.

So this time reflects the importance of copying network content, just like you have multiple copies in multiple databases.

We've been trying to fill in the missing sites with our "website time machine," where we collect nearly 1 billion web pages every day. It's actually more like a GitHub where you can go back in time on all the different sites and see their copy of the page at all times.

While it's easy to collect web pages in such a way, why don't we try to do something that's actually better? Now we have JavaScript, which allows users to publish code in our web programs; we have efficient hash codes, which are related to decentralized storage networks such as BitTorrent, Fliecoin, etc.

So, what is it that we want to build better? We want to build a private, robust network where you can actually make money by posting content on the network, not just through third parties. Hence our call in 2016 for a decentralized web. At that time, our development team got together and discussed that these decentralized technologies were the way forward for us. Now we've done some of that work because we now have smart contracts.

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Thoughts on Web 3.0

Internet Archive Brewster:

Since 1980, we've known that a new generation of publishing was coming, and it would be digital. We have a vision that there will be a new network system. It has to be an open protocol and it has to be a system that anyone can join.

My contribution in this area was an attempt to build WAIS, an open protocol based system with distributed servers and distributed clients. We started in 1989 and made it public on the Internet in 1992, long before the Internet today. It's a system where people can go and get the expertise they need. In a sense, it's more like Apple's artificial intelligence Siri. In WAIS, you can ask questions to servers that store different types of knowledge. Then they will give the answer. It has a simple URL system and also has a built-in payment system. But in the end we failed.

When the internet came out, people realized it was so easy to use, so people preferred the web, that the search system of WAIS was integrated, so we are probably best known now as the first search engine on the internet, but It's just an infrastructure.

For Web 3.0, my idea is that users can compete with many "big players", we need to make it possible for everyone to participate, you don't have to live on someone else's platform, and you don't have to follow the rules of a specific platform to participate .

I think the current internet is going the wrong way. Because of all kinds of misinformation and disinformation, there are some "big players" on the Internet with better algorithms, and they have the power to control the information they want to display. This is very dangerous.

In Web 3.0, we really should have filter mechanisms so you don't get spam all the time. But this should not be controlled centrally like it is now. So how do we go about building a system with a lot of players, a lot of winners, and a lot of opportunity to build the next generation of networks on top of? Maybe it won't happen in Web 3.0, then we'll have 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0 as well.

I've found that looking back at history is a great way to predict the future. If you take very early print in the 1400's and 1500's, you don't really get a royalty-based system until the early 1600's, so you can get paid to write a book, and have a very simple transaction: you buy from someone For a book, most of the money stays with the bookseller, and then part goes back to the printer and part goes back to the author. Early humans took a long time to develop this system.

So right now, we're in the early days of the internet, and we're owned by "ad networks." We don't have a great "royalty based" system. So how do we go about it?

We can build this into Web 3.0 so that there are no centralized forms of monopoly. If that doesn't work, then let's make sure we're going to get to 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0. Web 3.0 sounds great, and it will help democratize everything.

Marta, Chairman of the Filecoin Foundation:

To me, the coolest thing about a decentralized web is the ability to preserve humanity's most important information. The Internet Archive has been doing such amazing work in protecting the Internet, not only is your work protecting the Internet today, but your work can preserve humanity's most important information in the future.
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Advice for developers building for Web 3.0

Pay attention to the monopoly of different mechanisms and methods. These monopolies are basically individuals, organizations, agreements that seem to control everything. So how do we go about building a system flexible enough to bypass these types of monopolies? I wonder if the Web 3.0 networking protocols we've built will actually serve us well.

As we build these systems, we should also allow room for new players to join without asking old players for permission.

According to the "Notice on Further Preventing and Dealing with the Risk of Hype in Virtual Currency Transactions" issued by the central bank and other departments, the content of this article is only for information sharing, and does not promote or endorse any operation and investment behavior. Readers are requested to strictly abide by the laws and regulations of the region and do not participate in Any illegal financial conduct.

risk warning:

According to the "Notice on Further Preventing and Dealing with the Risk of Hype in Virtual Currency Transactions" issued by the central bank and other departments, the content of this article is only for information sharing, and does not promote or endorse any operation and investment behavior. Readers are requested to strictly abide by the laws and regulations of the region and do not participate in Any illegal financial conduct.