The internet is the most successful distributed communication network the world has ever seen, but in many of the ways which matter, the internet is far more centralized than you may realize. While the internet is spread across millions upon millions of servers, these servers all share a common trait, in that they are all owned and operated by individual corporate entities.
When taking a closer look, it is easy to recognize that the internet’s processing power and storage space rests in surprisingly few hands. This centralization of power makes the underlying technology vulnerable to attack or censorship, and it makes individual users vulnerable to the vagaries of corporate entities which they have no control over. For anyone seeking to host their application or website online, all of these issues matter.
Centralized vs Decentralized
For anyone who cares about the safety and security of their data, a serverless internet architecture promises a great many benefits over the existing server-based web. Now, there is significant progress being made towards the goal of a truly decentralized internet.
One company that is leading that charge is ArGo, a web hosting platform designed to help users build thoroughly modern websites on the Arweave permaweb. ArGo promises its users a decentralized, uncensored, and permanent platform for hosting websites or dApps with a one-time deployment fee.
ArGo is built on decentralized cloud technology and supports technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, hosting everything directly on the Arweave blockchain. An additional benefit of this comes courtesy of blockchain’s immutable nature, which assures the security, provenance and probity of the on-chain data. Better still, because the data is hosted across a network rather than siloed on individual servers, the company can assure its clients of 100% uptime.
ArGo is supported by its own proprietary token, $ARGO, which is used as a means of exchange on the platform. $ARGO also offers advantages in the form of discounts that are available to token holders and can be staked for even greater VIP features, privileges and rights. To reflect the fact that ArGo is a truly decentralized platform, the $ARGO token also confers voting and governance rights over the protocol. Token holders can even make propositions for other community members to vote upon.
A New Era
Thanks to projects such as ArGo, the internet is entering the next phase of its evolution. While the early internet was read-only, the second iteration of the internet was markedly more dynamic.
The emergence of social media in Web 2.0 promised greater interactivity and freedom for its users. Sadly, Web 2.0 never fully lived up to its promise. The internet has only become more centralized and siloed over time, as social media giants have become gatekeepers to information and resources.
At the same time a number of world governments including China, Turkey and Iran are intruding on user privacy, conducting deep packet inspections and cutting off whole swathes of the internet to their citizens. For these reasons the need for a truly decentralized web has never been stronger. Thanks to companies such as ArGo, Web 3.0 could usher in a new era of individual freedom and censorship resistance leading to a fairer, free, and more secure internet.
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