Why are Internet services turning open, given Facebook's troubles with game maker Zynga?
Original source: A16Z -Chris Dixon
Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
The criticism of giants like Facebook and Google has a long history.
Before 2011, there were complaints about Facebook's tight ties to Zynga, a maker of social games. Thanks to the former's resources, Zynga launched blockbuster products one after another, and with more than 264 million monthly active users, became the leader on Facebook's gaming platform, accounting for 15% of Facebook's revenue at one point.
At the time, the relationship was mutually beneficial, and other Facebook game developers didn't seem to be getting a fair shake. "There's no fairness at all," he said. As one developer fumed at GamesBeat 2011. But the good times soon came to an end.When Zynga and Facebook ended their special partnership in 2013, Zynga quickly lost its lead to other developers, and its performance has since slumped, as has its stock price. Facebook, on the other hand, has a whole new crop of developers and games, and its games business is at an all-time high.
In addition, another well-known case is the years-long antitrust battle between Google and Yelp, the "American version of the public review". Yelp The failure ended. Over the past decade or so, there have been countless examples of startups dying or dying at the hands of big companies. The reason behind this is worth pondering.
Over the past 35 years, as the Internet has evolved, control of the Internet has gradually shifted from open source protocols maintained by non-profit communities to proprietary services run by large technology companies. One result: billions of people have enjoyed the benefits of amazing, free technology, but with it come problems.
In addition to the misuse or theft of user data, creators and businesses that rely on Internet platforms are significantly affected by sudden rule changes that take away their audiences and profits. In the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency, something is changing: everyone is starting to follow a new Internet service paradigm that combines modern, centralized services with the original spirit of Internet community leadership.
In fact, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, the dominant Internet services were built on open protocols controlled by the Internet community. Take the Domain Name System, an Internet "phone book" controlled by a distributed network of people and organizations that are publicly created and managed so that anyone who follows community standards can own a domain name and set up an Internet site.
Of course, this means that the power of the companies that run the web and email hosting is kept in check, but if they misbehave, customers can simply transfer their domain names to competitors.
From the mid-2000s to the present, trust in open protocols has been gradually replaced by a centralised corporate management team.
As companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook build software and services beyond the capabilities of open protocols, users have migrated to these more complex platforms. Since the code is owned by the company, management principles can be changed on their own.
But under what rules should social platforms blacklist users? How do search engines determine site rankings? One minute, social platforms may be courting media organizations and small businesses, and the next minute, they may be de-prioritizing content or changing the rules of revenue distribution.
There has been a lot of talk about blockchains over the past few years, with a lot of hype but little knowledge of their true value. Blockchain is a network of physical computers that work together to form a single virtual computer. The benefit is that they can provide a strong guarantee of trust, rooted in the mathematical and game theory nature of the system. The user or developer can be confident that the code running on top of it will continue to behave as it was designed to, even if individual participants in the network want to change their minds.
This means that control of the entire system is in the hands of the community. On the other hand, users who rely on proprietary platforms have to worry about data theft or misuse, privacy policy changes, advertising intrusions, and so on. Proprietary platforms can suddenly change the rules for developers and businesses, as Facebook did for Zynga and Google did for Yelp.
The idea that a company's power over an entire system can be replaced by a community may sound far-fetched, but there is a strong precedent in the software transformation process of the past 20 years.
In the 1990s, computers were dominated by proprietary, closed-source software, the best known of which was Windows. But today, hundreds of millions of Android phones run on Linux, the open source operating system. In addition, most of the software that runs on Apple devices is open source, as is almost all of the modern cloud data centers, including Amazon. Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub and IBM's acquisition of Red Hat are notable examples of "open source" status.
Open source is becoming more and more important. Tech companies are shifting their business models from selling software to offering cloud-based services. Services companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix, and even Microsoft, are growing faster than open source software and, increasingly, gaining control of critical Internet infrastructure.
One of the insights of blockchain design is that by adding token incentives to the model, application scenarios will expand from software to cloud-based services. The role of cryptocurrencies circulating throughout the system is to provide a way to motivate individuals and groups to participate, maintain, and build services.
The idea that Internet services can have tokens may be a new concept, but blockchain and cryptocurrencies can indeed be used for cloud-based services, just as open source is for software. Remember, it took 20 years for open source software to replace proprietary software, and it will take a long time for open services to replace proprietary services.
The benefits of this shift will be enormous, as we can shift trust to community-owned or operated software rather than to individual companies, and the governance principle of the Internet will shift from "don't be evil" to "can't be evil."
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