"There is a lot of pressure in the world to censor the Internet"

"There is a lot of pressure in the world to censor the Internet" - internet freedom score nations world censorship drop net qrh2"There is a lot of pressure in the world to censor the internet," said David Vorick, lead developer of Skynet. This is what he said this morning, May 8, during his presentation at the MIT Bitcoin Expo, organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

The plight of the search engine giant

The specialist explains that, with the argument of preventing phishing attacks (for example, fraudulent pages created to defraud people), progress is being made at the expense of Internet neutrality. This is a principle that promotes that all network traffic should be treated equally, without restrictions, it being understood that the internet user has the right to freely choose from online resources.

“Google may decide, for an arbitrary reason, that a certain website shouldn't exist,” says Vorick. As an example, he says his company, a decentralized file-sharing platform, has had such problems. Because they did not comply with KYC (know your customer) policies and allowed users to upload all types of files to their storage system, their website was hidden from the popular search engine.

“With Chrome, we never signed any terms of service,” he says, mentioning that they still put a warning sign on their website and informed them that they would not remove it until they had removed all the malware.

He claims that Skynet only provides the infrastructure

“We are like a portal where people put files or websites, and when users use our website, we don't control the interface.

Eventually, Skynet had to adapt its operation in order not to be silenced by Google:

“Google is a $ 1,5 billion company with 100.000 employees. On the contrary, we had 14 employees at the time and Google had already taken a stand. There is no democracy in this. Google is a large company that looks only at share prices and has established itself as the internet regulator ”- David Vorick, lead developer of Skynet.

For Vorick, what happened with his company and Google was "a big step" and "a very serious violation". “Google has made its own decision that websites have to meet certain conditions if they want billions of people to be able to access them,” he says.

"The reconstruction of the internet must be reconsidered"

The specialist is convinced that, when it comes to regulation, we are moving in the wrong direction. For him, it is wrong to encourage ISPs to be involved in moral decisions. “If we do that, what's really going to happen is that the innovations will stop,” he says, adding, “Our culture will crash because anything that's culturally unusual or just plain unexpected is going to upset some infrastructure provider.

In this bleak scenario, Vorick is convinced that we must "consider rebuilding the internet" to decentralize it and prevent whoever controls a part of it from making arbitrary decisions.

Towards the end of his speech, the computer scientist added that this is precisely why he is very interested in Bitcoin (quotation BTC). As CryptoNews explains, this monetary system "works like a network of computers connected through the Internet". This decentralized network is immeasurable and neutral.

In this way, the cryptocurrency created by Satoshi Nakamoto establishes a new paradigm that points towards more communal uses of information and not governed by the powerful of the moment. A vision that requires more and more computer scientists and enthusiasts of human freedom.