Replace traditional IT with a World Computer
The Internet Computer aims to realize the original World Computer vision, and provide a better, open alternative to centralized traditional IT, such as cloud computing services, server computers, database servers, web servers, and security systems, such as firewalls. The intention is that the Internet Computer network can be used to build and run almost any online system or service.
How, you might ask, can a public network provide an alternative to the $5-trillion-dollar-a-year IT industry (according to Gartner). The answer is that the Internet Computer is a radical new form of blockchain made possible by advanced new cryptography, which does not need to store every past block of transactions, and does not involve local nodes, which confers game-changing advantages.
Developers build new systems and services on the Internet Computer using canister smart contracts. These have breakthrough efficiency, can process HTTP requests, and can be used to build any system or service, which then runs standalone from the blockchain itself. Because canisters are smart contracts, it is guaranteed they run the correct logic against the correct data.
No firewalls or security infrastructure necessary
Systems and services running from the Internet Computer don't need to be protected by firewalls, just in the same way DeFi smart contracts on Ethereum don't need to be protected by firewalls. They are secure by default, which is the exact opposite of systems built using traditional software running on traditional IT, which has no security by default, and must be protected by teams of security administrators, special configurations, and physical security systems such as firewalls and SEIM logging.
When systems and services are built using traditional IT, just one simple mistake can allow a hacker can steal data, or encrypt systems using ransomware, with catastrophic results, and it happens all the time. This year, expenditure on IT security will be $172 billion dollars worldwide (according to Gartner), but the intangible costs of constant hacks and potential business disruption is much higher.
Build on a public network, not Big Tech's fly traps
The game-changing advantages of the Internet Computer go far beyond security. In the 1990s, a debate existed regarding the internet vs walled-garden services, such as AOL, Compuserve and Microsoft's imagined Information Superhighway. The internet eventually won out easily because it was permissionless, and provided a free market, and nobody wanted to be fed content carefully curated for them by mega corporations.
It was a free market because, if Alice and Bob created profitable competing dating websites, say, then Alice could not call up the owner of the internet and say "if you slow down the public's access to Bob's website, I will give you stock in my company." The permissionless free market provided the foundations for social impact and freedoms, innovation and massive economic growth.
Today, the infrastructure that supports human society is increasingly automated by computers. The world's population of approximately 8 billion people could not be supported without the massive automation that, say, efficiently moves goods from farms to supermarkets, and much more complex technological supply chains. Meanwhile, daily online interactions have become part of our global social fabric and indispensable parts of our lives.
It can make no sense at all that humanity builds its core infrastructure on the back of a few anointed Big Tech services, such as Amazon Web Services, then making us all captive. Moreover, when compared to what the Internet Computer increasingly offers as its technology advances, these platforms have serious disadvantages.
We know they are insecure and unreliable by comparison to a blockchain. But they are also inefficient. Traditional IT evolved in a time when computers were vastly less powerful, and the internet vastly slower, and it has evolved from foundations that are no longer relevant. We must combine and integrate a veritable menagerie of components — such as servers or cloud instances, cloud orchestration layers, databases, web servers, memcached, backup systems, replicators, content distribution networks, middleware, security tools and much more — which create unnecessarily complex and fragile Rube Goldberg machines.
Managing this complexity is the source of the biggest cost of all. Of the $5 trillion dollar global IT spend, 80% of that is spent on IT operations i.e. human beings, who spend much of their time managing the unnecessary complexity. Organizations operating an important website must often hire systems administrators, database administrators and security administrators just to keep it running. This costs crazy amounts of money, and the complexity also ensures that systems and services cannot be updated quickly.
Meanwhile, the reward for all this, is to become a captive customer of a cloud computing service provider, and other vendors: building using the proprietary and complex stack provided by Amazon Web Services is no different to building using Microsoft software twenty years ago, you eventually get stuck there. Cloud computing services keep releasing cool new platform features, and a large part of the reason, is to better trap those lured into building with them.
The Internet Computer now provides a clear alternative in the form of a public network. On this public open platform, you build using canister smart contract code that is unstoppable and secure without firewalls, and greatly simplifies the construction and maintenance of systems and services.
Build on the internet to emit less CO2
Another great surprise is that moving to the Internet Computer can reduce your CO2 emissions, even though the platform is an advanced blockchain. That is because its architecture and cryptography carefully configures replication to what is necessary to provide liveness (unstoppability) and security guarantees. The Internet Computer's math embraces replication, to provide a platform for unstoppable and secure code.
By contrast, traditional IT is replete with accidental, tacked-on replication. When you create a system or service, very often data is replicated across several database nodes, backup systems, middleware, and copies kept handy by the code producing web pages, for example using memcached. The pages then served are further replicated by content distribution networks. The use of replication is not efficient, nor effective, since it does not produce systems that are unstoppable and tamperproof.
Web3 and cloud are incompatible
Today, if you ask much of the public and journalists what Web3 is, they will propose that it is something to do with NFTs. But those working at the forefront of the field understand it as something much more profound and impactful. Web3 is about replacing today's Web 2.0 services, which are mostly run by big corporations, with an infrastructure that involves users through the tokenization of assets and participation rights, and by assigning full control over these services to DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), so they can be run by their communities.
In the future, Web3 online services will run rather like open economies. They will be controlled by DAOs, which in turn will be controlled by voting using governance tokens. These tokens will be held by founders, core developers, investors and, most importantly, the end users of the services themselves. Algorithms will be give them out to users who contribute, perhaps because they are active content creators, refer other users, or help with content moderation. Users will be the owners of services, and also part of the team that runs them — which will enable them to scale fast, and make them more viral and sticky.
Entire world's will run from the blockchain. For example, one metaverse project being built on the Internet Computer today enables users to create their own 3D island, in the style of Minecraft, which they can share via a URL on their social media profiles. That world is itself an NFT, but they can also import ready-crafted objects into their metaverse islands, such as a castle or art gallery, by acquiring NFTs, then use the space to sell art NFTs. Island owners can create gateways to other islands, as a means to share traffic, can sell the gateways as NFTs. This only scratches the surface of what is being done: The metaverse is an economy.
Meanwhile, in Web3, everything blends with DeFi. For example, social media can blend with DeFi to become SocialFi. Open Chat (oc.app) is a messaging service that runs entirely from the Internet Computer blockchain, where smart contracts process and store text messages and media messages such as video. But this is no normal messaging service. A user account can also play the role of a crypto wallet, which maintains bitcoin, ICP and other tokens that can be sent along with chat messages. On top, it is being integrated by other Web3 developers, and special group chats now provide users with easy ways to vote on DAO governance proposals.
The question of how security and regulation are handled by these new services is critical. Users do not want to lose their NFTs in a hack, especially if they confer ownership of a valuable and highly trafficked metaverse they created, say, and they also do not want to have their crypto stolen. Furthermore, where centralized services support the transfer of things of value between users, the developers will not want to find themselves classified as money transmitters.
Any reasonable analysis shows that the only practical way to solve these problems is to run Web3 services in the mode of protocols, just like blockchains themselves. This can be done by building them exclusively using smart contracts that are then placed under the full and exclusive control of community DAOs. Once control has been transferred to a community DAO, if the service is running 100% from the blockchain, the developers cannot arbitrarily change the code to steal crypto balances, say.
Moreover, as the Web3 service now runs autonomously from blockchain in cyberspace, where it is controlled by a DAO that manages and updates, its management is no longer rooted in a jurisdiction. There is no centralized entity such as a person, group of developers, or corporation that is responsible for its ongoing operations. This is very different to a Web3 service built using a cloud computing service, which directly transfers responsibility to those who pay for and configure the cloud account, and transitively to any shadow controllers.
The Internet Computer provides for any Web3 service or application to be built entirely on chain using smart contracts, without need for cloud computing, server computers, or anything else. Furthermore, services and applications can be placed under the full control of DAOs, either using the built-in [Service Nervous System] framework, or third party DAO frameworks.
However you plan to build a Web3 service or application, you need to ditch the cloud. You can either build exclusively on the Internet Computer, or combine smart contract code on the Internet Computer with code on other chains such as Ethereum.