Replace traditional IT with a World Computer

The Internet Computer aims to realize the original World Computer vision, and provide an 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 novel cryptography. Unlike traditional blockchains, it does not need to indefinitely store old blocks of transactions, does not need local nodes in its network, and can scale its capacity to host computations efficiently.

On the Internet Computer, developers can build almost any new online system or service exclusively using canister smart contracts. These have breakthrough levels of efficiency, have the speed to process HTTP requests and directly provide interactive web experiences, and can be used to build almost any system or service using only blockchain. Yet, because canisters are smart contracts, they have their traditional magical properties too.

For example, canisters are unstoppable, and tamperproof, which means that when their code is invoked, they are guaranteed to run the correct logic against the correct data. Furthermore, they can be made to run autonomously if required, and can process tokens.

No firewalls or security infrastructure necessary

Systems and services running from the Internet Computer, which have been built using canister smart contracts, 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 special security tech 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. For 2022, 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.

Traditional IT is in the midst of a security meltdown, the Internet Computer provides a way out. Because systems are secure by default, the cost of security tech and its operation can be avoided, as can the intangible costs of hacks, and the damage they cause.

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, there was an ongoing debate regarding whether the public internet, or walled-garden networks, such as AOL, Compuserve and Microsoft's imagined Information Superhighway, would prevail. Eventually the internet 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 but competing 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 powers much more complex technological supply chains. Meanwhile, online interactions now form a global social fabric that are indispensable parts of our daily lives.

It can make no sense at all that humanity builds society's core information 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 can provide as a blockchain, these platforms have serious disadvantages.

We know they are insecure and unreliable by comparison to a blockchain. But what is harder to see through the noise, is that they are also highly inefficient. Traditional IT evolved in a time when computers were vastly less powerful, and the internet vastly slower, embedding technical and architectural decisions that are no longer relevant within an evolutionary branch that is increasingly broken.

To use traditional IT, 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 highly 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. Those building using the proprietary and complex stack provided by Amazon Web Services, say, will find themselves in a similar predicament to those building using the Microsoft software stack twenty years ago, and 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 open platform, you build using canister smart contract code that is unstoppable and secure without firewalls, which 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, cryptography and network governance, carefully configures replication to minimize it, and constrains it to what is necessary to provide the liveness (unstoppability) and security guarantees expected of a blockchain. 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. On the one hand, this accidental hidden replication is not efficient when considered as a whole, and on the other hand, traditional IT does not use the replication to produce unstoppable and tamperproof systems.

Today we are in a strange place, where in the popular imagination, blockchain is defined by proof-of-work, and major blockchains that consume as much power as a small country. This all the while that we already have a blockchain with efficiency levels that are many orders of magnitude improved, which can be used to build systems and services that are more efficient than those built using traditional IT.

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 actively create popular content, refer other users to the service, 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, and then 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, among other things.

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, the developers of such services, do not want to find themselves classified as money transmitters, say, because they were constructed using centralized traditional IT.

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, and the service runs 100% from the blockchain without the use of traditional IT, the developers cannot arbitrarily change the code to steal crypto balances. Nor can anyone else steal the crypto balances unless their code is flawed.

Moreover, when a Web3 service truly runs autonomously in cyberspace, under the exclusive control of a community DAO, its management and ownership (in as much as control of a governance token confers "ownership") 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, or other traditional IT, which roots it in a jurisdiction and directly transfers legal responsibility to those who control and own the cloud account. This responsibility is also transitively transferred to any shadow controllers involved.

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 any other traditional IT. 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.

Web3 TL;DR

However you plan to build a Web3 service or application, you need to ditch the cloud and traditional IT. You can either build exclusively on the Internet Computer, or combine smart contract code on the Internet Computer with smart contract code on other chains such as Ethereum.

Finally, today, blockchain is the stack.