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Comment by radlad | Hacker News Reader

I'm very excited to see what happens with IPFS. The article talks about replacing HTTP however, and this is definitely a tricky task.

Someone in this thread already asked one of my questions (So is this primarily for static websites?) but my second question is: So is this primarily for personal websites?

I'm having a hard time finding a good way for Facebook, for example, to monetize their website. Targeting ads go out the window with mostly static content. Even more so though, what about Netflix? How is DRM done? How do you make sure only the correct users can access your objects?

edit: Also, doesn't a "permanent web" have an inevitably fatal flaw that you can't free space?

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One monetization strategy in general for distributed networks is that users pay for bandwidth. They're rewarded for the bandwidth they provide. They profit if they provide more bandwidth than they use. And app developers are rewarded when their apps cause bandwidth to be used. I don't know if IPFS works this way.

As far as paying a premium over raw bandwidth to access premium content (Netflix), you could pay them to unencrypt it for you to download. DRM though isn't secure in the first place and decentralization won't make it better.

Oh, of course, I'm not trying to argue that DRM is good or that decentralization would make it better or even work as well. The problem of course is that without it working as well as it currently does, premium content providers have no incentive (and in fact, are decentivized) from making the switch.

The general idea of decrypting premium content at a cost would work fairly well, however I'm wondering if it's something that can be done easily and dynamically via IPFS. For example, can I, without burdening the network with a billion copies, encrypted with each the client's key, hand that data off to them? If I simply decrypt it and hand it over, it's on a distributed network and anyone can grab it.

Delivery of the unencrypted premium content would likely happen through a direct link with a different protocol. As you say, the content providers don't want that content to be accessible to everyone in the network.

The website used to navigate the catalog of premium content could be built as a IPFS page though.

You can free space, but how that happens is not explicit.

The more people a file is requested by, the more places it is stored. If the file ceases to be requested, and all the participants decide to remove it from their caches, the file is gone.

DHT records are slightly more persistent, but without a sponsor they fade as the network's churn removes the nodes that once hosted them.

It is very hard to delete things, and the most likely things to be deleted are things people are not providing effort to preserve (even one person providing such effort is sufficient to maintain the DHT records.)

Hmm, that was sort of what I figured, but that seems to me as though calling it a "permanent" web is a bit of a misnomer. There is still a place for projects like the Internet Archive.

Brewster Kahle (IA founder) has expressed a public interest in IA acting as a seeder for distributed websites, so IA definitely still has a place.

Interesting point - but why wouldn't the business model that worked for Facebook - ads - work on a decentralised web? Instead of posting content to FB alongside which they run ads and generate revenue, individual publishers could keep the ad revenue themselves, perhaps with a brokerage / commission model like Google operate. Seems to work OK for blogs, which are quite decentralised. Why shouldn't it work for status feeds?

In terms of targeting, once you're dealing with "small data" instead of centralised "big data" you need a lot less algorithms to figure out what ads might work. A FB neural net probably does a lot of deep learning to guess that a bunch of mountain-biking friends might be interested in saddles. Decentralised operators could probably figure that out themselves.

My first thought when reading the specification was that they're liars and making bold claims out of context. Yes, any torrent ever released is also permanent. Yet, if I dig my archives and try to download 10 years old ed2k links from ShareReactor, somehow there aren't any seeds. Wonder why? Isn't it permanent? Because the ed2k link is right for sure, it's permament.

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