Network of Trust

Proposal from 2021 how to fix Internet

Network of Trust (NoT) proposal

Originally from 2021

My interest in the topic of media falsification and distrust in mainstream media began a few years ago. Since 2010 I have been focusing on the informatics field, mainly because it was my study field at university and also due to my interest in computers and the open-source community altogether. After the start-up era in 2017 I started to notice a few changes.

Firstly, with spread of smartphones and internet adaptation exceeding 90% threshold the audience of Internet has changed dramatically, it wasn't anymore exchange between scientists or young people with technical skills but started to be mass medium for entertainment, politics and business. To put it short, Internet become less smart and more business oriented.

Secondly, there has been huge centralization. Main reason for that is big corporations which acquired most of the invention for their business interests and either disable the product or incorporated it into their portfolios. This has been massive and most of the open-source inventions are already in the hands of commercial interests.

This two events make me think about main idea how Internet should support free speech, make possible for everyone to express their opinion and allow to start business very easily - its very similar to free market, at first glance it seems very simple to compete with others but after someone acquire majority the free market will become one huge monopoly.

In conclusion, the Internet, media and also academics (that's also the sad part) stopped being democratic tools, they became tools in hand of few which are using them for misinformation, manipulation for commercial purposes and for propaganda to sustain the current state of affairs. This is wrong and needs to be fixed.

That's also why I hope it can be changed. There are multiple ways, one of the ways is legislative changes which would protect children, humans and others like in the real world. That's not going to happen – the EU has adopted GDPR legislation a long time ago and still it's not enough. The Internet can not be regulated by laws, because it's not a human but a computer network. In this case there has to be a system, which will protect people and others from malicious manipulation.

In my opinion the Internet is missing one critical component which is Network of Trust (NoT) . This Network would allow participants to publicly state whom they trust. Their trust network could be used for others to navigate through other sources and decide, which of them is credible for them.

This Trust Network has to be non commercial, their value has to be in correct and trustworthy information or achievements. It's very similar to academic peer review and quotations of published articles only this would involve the Internet and would be not technical, like Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) which currently allows encrypted connection between servers but would be mainly for media and information sources.

This idea would allow participants to give trust in limited amounts and prioritize their sources. Also there would be different levels of trust and in higher levels can be trust given only by people with higher ranking and so on. Region divide is also must, each region has to have a specific population and user base.