Since the early days of the internet there has always been an engineering question about server/client side processing. However in contemporary times this is far deeper than an engineering question; it is a fundamental issue of *autonomy *and *ownership *of data and control of online identity and action. The meaning of this distinction has expanded from an engineering implementation question, to one of enormous consequence in society at large. Who has the power- the individual, or the service provider?

In the last twenty years we have seen an ever-increasingly expansive reach of enormous and growing centralized service providers. Obviously this includes monolithic web service providers such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook. But this even includes previously client-centric software like Microsoft Office transitioning to Office 365 as a “live service” with increasing internet connectivity requirements. Ebook software like Amazon Kindle requiring online check-in in order to execute a function which strictly speaking does not require it- reading a book could and most likely should be a strictly client-side activity of downloading a small book file and displaying it. Privacy from data being created and exploited in this context is a huge concern as well, but has been oft-discussed and I leave you to inquire further on that subject on your own.

This shift matters more than ever in today’s online world. When you buy a book from Amazon, do you really own it? Digital purchases are huge and ever-growing, displacing even physical products such as buying a digital copy of a book, movie, TV show, video game, or other product. But making this a permanently-connected live service begs the question; do you really own what you have paid for? If one day that service goes under, will you have anything left? In the long arc of history every company eventually folds, but their works have historically remained. Digital products? If the live service provider folds, everything they made could disappear overnight. And all their customers will have no entity against which to vent their annoyance that all their content and products are gone forever.

Centralized server offerings naturally have great advantages in terms of power and consolidation. And in some cases those are key design requirements of offering a particular service. For example, Google Stadia is an excellent example of a service which obviously requires a remote connection to a data center to function at all. As a result the user has access to greatly increased processing power than on their local machine, as well as a shared data environment with other users. It’s important not to undersell the advantages of a centralized solution. Where many companies seem to be deliberately stepping over the line into naked exploitation is by adding “live service” requirements completely needlessly just to cripple their users on purpose, so they can charge more and gain more control without merit or purpose. The service provider’s power has expanded constantly, almost unchecked for decades. I remain optimistic that we are now seeing a reversal of sentiment regarding that trend, but no real progress has yet been made.

Conversely, decentralization as a deliberate design decision gives the end user full control. What does this look like from a business standpoint? You give the user the product and you’re done. You exert no control within their device over what they do with it, you do not “phone home” from software installed on their phone or desktop. They simply get a copy of the product, and probably back it up themselves; the digital equivalent of a shelf full of records or VCR’s. Consider the successful Humble Store. A user buys a book, Humble simply delivers them the file in DRM-free EPUB, PDF, and MOBI formats, end of transaction. The user is responsible after that point. It still exists, in some ways, but as a paradigm it is losing badly across the board.

In my opinion the proliferation of crippling live service requirements such as Kindle DRM is a destructive trend of deliberately complicating and weakening a product offering in order to make money. It is the digital equivalent of planned obsolescence in a physical device such as a phone. For example, restricting users to a fixed number of installations is a common trick, used to charge more for when a user needs more installations. In the consumer case, for a single person purchaser, this honestly seems superfluous, bordering on bald-faced cash-grab. What should it matter if a customer migrates software they own to a second physical machine? Although this approach could be logical for a business service provider case offering a software product to a business with many employees.

I find it intriguing that we appear to have lost something important in the transition from physical sales, to digital sales. When you buy a physical item, such as an old-school music record, you own that item free and clear. You can play it, re-sell it, rip it, it is your property to do with as you see fit.

Live service connected digital products today? Completely different. You cannot re-sell, rip, or in many cases even use a digital product you have purchased without shelling out even more money after the fact. The company from which you are buying that service has seized an ever-increasing amount of control over your product post-sale. This one-sided seizure of control and ownership post-sale should not have been permitted. And where government should have stepped in to stop them, silence.

Returning autonomy in the digital sphere is not going to be a quick or easy process. Right now there really isn’t a lot an end user can do- monopolistic practices have largely eliminated consumer choice about these decisions. If you want to use Microsoft Office, you can either deal with the fact that you don’t own or control any part of that software, or you can Hobson’s Choice yourself out of the market. This is the canonical situation that anti-trust is intended to prevent from occurring. Yet here we are. And as we all know, Hobson’s Choice isn’t really a choice in most cases. You take what is available because going without entirely is worse, not because you positively make a healthy, productive choice in favor of your one option. The free market should result in a plethora of options from which consumers make an informed and productive choice that pleases them, and trend-setting across the providers of those options results in a healthy, positive relationship between consumer and business, rather than a captured, exploitative monopoly.

The long-term solution is creating decentralized alternatives, giving the end user real autonomy over their digital life and actual ownership and control over their data, both in terms of technological actual control and also legal rights. This will be a long campaign of many years.

Providers of decentralized solutions have a number of intrinsic business disadvantages compared to centralized ones. For a start, they cannot take advantage of the type of authoritarian controls and market power of a centralized provider. Microsoft can throw around a lot of weight, a decentralized service provider cannot and never will. A centralized service like Facebook can also exploit a lot of data collected about users to great business advantage, where a decentralized equivalent simply won’t have access to that information. In many respects creating a decentralized alternative to a successful centralized product is almost like setting out to make a worse business model- strictly in terms of profitability and power, it is worse. A single centralized company taking maximum advantage and control for itself will have more money and control.

But that isn’t the point. The point is to put the power in the hands of the users. To replace the Kindle DRM of the world with someone buying a book and then simply owning the thing they purchased, even if it is a digital product. To replace the Facebooks of the world with individuals running an instance on their own machine, which privately keeps their list of friends and messages and other data stored locally.

The reason this project is so hard is that existing businesses are being exploitative because it works. It works *really well*. These are among the biggest and most profitable companies *ever*.

Trying to be less exploitative makes it challenging to compete against them commercially. You will make less money. At least until people start taking their digital autonomy and digital property seriously enough that they make a choice to buy from more honest, less controlling, and less exploitative companies.

The difficulty of building a model that benefits users more, is that the world today largely isn’t interested in deliberately making less money. But as with many things in life, there are many things more important than money. In my opinion freedom is one of them. And in the 21st century having your computer and your data actually belong to you and be exclusively under your control is a fundamental point that we should insist upon, even if that autonomy and ownership comes at a cost in dollars.