A completely new internet, with all its permissions on the bitcoin blockchain

A lot of weird stuff has been happening to data inside the internet’s walled gardens. It has been getting shut down by the people who own the sites we all depend on. There’s a protest going on at Facebook over the issue right now. One Turkish journalist is saying that his account has been blocked inside the country, at his government’s request; Palestinian journalists have a similar problem. YouTubers believe that their videos have been getting unfairly de-monetized by mindless robots.

On a more macro level, publishers that had worked hard to build a Facebook driven traffic strategy saw their traffic plummet when the social media giant decided it preferred user generated content. These decisions cut more deeply because so many organizations depend entirely on the big social sites for relevance. Some of them don’t even have standalone websites.

NowThis was feted at its founding in 2012 for building a news organization that assumed all of its content would be distributed on sprawling social networks, but it hasn’t caught on as a cultural force. Social network driven growth was seductive way to reduce friction marshaling powerful network effects to build audience, which made it easier for content to go viral. That said, it seems like publishers forgot to consider the potential downside of depending on someone else’s IP to distribute content?
Blockstack browser, open on a desktop, still in private alpha. Courtesy of Blockstack
A Union Square Ventures and Y Combinator backed startup called Blockstack, just barely out of stealth mode, has been designing an alternative browser for what could be fairly described as another internet, one powered by the bitcoin blockchain.
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