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Brave has just taken a step towards supporting a decentralized web, becoming the first browser to offer native integration with a peer-to-peer networking protocol that aims to fundamentally change how the internet works. The technology is called IPFS (which stands for InterPlanetary File System), a relatively obscure transport protocol that promises to improve upon the mainstream HTTP standard by making content faster to access and more resistant to failure and control.
This explicator of TechCrunch provides a good overview of how the protocol works. But here’s the short version: While HTTP is designed for browsers to access information on central servers, IPFS accesses it over a network of distributed nodes. Vice compares it to downloading content through BitTorrent, rather than from a central server. You enter a web address as usual and the network is able to find the nodes that store the content you want.
Benefits of the new approach include faster speeds, as data can be distributed and stored closer to the people who access it, as well as lower server costs for the original publisher of the content. But perhaps more importantly, IPFS has the potential to make web content much more resistant to failure and resistant to censorship.
Brave, which currently has 24 million monthly active users, was an early supporter of IPFS, working on the standard since 2018. But with Brave browser version 1.19 released today, Brave users will be able to directly access IPFS content by resolving URIs. that start with ipfs: //. They can also choose to install a “one-click full IPFS node”, making their browser a node in the peer-to-peer network.
“IPFS offers users a solution to the problem of centralized servers creating a central point of failure for access to content,” Brian Bondy, CTO of Brave, said in a statement, adding that it gives Brave users “the power to transparently serve content to millions of new users. across the world via a new secure protocol. “
Molly Mackinlay, head of the IPFS project, adds that IPFS ‘enabling of the decentralized web can overcome the “systemic censorship of data” of governments and big tech. “Today, web users around the world cannot access restricted content, including, for example, parts of Wikipedia in Thailand, more than 100,000 websites blocked in Turkey, and critical access to COVID-19 information in China, ”Mackinlay says,“ Now anyone with an Internet connection can access this critical information through IPFS on the Brave browser. “
This effort to make web content more resilient and unconstrained comes at a time when service and platform owners are faced with difficult choices about what content should stay online. In the aftermath of the Capitol Riots, President Trump was silenced on Facebook and Twitter, then the Talk app was taken out of Google and Apple app stores, and Amazon pulled its centralized web services. A decentralized website enabled, in part, by IPFS would make this type of control more difficult in the future.
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