Un article de 2012, par Arvind Narayanan, Solon Barocas, Vincent Toubiana, Helen Nissembaum and Dan Boneh, librement disponible en ligne sur la plateforme ArXiv, porte un “regard critique” sur les architectures de réseau décentralisées dans des contextes d’application qui impliquent un traitement des données personnelles.
Le problème central auquel se confronte le papier est la distance entre la promesse des architectures décentralisées, face à la centralisation progressive des fournisseurs de service, et le manque d’application à large échelle, sauf exceptions, de ces architectures. En parallèle aux avantages, le papier discute les inconvénients de la décentralisation, qui restent, d’après les auteurs, souvent cachés sous la promesse d’une plus grande liberté et protection.
« …for all these efforts, decentralized personal data architectures have seen little adoption. This position paper attempts to account for these failures, challenging the accepted wisdom in the web community on the feasibility and desirability of these approaches. »
« for the most part decentralized social networking appears not to have anticipated the success of mainstream commercial, centralized social networks, but rather developed as a response to it. »
« we present some underappreciated drawbacks of decentralized architectures. Not all of these apply to all types of systems, nor is any of them individually a decisive factor. But collectively they may help explain why decentralization faces a steep road ahead, and why even if adopted, decentralization will not necessarily provide all the benefits that its proponents believe will automatically flow from it. »
« We hope to kick off a more tempered discussion of the future of personal data architectures in both scholarly and hobbyist/entrepreneurial circles, one that is informed by the lessons of history. There is much work to be done along these lines — application of economic theory can shed light on questions such as the relative strength of network effects in centralized vs. decentralized systems. Empirical methodology such as user and developer interviews would also be tremendously valuable. »
On est ravis d’apprendre qu’on est en train de contribuer à une démarche intéressante. ;-)
