The Internet is Beautiful

The internet is beautiful… Well, my twitter feed could be described as many things, beautiful is admittedly not one of them. But what I am talking about is the design of the internet, as a system for information exchange. It is beautiful.? It’s beautiful, elegant and decentralised.

You could challenge that last one, decentralised, and you would be right to. The decentralised nature of the internet is something we need to continually challenge and protect. Between the IETF, ICANN, W3C, amongst others, we appear to have a relatively robust set of governance practices that is upholding the most important piece of infrastructure humankind has ever built. Protocol governance, security, architecture, performance and some level of equitable distribution of access to IP space appears to be taken care of. Yet there are some clear issues with the way the internet is being operated at an industry level that are a cause for concern. Let me explain.

Networks are powerful, we know this. Metcalfe's law states that the value of any network is proportional to the square of the number of its participants. This is why the internet has been such a huge boost for the productivity of humankind. But there are limitations we need to understand when applying this theory. The most relevant assumption here is that all network participants can and will connect with all other participants. So we could take a step here and posit that the most valuable version of the internet is a version where everyone is interacting with one another directly. Not only would this yield more network value but it might distribute that value more equitably amongst all participants. Imagine that.

Currently an estimated 50%-70% of the entire value generated by the modern web is absorbed by the top 10 web companies: Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alibaba Group, Tencent, Netflix, ByteDance and Twitter. If we consider that there might be 10 million meaningful shareholders in these 10 companies, the inequitable distribution of value generated by humanity's most significant network is clearly drawn towards something like 0.1% of the world’s population. This feels - suboptimal, to say the least.

If the internet is a network where the value is a direct function of our participation and interaction with one another, why isn’t that value more equitably distributed? Is it a technical limitation? Up until more recently this may have been so.

The internet doesn’t have a native protocol that accounts for contribution and distributes the respective value. So we have applied ancient accounting techniques in kludgy layers of error prone complexity and human driven processes that sum up to a system that is wholly incapable of keeping account of contributions at a granular level, let alone distributing the resulting value equitably. These systems are historically inefficient and have never been automated enough to achieve this. But when I look at my bill from AWS I am seeing a highly sophisticated measurement system that is counting every cycle of every CPU and billing me accordingly. Why can’t we use the same level of technological capability to account for the contributions on a network? Well, I think we can, but who is incentivised to do that? And what about the distribution of the value? Amazon is highly incentivised to bill everyone who uses their web services and all the value is moving in one direction, in the shape of a monthly bill payment. This is much more simple than a granular and equitable distribution of value to all contributors in a network.

What if we could account for everyone’s contribution within a network and then programmatically distribute the respective value directly back to each one of the contributors? No middle man, no accountants, no monthly cycle. A clean and efficient distribution of value respective to contribution. Wouldn’t this incentivise participation and in turn increase the value of the network as a whole? The answer I believe is Yes. As long as everyone has an abundance to contribute.

Now let me tell you a story about the economics of live streaming infrastructure. The infrastructure costs of live streaming are too BIG. The economics of live streaming simply do not work. To the point that all the big players in the space are stuck between a rock and hard place. The rock being the rising cost of content rights and the hard place being the linear cost of live streaming delivery. Look at the losses they are all booking every quarter.

The cost of live streaming is not the transcoding as you might think, it’s not CPU/GPU bound workloads, it’s 99% “network” cost - the bandwidth required to deliver the content over the internet. In a network of interconnected computers what do we all have an abundance of? That’s right - “network”.

Now, if I plug an ethernet cable into my laptop and connect it to your laptop, we’ve made a network of 2, our own mini internet. Who owns the bandwidth between those 2 machines? Well, I own the cable but does it seem right that I should now charge you for every bit that we exchange across that network? No. Maybe there is a very low fee for the usage of the cable but the value has been generated by our cooperation and respective participation in the network, not the physical cable. And yet currently, when we watch live streamed content on the internet every single gigabyte of data that moves around the internet to do so is charged back to the streaming company, and then that cost is passed on to you, the consumer, the network participant. But we all have network capacity, abundant in the network around us. My fiber plan has ~500mbps upstream bandwidth that I probably use about 1% of on average. If the internet was supposed to be a hub and spoke where the tech giants charge us all for the right to receive information from a central and all powerful oracle it would not have changed the course of humanity in the way it has. This is quite frankly just not the way that the internet was designed to be used. No wonder that the cost of streaming services are getting ridiculous, these bozos literally broke the internet. Our internet. And we are paying them for the privilege, every month.?

It’s worth noting that the infrastructure providers also have a strong and controlling and centralizing effect on the industry, driven by their enterprise pricing scales. If you move 6-9 petabytes of data through their infrastructure every month they might charge you 2 cents per GB. But if you are a smaller organization you might pay up to 8.5 cents a GB. This pricing scale centralizes the power of live streaming with a few of the biggest corporate networks which become the platforms within which the entire power of live streaming is held. A power which, I pose, is simply a basic function of our modern internet. The visible effect of this is that many potential D2C business models are unviable due to this economic environment, trapping them in the centralised platforms and bound by the limitations of that platform risk.

At one point in the 2000s 60% of all internet traffic was peer-to-peer, Napster, Limewire, Bittorrent etc. everyone who was around at the time, using those protocols, knows that they were a robust and reliable way to move content around the internet, it really worked very well. But the problem wasn’t the distribution of content. The problem was accounting for and distributing the value of the content, because those protocols didn’t allow for the recipients of the content to send a fair exchange of value back to the rights holders, even if they wanted to. Therefore the whole approach was deemed to be piracy. As one of my co-founders likes to say - “We threw out the peer-to-peer baby with the content protection bathwater". While piracy most certainly should be considered taboo, peer-to-peer protocols should most certainly not. But somehow we’ve lumped it all in together and lost touch with the intrinsic network value of the internet.

Fast forward to the 2020s and technology has moved on. One of the clear advancements is our ability to granularly account for contribution and programmatically distribute value with low cost and cryptographic verifiability. Thanks to the emergence of blockchain technology and the advancements in our use of cryptography more widely, we can now solve this problem. I'm proud to say that myself and some of the smartest and most enjoyable individuals I know are working on this together right now.

Enter, Rilla Network - The open and public protocol for the future of live content. At its core Rilla Network enables you, the network participant, to contribute your upstream bandwidth to reduce the cost of live streaming and in turn receive a share of the value you have unlocked by doing so.

Rilla aims to reduce the cost of live streaming and flatten the playing field so that it doesn’t matter if you’re a large corporation or a one-man-band streamer, the cost of reaching your audience is the same. The price is set by the network.

Rilla will unlock enormous value by releasing unnecessary infrastructure costs and enabling a redistribution of that value, efficiently and programmatically.

Rilla will provide native interactivity and transacability as we look forward to a world where audiences are no longer passive receivers of content but are becoming active participants in an immersive and engaging network where they not only interact with other audience members but interact with the content itself, in real time.

The future of live content is different for the coming generations. Esports needs a live streaming protocol that is deeply and directly integrated into the game engine itself allowing participants to interact and transact while engaged in a wholly immersive experience.

The future of live digital experiences is coming and it will run on an open and public protocol that redistributes the value directly back to the creators and their communities. This will super-charge our creative engine by utilizing the internet in the way that it was designed.

Rilla Network will play a part in the coming revolution, unleashing the internet’s true potential. The possibilities are truly exciting. Together we can unleash OUR internet.