BitTorrent, the company behind the self-named BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol and the self-named BitTorrent software that utilizes that protocol, is currently searching for Alpha testers for a new project called Project Maelstrom. Basically, it’s a web browser that’s based on the BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing technology.
The project is still in the very early stages of development, but the company believes that this “is the first step toward a truly distributed web, one that does not rely on centralized servers.” This certainly isn’t a new idea for the company, especially considering decentralization is pretty much the core idea behind its products.
“If we are successful, we believe this project has the potential to help address some of the most vexing problems facing the Internet today,” BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker notes, as quoted by TorrentFreak. “How can we keep the Internet open? How can we keep access to the Internet neutral? How can we better ensure our private data is not misused by large companies? How can we help the Internet scale efficiently for content?”
“What value does this deliver?” Klinker asks rhetorically, as quoted by The Verge. “There’d be fewer centralized servers to get in the way of you and your data or you and the content you’re interested in, certainly less barriers between you publishing content, as well.”
Klinker’s vision of the future for the internet is one in which web publishers will be able to distribute, and update an entire website through the BitTorrent protocol, and others visiting the page would automatically help share the site’s content. This is very similar to how someone downloading a file over BitTorrent would also start sharing the file with other peers.
Several questions remain, however, such as: Will other companies or organizations be able to build similar browsers that would be compatible with “new torrent-based web” by adopting a certain open source standard that BitTorrent releases? Will this open standard come with the built-in encryption that most torrents lack? Only time will tell, but the idea is certainly promising.
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