As more elements of our lives move online, the amount and value of data we accumulate are rapidly increasing. The communications we have through emails, instant messaging tools, and social media applications, our identity information, etc. - all this data is now online and moves seamlessly between our devices.
However, to achieve this, all data must be stored somewhere, on some computer; if it's not your computer, then it's someone else's. This means that the 'other' who controls that computer ultimately controls your data, and they also decide how you can handle your data, and you might even lose access to it.
But there's more: others who control everything also decide who can access this data. Your data has long been used to deliver ads to you, enticing you to buy more things you don't need. If you've read any updates to end-user license agreements you might have signed in the past year, you'll find that many companies now claim the right to use your data to train their artificial intelligence.
What are the alternatives?
Running your own services is actually difficult; operating your own infrastructure requires a significant investment of time.
The Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) revolutionizes the way services are built, allowing you to store code and data without relinquishing control, so you still have everything under your control; furthermore, it does not require you to operate the infrastructure yourself.
Fundamentally, you can think of ICP as a computing platform built around the concept of ownership of code and data: a sovereign cloud, a true world computer.
This is achieved through the construction of a decentralized network, with the underlying principles of ICP being the same as Bitcoin. However, after years of research and development by many, the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) has been able to expand the application of decentralized technology, which is no longer just a simple token ledger for currency transactions.
Today, its use has covered a fully functional computing platform that can host all your code and data, putting you in control of everything.
With ICP, data sovereignty is in your hands.
Join us on a journey to the world computer.
Learn more:
Discover the Internet Computer at internetcomputer.org;
Watch tutorials on the DFINITY YouTube channel;
For developers, start building immediately at icp.ninja;
This article is adapted from 'World Computer Technology Lecture' by Björn Tackmann, Head of Research at the DFINITY Foundation; you can watch the original video.
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