News and Research articles on Decentralisation

Digital organising

Stephan Bohn, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society
Ali Aslan Gümüsay, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Georg von Richthofen, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society
Georg Reischauer, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business
PUBLISHED ON: 16 Nov 2023 DOI: 10.14763/2023.4.1726

Digital organising refers to the collective purposeful alignment and distributed action fostered through digital technologies. The apparently opposing nature of digital organising draws attention to the need to unravel the concept theoretically.

Cypherpunk

André Ramiro, Law and Technology Research Institute of Recife (IP.rec)
Ruy de Queiroz, Federal University of Pernambuco
PUBLISHED ON: 26 Apr 2022 DOI: 10.14763/2022.2.1664

Cypherpunk refers to social movements, individuals, institutions, technologies, and political actions that, with a decentralised approach, defend, support, offer, code, or rely on strong encryption systems in order to re-shape social, political, or economic asymmetries. ​

Decentralisation: a multidisciplinary perspective

Balázs Bodó, University of Amsterdam
Jaya Klara Brekke, Durham University
Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Radboud University
PUBLISHED ON: 16 Jun 2021 DOI: 10.14763/2021.2.1563

This article belongs to Concepts of the digital society, a special section of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Christian Katzenbach and Thomas Christian Bächle. 1. Introduction The concept of decentralisation traverses multiple contexts, fields and disciplines. We begin this multidisciplinary discussion on decentralisation with describing the technical definitions and motivations for decentralisation in network engineering. We then move on to discuss the broader motivations for such decentralised networks, which span social, political and economic aims. Our intention is not to compare cases of decentralisation across disciplines and contexts as much as to point out that a study of …

KEYWORDS: Decentralisation

Decentralisation in the blockchain space

Balázs Bodó, University of Amsterdam
Jaya Klara Brekke, Durham University
Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Radboud University
PUBLISHED ON: 19 May 2021 DOI: 10.14763/2021.2.1560

The rapidly evolving blockchain technology space has put decentralisation back into the focus of the design of techno-social systems, and the role of decentralised technological infrastructures in achieving particular social, economic, or political goals. In this entry we address how blockchains and distributed ledgers think about decentralisation.

Personal information management systems: a user-centric privacy utopia?

Heleen Janssen, University of Cambridge
Jennifer Cobbe, University of Cambridge
Jatinder Singh, University of Cambridge
PUBLISHED ON: 18 Dec 2020 DOI: 10.14763/2020.4.1536

PDSs aim to empower users over their data. We explain their limits, and describe why decentralising data processing does not imply decentralisation of power.

By retracing the stages of development of a 'peer-to-peer cloud' storage service, Francesca Musiani argues that decentralised network architectures are internet governance 'in practice'.

Flawed cloud architectures and the rise of decentral alternatives

Primavera De Filippi, Research and Studies Center of Administrative Science (CERSA/CNRS), Université Paris II (Panthéon-Assas)
PUBLISHED ON: 1 Nov 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.4.212

Currently dominant cloud services raise challenges in terms of security, privacy and user autonomy. Decentralisation, advocated by civil society, may overcome some of the drawbacks.

Network architecture as internet governance

Francesca Musiani, MINES ParisTech
PUBLISHED ON: 24 Oct 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.4.208

Changes in the internet's architectural design affect the repartition of competences and responsibilities between service providers, content producers, users and network operators. This article outlines the dialectic between centralised and distributed architectures, institutions and practices, and how they mutually affect each other.