Eli Sklar: Fixing The Internet’s Big Flaw

From time to time when we’re talking to new people and hearing fresh ideas you hear something so new, fresh and exciting from someone with such a vision that you are simply blown away.

The first time I talked to Eli Sklar, that was how I felt. He is the type of guy that shoots for the moon with tons of crazy ideas that would just not be considered by the rest of us mere mortals. He is involved in some new startups and could be described as a kind of serial entrepreneur from a big new tech hub: Tel Aviv. He is deeply involved in startups and development. His resume reads like a developers dream. A mix of positions and successful startups. His latest work has involved the blockchain technology that underpins Bitcoin.

In the online community, decentralization is not a new concept. In fact, from the very birth of the internet decentralization of information was the goal, especially in Media, which until the internet was tightly controlled by publishers and large media outlets. If you wanted millions of people to see, read, or experience something you had to get it on broadcast media networks with their endless amounts of gatekeepers and corporate policies that by the time you might get your idea seen or heard, it had been diluted and focused group down to something else entirely. And that was if they didn’t send you packing from the start.

Then the internet came along and gave the world a platform to make their ideas heard

The internet has allowed more people to consumer more information than ever before in the history of the planet. It has allowed a mass decentralization of media that is unprecedented. There is only one problem: it’s getting aged. Everywhere you look: cell phone networks are using technology from the 80s and 90s. The DDoS system came from the late 70s and is vulnerable to attacks that happen with increasing frequency. The data of the internet, this very post that you’re reading is controlled by the ISP that serves your connection and the servers that I use to host this content. This means that our connection can be severed at the will of 2 separate companies with a complete disregard for your desire to read my work or my desire to write. This is troublesome because it is too easy to censor a platform we’ve gotten used to being fairly open. There is also the matter of pay. The internet notoriously does not pay creators a fair price for their work. Meanwhile, companies like Google and others rack in billions on something they only have to pay pennies for in the first place. It’s completely unfair and Eli Sklar is out to fix it.

The best part is that in his signature post: Fix Our Internet is actually

sets out a timetable and practical plan to solve these problems

One of the first fixes that I really like is that a new router would be created to move traffic and bandwidth around to those that need it. It turns bandwidth, the ability to send and receive packets of information, into a commodity itself. There is plenty of under utilized bandwidth. There is also plenty of people not getting traffic and other people who are wasting said traffic. By creating this decentralized network of routers this all would occur without any central control. The internet would become it’s original intention: the sharing of data between interested parties.

I’ve said before that the struggle with the internet is that it needs to pay for itself and there is no good way to do that through advertising only at this time. Eli is working on new projects that not only move technology forward but also move people and business forward. Everyday we stand at the intersection of social interactions and commercial interactions. When those interactions should be social and when they should be commercial is something that is really unique online. He is creating a way to separate those relationships in a way that you can have both and still make money and have a social life.

“We’ll all be paying small amounts of money to a lot of people for things that we want.”

The small amounts of money to specialized providers is not a new concept in the course of capitalism and not a new concept in the wheelhouse of ideas that aim to remake the internet (and indeed our lives) as a truly decentralized network that doesn’t rely on big companies just to exist.

At this stage of the conversation he started talking about really big things. I like really big things. He talked about how using this system we can create systems to manage the planet and optimize our use of everything around us from resources to people themselves. Our current socio-economic system is failing us because it can’t support this many people. He wants to create something new and collaborative. His ideas even extend to global governance and how to create a system that holds all opinions and things together in a type of bottom-up consensus rather than top down autocracy. Even though he feels before his time, I feel like his thinking is a breath of fresh air and I’m glad that someone, somewhere with the brains and resources is working on something so vitally important to the collaborative future of humanity. Using nature as a guide, he thinks we can learn to manage everything ourselves without a 3rd intermediary to do it for us.  It’s no secret that I’m skeptical of such claims but I’m excited to see what this thinking yields for the planet and for the humans that live on it.

So what is he doing right now? He is working on a creating what he describes as:  the Facebook of commerce, connecting people for products and services in an organic and social way. I look forward to seeing that product when it arrives.

I’m really optimistic that we will move onto better technology that will actually move the planetary conversation forward and how we work with nature and the planet.

To read his work about Bitcoin and Decentralization: