Perhaps nothing in human history has grown so rapidly as the Internet of Things. More of an idea than anything else just a few years ago, the IoT has grown at such an astonishing pace that it‘s upended virtually every industry and worked its way into nearly every facet of life. Despite this impressive track record of growth, the IoT must adapt if it wants to keep thriving, and the only way that it can endure for long is by decentralizing.
Here’s why decentralization is the next big step for the IoT, and what its proponents will believe the IoT can achieve when it’s more decentralized and secure than ever before.
Decentralization is needed to fight monopolies
It goes without saying that today’s digital market is essentially dominated by a few giants; corporate behemoths like Amazon, Microsoft, and Alibaba in China have iron-tight monopolies or astonishing levels of influence in a myriad of some of the most important industries in the world today. This includes the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, with many companies setting up on AI domains. If we want to keep the IoT growing at its boggling, breakneck-pace, then we need to consider decentralizing it to be an imperative step towards freeing it from a stymieing set of monopolies.
The first-mover advantage that many early tech companies enjoyed has put them into positions of power over their competitors which effectively insures that innovative new products and services don’t arrive on the market. The so-called sharing economy is really dominated by a few greedy companies at the top who hoard as much data, money, and influence over lawmaking as they can, and this will inevitably spell the death of the IoT if their rigid grip over the economy isn’t broken. The expansion of monopolies simply can’t be stopped if we don’t begin to decentralize our economic system.
To build intelligent infrastructure that can help make smart cities a reality, the IoT will also find decentralization to be imperative. The IoT, which can power a good 8×8 headset has always been defined by the disparate networks that make it up, but separating those dizzying networks from one another in such a way that the can be uniquely examined and optimized is no easy task. For intelligent infrastructure and smart cities of the future to ever meaningfully take shape, however, the IoT must be shaken up and decentralized.
New technology will demand decentralization
By far the most important reason that the IoT will inevitably find itself decentralizing is the simple fact that new technology will demand it. The impressive rise of blockchain services to the top of the contemporary economy’s consciousness has led many investors and analysts to believe that blockchain services and the IoT will make so much money in a decentralized, collaboration-based economic system that investors will find it too hard to resist the trend of disrupting the existing centralized system.
Security threats play into this realm; the IoT is terribly vulnerable in its current state, with data breaches and nefarious hacking incidents regularly consuming international headlines,. If we want our IoT to become secure, we simply need to realize that decentralizing our digital operations the only way to ensure they can’t all be compromised at once. Consumers, corporations, and lawmakers alike are all unified behind greater digital security, so expect data gurus and security professionals to begin pushing for decentralization sooner rather than later.
The IoT is confusing, often unpredictable, and prone to such rapid changes that it can be nearly impossible to keep up with it. Nonetheless, it’s clear for all to see that the next big step forward for the Internet of Things is to embrace decentralization for increased efficiency and security all around.
