People-Powered Communication Network: The Next Generation of WebRTC

The great leaps forward in civilization have all come on the back of advancements in communication. From the evolution of human language and early cave paintings to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, through to the age of telecommunications, and, ultimately, the internet.

Moving from physical messages to real-time communication (RTC) via telephony enabled our interactions to become faster, more efficient, more scalable, and, most importantly, more interpersonal.

The development of the internet is now widely accepted to be falling into distinct phases, which we’ve come to know as Web1, Web2, and Web3. Web1 and Web2 are often defined through the lens of communications, with Web1 featuring static content delivery systems, while Web2 transformed the way we interact online with the advent of social media and video streaming.

WebRTC, a defining component of Web2, enabled global business and commerce to continue at the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

The emergence of Web3 is still underway, and so far, it’s fair to say that the major impact of Web3 has been more focused on finance than communication. Four years after the pandemic began, WebRTC is still firmly rooted in the Web2 space.

Stagnating Problems

Our online meetings and interactions take place predominantly using services like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, alongside more social-oriented offerings such as WhatsApp, FaceTime, and Facebook Messenger.

However, there isn’t much to differentiate these products in terms of user experience, and as centralized offerings, they all share similar deficiencies. “Zoom fatigue” came to describe the exhaustion that results from spending hours staring at 2D images of coworkers onscreen.

Or, if you’re the host, hoping that the screen doesn’t freeze or the audio drops out due to performance and connectivity issues.

The practice known as “Zoom bombing,” where unwanted participants gatecrash meetings, highlights just one of the privacy and covert monitoring issues with Web2 RTC services.

The fact that they are run on centralized servers also creates a potential point of failure, as well as limiting scalability.

The fact that Zoom is often named as the culprit for these issues is also somewhat unfair – all platforms suffer from similar issues.

Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the extractive model of centralized ownership simply doesn’t incentivize change or improvement beyond ensuring that enough customers continue to pay their monthly subscriptions. Policies and practices often work in service of profit but against the interests of the user, such as data harvesting or intrusive ads.

Changing the Paradigm

The emergence of Web3 offers a chance for a different model; one that’s closer in spirit to the evolution of communication throughout history, where people have sought to make information more accessible and available to the many.

Decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) refers to the segment of Web3 where projects harness the power of decentralized networks to create a more robust, scalable, and people-centric infrastructure that can support the next evolution of the Internet.

The centralized infrastructure model is based on companies generating or buying up resources such as bandwidth, file storage, or connectivity and reselling them at a profit using any of the extractive business practices covered above.

In the DePIN model, individuals and entities can pool their resources into a decentralized node-based infrastructure network so it can be sold ad-hoc and on-demand to anyone who needs it at a far lower cost.

Entities that contribute resources to the network are rewarded for their contribution, incentivizing further participation.

Ultimately, the user benefits from a superior experience thanks to a more scalable and private network that is better designed for growth and improvement.

Depending on the type of project, running a node for these networks doesn’t necessarily involve any high technological overheads. However, it is a paradigm shift.

Moving from a top-down economic model to a peer-to-peer value creation ecosystem based on shared social consensus requires education and a change in mindset for mainstream users and enterprises unfamiliar with the Web3 model.

But the shift is happening. Networks such as Filecoin (decentralized file storage), one of the longest-established DePIN projects, now hosts file storage for global open-source projects such as Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg.

DePIN is anticipated to be among the biggest growth segments in the digital asset sector in 2024 as the benefits of decentralized infrastructure networks focused on value creation become more apparent.

Ringing the Changes for With dRTC

While DePIN segments like file storage, connectivity, and computing have already seen quite extensive development, WebRTC is only just beginning to showcase its potential. The fundamental improvements in the areas of privacy and performance are only the very beginning.

Scalable, flexible dRTC (decentralized RTC) will enable on-demand meeting services that can scale to any number of participants without any degradation of quality.

The growing demand for RTC in games and virtual spaces will be met by dRTC networks delivering seamless, immersive 3D interactions with ultra-low latency. Furthermore, with the functionality available via APIs and SDKs on an open-source basis, it’s possible to embed rich dRTC into any applications or services.

However, the practical benefits of dRTC, and indeed, dePIN more broadly, are only made possible by bringing the people-powered networking model to life. Moving from Web2 to Web3 will require a significant mindset shift, but the advantages of doing so will only compound over time.