Human-Centric Internet

The term “Human-Centric Internet” describes an Internet for humans. It highlights individual human concerns, in contrast to e.g. the Internet of Things (IoT), which is focused on connectivity for smart devices.

The European Commission’s The Next Generation Internet (NGI) Initiative¹ aims for a human-centric Internet.

#Context

Human concerns are plentiful, and since the current Internet is build by humans, what precisely is it that makes a human-centric Internet different from what we see today?

In a sense, the term is a reaction of recent developments in the web sphere, a call back to this technology’s roots. The web was built to disseminate information, to connect people by sharing knowledge.

While it’s clear that today’s Internet is used for much more than sharing knowledge, some of those use-cases are no longer concerned with connecting people.

Taking the Internet of Things (IoT) as an example, we live in a world where the sum of every person’s concerns is represented by thousands of machines, all connected to the same Internet. Whether it the home automation system that closes our shades, or the smart sensor triggering a field to be irrigated, these IoT devices do serve human needs.

However, the rise of surveillance capitalism shows like few other examples that not everything that happens on the Internet has humanity’s best interests at heart. For a truly human-centric Internet, we need to refocus our efforts.

#Human-Centric

Human-centric concerns include those related to how data – in particular, personally identifiable information (PII) – is handled, and therefore focus on:

• Data Transparency for a more transparent personal data storage and a more fine-grained data transfer when exercising personal data access rights;
• Data Compatibility & Interoperability to facilitate switches between service providers;
• Security & Privacy of consumers when their personal data are transferred from one provider to another.
• Service Portability to empower users to share their data with any service provider and host that they trust;
• Data Sovereignty to empower users to transfer a complete data set or parts of it to any new provider without giving reasons.

Additionally, human-centric concerns cannot zero in on these without concerns for the wider ecosystem, so must also include considerations for a green Internet, which in practice means keeping computer usage to the what is necessary to support other human needs, by reducing:

• data storage;
• data transmission;
• duplicate processing;
• wasteful algorithms;
• etc.

Finally, a human-centric Internet is also trustworthy. Research shows that transparency is a key factor in building trustworthy technology. This applies not only to data storage and transmission, but additional concerns such as energy use, etc.

#Human-Centric Networking Architecture

The architectural principles of Human-Centric Networking (HCN) share some similarities to both information-centric networking (ICN), and delay-tolerant networking (DTN).

The notion that content should be addressable, which underlies ICN, is expanded upon to no longer mean individual, static content blocks, but rather mutable, shared resources. DTN influences the design by providing for explicit custodianship of resources (though the meaning differs somewhat in DTN).

Shared resources are self-contained and know who they are shared with – which implies that humans sharing in the resource have some (ephemeral or static) identifiers to represent them. Unlike ICN, DTN, or even the good, old-fashioned Internet, this means that human identifiers are a fundamental component of this architecture – and as a result of this, also various authentication and authorization concerns.

This is how human interactions can be secured; not by layering security as an optional addition upon an architecture, but embedding it from the beginning.

The full architecture specification² contains more detail.

#Related

The Declaration of Digital Autonomy³ expresses similar values to the “human-centric” term. But where that declaration stands as a manifesto for technology users, human-centric technology focuses more on the design principles underpinning its creation. They’re two sides of the same coin.

Note also that some definitions of “human-centric” are just rebrandings of the IoT definition we discuss above: rather than networking for humans, it describes networking about humans, and focuses more on all the sensors we might carry around these days that provide access to PII. This approach should not rightfully be called “human-centric”.

Finally, the peer-for-peer (P4P) term has been coined as a similar concept. Where P4P focuses on small community networks, HCN acknowledges the Internet’s global scope. Much like the Internet is sometimes described as a “network of networks”, one can imagine the HCN term as analogous to the Internet in encompassing many P4P networks.