John Beezer argues that “platform power” – the ability of digital platforms to leverage network effects, data collection, and algorithms to shape markets and discourse – represents a potent and potentially dangerous form of control. As governments digitize services (e.g., Estonia’s e-Estonia and IndiaStack), they risk adopting similar centralized platform architectures that could enable unprecedented surveillance and manipulation, threatening democratic norms.

Over the last few years, the DRC has gained a reputation for creating full stack responses to the decentralization issues of the day. We’re still working on that. That central concept, to create a throughline from concept to advocacy, is an approach that we would like to foster across the community. And so we started the DRC Grant, currently in its inaugural year.

Following on from our recent Comment in the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law and Policy, this blog post – reproduced from the original by kind permission from Flashbots – provides an update to the findings as the lawsuits against Google have progressed.

When we started this organization in 2021, we were guided by a conviction that emerging technologies, especially blockchain, could help bring more equitable governance and ownership to the digital economy, enabling broader economic participation through more disintermediated systems.

Through examples from social media, telecom history, and emerging protocols, this conversation examines the tension between convenience and control, why centralization persists, and how decentralized systems might restore resilience, diversity, and real choice in how we interact online.

Search was once open, messy, and plural. Then PageRank turned discovery into a single chokepoint, and Google became the gatekeeper of the web. Social media promised connection, then collaborative filtering concentrated our attention on a handful of feeds optimized for outrage and compulsion. Both became monopolies, both rewrote society. Now, AI brings a new frontier: memory, the structured record of our lives.

Status, unlike power or wealth, is a measure of social standing that must be conferred by others, and the Internet has enabled a plethora of quantifiable status measurements. These measurements of value are, however, inherently flawed. Conferring status creates inequality by definition and quantifying it exacerbates that inequality.

In light of the current development of the “agentic web,” we are perhaps witnessing the birth of a new digital species: decentralized AI agents (DeAgents) that train, reason, transact, and even reproduce without human-in-the-loop.

What Did We Learn from the $1.5 billion Bybit hack as individuals and as an ecosystem? Research insights from an ethnographic investigation and forthcoming book on decentralised security.

The Decentralization Research Center (DRC) is a nonprofit research and advocacy organization dedicated to one of the defining issues of our time: how power is distributed in the digital age.