Tron has revealed a new mission statement that the company recently sent to all of its employees in the US and China. It tracks the history of the internet and describes the corporate takeover by tech titans too focused on profit instead of people.
Founder Justin Sun writes,
“The Internet was decentralized when it was first created. Since Web 1.0 in the 80s, we believed that Internet services should be built upon an open protocol shared by the web community. Since then, we’ve created open protocol standards like TCP/IP and HTTP. The World Wide Web has become a cornerstone of the entire Information Age and a basic service that we’ve come to depend on…
Web 2.0, which was from the mid-2000s to 2011, profit-focused tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix started to create applications and services that overtook open protocols. These large corporations were all about profitability and monopolizing the market, and appealing to Wall Street as their primary capital market. The internet was becoming centralized, just like the way Rome transitioned from a democratic society to an empire.
Web 3.0, 2012 to present. This era is all about mobility, dominated by smartphones and mobile apps, which exacerbated the centralized governance structure of Web 2.0. Billions of users around the world were more or less forced into a more complex and centralized internet structure. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix became hugely successful in this new wave. Just last week, Apple’s market cap hit 1 trillion.
The centralized internet structure started to trigger public fear. There are suspicions that the control Facebook has over global private data could have influenced the US general election; people are fearful of potential data monopoly by Google within the EU. Cyberpunk novels and movies reflect the fear and controversy surrounding large corporations, technology, and excessive control from financial institutions.”
According to Sun, Tron’s purchase of BitTorrent is based on a shared ideology that dramatically differs from the way the current generation of internet giants view the technological landscape.
“Contrary to speculation, the main reason for the acquisition isn’t BitTorrent’s more than 100M active users, and it isn’t for an amazing commercial opportunity. Yes, these things are great perks, but the more important reason is that BitTorrent has always been committed to one value, which is ‘Democratize the internet.’ This is very much in line with TRON’s ‘Decentralize the Web.’ The fact that our values are in sync is the driving force behind this acquisition…
In order to address the issues brought by the centralized internet, the solution will have to be decentralized. We will address all of these issues in Web 4.0 and create a better internet for this era: a decentralized, mass-collaborative internet governed by the community, with highly effective, available, and convenient internet apps and services. From this perspective, the revolution of blockchain technologies is going beyond the blockchain industry, bringing about ground-breaking changes to the infrastructure of the entire internet.
Tron intends to be the largest decentralized internet ecosystem in the world. With the mission of making the internet decentralized once again, we are dedicated to making decentralized internet services available for everyone in the world.”
Sun also outlined the steps Tron plans to take to make its vision a reality, which includes optimizing the BitTorrent protocol to work with blockchain technology.
You can check out the full statement here.
