Twitter founder ‘regrets’ role in creating centralised internet

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox

Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has said he regrets the role he played in making the internet more centralised.

The tech billionaire lamented the transition away from technologies that formed the early days of the internet – like Internet Relay Chat (IRC) instant messaging and the peer-to-peer framework of Usenet – into one dominated by a few giants like Google, Facebook, and even Twitter.

“The days of Usenet, IRC, the web... even email (w PGP)... were amazing,” Mr Dorsey tweeted.

“Centralising discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet. I realise I’m partially to blame and I regret it.”

Mr Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO in November, 15 years after founding the social media platform.

He has since focussed his efforts into crypto-related ventures, with the hope of making bitcoin the “native currency for the internet”.

The decentralised cryptocurrency shares some of the same technological traits that the world wide web embodied when it was first formed, and has attracted many of the early internet pioneers.

Mr Dorsey’s friend and fellow tech billionaire Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal, is a bitcoin advocate and suggested last week that he would set up his own decentralised social network that supports cryptocurrencies after becoming frustrated with Twitter.

In a poll posted on 24 March, Mr Musk asked his 79 million followers whether the Twitter algorithm should be open source.

More than 80 per cent replied that they thought it should be, with Mr Dorsey replying: “The choice of which algorithm to use (or not) should be open to everyone.”

Mr Musk said he was giving “serious thought” to setting up a rival platform, though these plans appear to be on hold after it was revealed on Monday that Mr Musk had bought a 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter, worth almost $3 billion.

Filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) show that Mr Musk, who also runs SpaceX and Tesla, made the purchase of Twitter shares on 14 March – before he made the posts hinting at starting his own platform.