  Over the past decade, we have witnessed the Internet becoming increasingly
centralized in the hands of a small number of giant technology firms, that
control many of the most popular applications and the content they host on
their platforms. In addition, in the majority of instances today, access to the
Internet is usually provided through local internet service providers (ISPs) in
each country. Governments in different jurisdictions can exert pressure on
these technology firms and ISPs to enforce restrictions on Internet usage by
their citizens, such as the blocking access to certain sites and/or content. In
this paper, we present a promising new approach to circumventing some of these
issues. Our decentralized web (DWeb) proposal makes use of a mesh network to
connect community based routers. In addition, objects on the DWeb are indexed
using Bblockchain technology, which allows for secure storage of immutable
object references, and integrity checking of the data being served to users.
Our DWeb design is also capable of operating during network partitions, and is
able to quickly re-synchronize with the larger network once connectivity has
been restored.
