The hot topic of these days is TikTok crisis. TikTok is the international version of Bytedance’s Douyin. It has occupied the global young people’s market through short videos and accurate and personalized content push, allowing everyone’s creativity and self-expression to be fully realized. Highly relevant pushes are achieved through artificial intelligence algorithms, making it an aggregating platform for high popularity and high-quality personalized short video content. Therefore, it is very popular with advertisers and its ROI efficiency is quite high, making TikTok an outstanding new generation of advertising and marketing platform. Operating in North America for just over two years, it currently has an annual revenue of USD 5 billion, reaching a valuation of USD 50 billion.
When it occupied the mobile phone of the young generation in the world with an unstoppable momentum, it encountered an unprecedented crisis in the United States. The U.S. government used information security as a reason to intervene politically to prevent the continued operation of this global application which is from Chinese innovation.
This blockade is unprecedented, directly rising at the level of Congress and the president of the government. Although it is still in the stage of intense negotiation, the crisis of TikTok is like a boulder that stirred up a huge wave in the calm water, prompting us to look at the essence through appearance and think about the dangers and opportunities of our global digital transformation in the new era.
An interesting phenomenon is that TikTok users have expressed strong dissatisfaction. Although the momentum is huge, it is TikTok’s management and government officials who are now to decide its fate. For users, especially those who are already quite popular, they are faced with two possibilities. First, users can continue using TikTok after the change of ownership. However, due to the change of the operator, many existing strategies and the back-end algorithm is changed; Second, the change of ownership is not completed before September 15, TikTok may be directly shut down, causing all users’ accumulated data, popularity, and social circle to disappear in an instant. Real users’ opinions are not valued in this process.
When people are exclaiming the mighty power of the government and the innocence of TikTok, what I see is the end of the current generation Internet era. As we all know, the current core model of the Internet s platform-centric traffic business. It brings convenience and efficiency to people’s daily life, but users are contributing their own data to the platform for free. When the platform is strong enough, monopoly will occur. Enterprises and individuals who lose their bargaining power at this time can only become workers who are deeply exploited but cannot leave.
When people try to break the monopoly of Internet platforms through entrepreneurship, we find that the successful entrepreneurial company has become a new generation of monopolists, and it has become what it hates. Take Douyin and the international version of TikTok as examples. This is a typical example of using personal data to realize efficient traffic monetization. However, it is still a centralized platform monopoly model, and its success is not directly related to every user. Internet celebrities who work hard on it may also gradually lose their enthusiasm due to the unequal share of profits, especially those who have already a well-known internet celebrity, if their own data and traffic have more say and control, that would be great.
In my opinion, Bytedance’s achievements are proud, but it is still a high-quality enterprise at the end of the centralized platform model in the first generation Internet era. It is not in line with the decentralized personal data ownership confirmation and permission based sharing model of the next-generation Internet. This is our opportunity for change now.
From another perspective, if the US government uses its power to close TikTok, not to mention that this directly destroys the principles of the market economy, it will directly harm the core interests of every user. It hijacks the user’s right to choose on the grounds of protecting users, which is an inevitable drawback of the centralized platform model. So, is it possible for us to have an application that cannot be shut down? In other words, an application whose destiny is determined by its users.
This leads to the stage of the next-generation Internet that is about to kick off. After the first-generation Internet platform model, the next-generation Internet will be a completely user-centric model. In the digital world, user-centered means centered on user data. The ownership of data belongs to users, not platforms. The platform uses user data to make money under user authorization and shares the profit with users in accordance with the agreement.
The key word here is “decentralization.” After ten years of development, the decentralized ledger technology driven by the blockchain has developed to a relatively practical stage. The decentralized digital identity, personal data ownership, data assetization, and smart contract binding profit sharing relations and so on have gradually landed. Decentralized data storage based on point-to-point transmission technology and distributed algorithms for private domain traffic based on decentralized data are also a solid foundation for data assetization. The application built based on these technologies is the app that cannot be shut down. The philosophy behind it is “my data is my personal property”.
The commercialization of the next generation Internet is a combination of technical logic architecture, business model, and operation model. We are currently at such a beginning stage. The essence of the wealth Internet is to allow individuals to create their own wealth with their own data.
Looking back and forth at TikTok’s crisis and the dominance of the U.S. government from this perspective, we will find that the essence of this phenomenon is that when a model can no longer be developed based on a market economy, the era of the next generation of distributed business applications is about to come. Instead of being entangled in it, it is better to think and solve this problem from a higher dimension.
Today, I commented to some friends: “I hope that Douyin will deal with the North American TikTok issue from another dimension. Instead of being entangled and killed, I directly announced that this project will be permanently decentralized and self-operated in North America, using the underlying technology of the blockchain. Make an application that can never be shut down, the data is confirmed to each user, the platform is fully machine managed to just collect gas fees to maintain, and the profits are mainly distributed to Internet celebrities, users, and contributors (investors are also a type of contributor). In fact, it is accelerating self-evolution into the next generation of user-centric, blockchain and artificial intelligence-based core applications.”
We are in the era of transitioning from the first-generation Internet to the next-generation Internet. The prospects are attractive while hurdles are ahead. I hope that a new generation of disruptive and innovative companies will continue to emerge and become an unstoppable new wave.
In the past few years, I have come into contact with many projects, some with ambitious visions, and some with pragmatic practices, especially Elastos, which insists on being the “next generation Internet infrastructure” in the hustle and bustle of the blockchain bubble. There are many witnesses in any era, but most are critics and bystanders, and a few are practitioners. We need more perseverance practitioners, continuous improvement, continuous rise after falling, continuous exploration and realization of the real breakthrough point.
Author: Brian Xin
2020.8.4
