Critiques protocolaires d’Internet : comparaison des projets IPFS et SecureScuttleButt

Abstract

This article highlights the political a priori and debates around two critical infrastructures proposed as alternatives to current Internet protocols: the IPFS (Interplanetary File System) and SSB (SecureScuttlebutt). Using critical discourse analysis to analyze the discourses of the developers of these two systems, the article explores a particular form of criticism of Internet regimes: infrastructural criticism, and highlights its variety. By comparing these two case studies, we see how different alternatives to the current spatio-temporal implementations of the Internet allow us to identify the agency dimensions of these acts of hijacking and substitution, characterizing two quite different approaches to decentralized protocols, despite their technical similarity.

Keywords

• Science and technology studies
• protocol
• comparative analysis
• infrastructure