A week after experiencing an internet blackout in his country, Hashing It Out host Elisha Owusu Akyaw looks for answers on how blockchain technology can create a more sovereign internet in an interview with the co-founder of XYO Network, Arie Trouw.

The episode also covers data sovereignty and the importance of privacy in the ever-evolving internet landscape. The conversation between Owusu Akyaw and Trouw explores new issues like elections and fake news, and how blockchain tech could be used to verify the authenticity of information on social media. 

Trouw explains that the sovereign internet is based on that idea of the original version of the internet (Web1) but with the functionalities of Web2 and Web3.

On a sovereign internet, users own their own data set, tools and services, which they can share with other users without needing a central server or third-party authority.

“So the sovereign internet is really, to some degree, a step back from Web2 to Web1, where each party has their own services and their own peer-to-peer functionality that they share with somebody else. And the internet works the way it’s meant to be, where it’s resilient to outages.”

With major elections taking place worldwide in 2024, issues like fake news and artificial intelligence-generated deep fakes threaten to widen the polarization in society.

Trouw concedes that blockchain may not be the answer to the problem since dealing with fake information on the internet requires the average person to be a skeptic and have the desire to verify everything they read.

However, when society develops a culture that seeks to verify the credibility of information, Trouw believes that blockchain technology would be the ultimate method to authenticate the origin of information on the internet.

The rest of the podcast explores more use cases of blockchain technology in creating a better internet by using location data and how blockchain technology could play a role in identifying aliens.

Listen to the full episode of Hashing It Out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, TuneIn or your podcast platform of choice, and remember to check out Cointelegraph’s growing catalog of Web3 podcasts.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.