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

Abstract

This paper explores two critical infrastructure proposals as alternatives to the current state of the Internet protocols: IPFS (Interplanetary File System) and Scuttlebutt, highlighting the political a priori and debates of these technical enterprises. To do so, I propose to analyze the discourses of the developers of these two systems in the mode of a critical discourse analysis.This article highlights a particular form of criticism of Internet regimes: infrastructural criticism, and highlights its variety through a comparative study. Through these two case studies, we will 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, yet linked by a technical similarity.