A fairer internet

Imagine the pandemic without the internet. No food delivery apps to keep you fed. No video calls to connect with family. No remote work to keep businesses running. No streaming to keep you sane during lockdown. It’s almost unthinkable. That tells us something important about where we are as a society.

Connectivity has crossed from luxury to necessity. It’s become analogous to water or power: a utility so fundamental to modern life that we can barely function without it. And yet, the infrastructure that underpins this essential service is owned and controlled by remarkably few organisations.

A concentrated cloud#

AWS hosts over 9 million websites and commands more than 30% of the cloud infrastructure market. Google Cloud holds roughly 13%. Microsoft Azure sits at around 7%. Between just three companies, over half of the internet’s infrastructure is accounted for. The digital backbone of modern society (the thing we rely on for everything from healthcare to education to commerce) is concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of corporations.

That concentration comes with risks. It means single points of failure. It means pricing power that favours the provider, not the user. And it means that the wealth generated by the internet flows upward to a select few, rather than being shared with the communities that actually make it work.

A different way#

Edge believes there is a different way. We’re a not-for-profit organisation, and that’s a deliberate choice. We believe that the infrastructure powering our digital society should be owned collectively by the people who use it and contribute to it.

Our lightweight infrastructure model makes this possible. Instead of requiring billions of pounds in capital to build data centres, Edge allows anyone with a laptop, phone, or gaming console to offer their spare computing capacity to the network. You become part of the cloud. You contribute to its power. And in return, you earn revenue from the services your device helps provide.

Revenue shared with everyone#

This is the fundamental difference. In the traditional cloud model, the revenue generated by infrastructure flows to shareholders and executives at the world’s richest companies. In the Edge model, that revenue is shared with everyone who contributes. The more you participate, the more you earn.

It’s a network that provides secure and performant services (the same compute, storage, and delivery that any cloud platform offers), but does so in a way that’s distributed, community-owned, and fundamentally fairer. The internet should belong to the people who build it, use it, and depend on it. Edge is how we get there.