Data Roads
A public data storage and distribution scheme: the generator of data is its owner by default, data is encrypted and redundantly distributed across many peers globally, and access is only ever granted through an active, renewable agreement.
Most data today routes through a small number of centralized custodians who become gatekeepers of data they didn't generate and often don't own in any meaningful sense. Data Roads starts from the opposite default.
The generator of a piece of data is its owner. Storage has no single point of failure or control: data is encrypted and redundantly distributed across many peers, globally, by whatever medium actually works for a given participant, from dedicated storage infrastructure down to someone's hard drive or a file copied to a desktop. Redundancy is computed from the real population actually holding a copy, not assumed from a fixed replication number. Anyone who wants access, scientist or enterprise, gets it only through an agreement with the owner that has to be actively renewed, not a permanent grant, and peers who store or relay data on the network's behalf are compensated for doing so.
It's early and it's going to change a lot before it's finished. The actual RFC and a short companion paper, both still in active draft, live on GitHub: