in the traditional internet if a company decides to shut down its API, every buisiness that relies on that api is automatically in a disastrous position. how does Dfinity solves this problem?
i think this is related to its concept on open internet services yet i still can’t see how could this be possible
You’ll be able to lock api’s so that nobody can change them anymore. Furthermore as long as someone keeps paying for the cycles of a canister it will stay online guaranteeing that the api will stay online as well
But if the developer just stop feeding the canister with live data (example: weather data canister) - or feed a whole new canister instead of the previous one; he can in theory still stop an “API”?
i think so yeah, its literally the same with the traditional internet except it is more open in that it doesn’t allow any entity to control any canister instead its decentralized so it solves the problem of a developer or a corporation changing his/their mind on the API
Yes that will still be the case. Data from outside the network will have to come from some sort of oracle. Lots of interesting ideas about that in the ethereum community
The interface of a canister cannot be changed if its controller is set to NULL. This is what they mean when they talk about Irrevocable APIs. Anyone who builds a business on an Irrevocable API can minimize their exposure to platform risk. Note that someone must continue to charge the underlying canister with cycles or it will ultimately get garbage collected.
so a place in the ecosystem for more middlemen to insert themselves? more tokens to hoard?
These proposals are then governed by the NNS, enabling users of the application or service to vote and make decisions about its code, policies, and functions. An open internet service can mark shared functions as “permanent” (i.e. APIs can be marked as permanent). In such cases, canister upgrades cannot overwrite the shared functions, and if an upgrade degrades the functionality it provides, constructively revoking the API, the Internet Computer’s own governance system can make progressive modifications to the governance system of the internet service until such time that the expected functionality is restored.