Who Owns Your Data? Filecoin’s Fight for Internet Freedom

Here is something people rarely think back on after uploading their documents “on the cloud”: Who controls that data?

According to a study published by Cloudzero, centralized companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud control 63% of worldwide cloud infrastructure, meaning that a significant portion of the world’s data lives on the servers owned by just three corporations.

For Marta Belcher, President and Chair of the Filecoin Foundation, this is more than just a tech problem; it is a civil liberties issue. Instead, together with Filecoin, Belcher envisions a new kind of internet – one where resilience and decentralization are giving the power back to the users.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Decentralized Internet According to Filecoin
3. The “Airbnb for File Storage”
4. Preserving Truth: Filecoin’s role in Human Rights & Journalism
5. Filecoin to Surpass 1EiB by the end of 2025
6. AI Storage & Other Growing Trends
7. The Bottom Line
8. FAQs
9. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Decentralized Internet According to Filecoin
3. The “Airbnb for File Storage”
Show Full Guide
4. Preserving Truth: Filecoin’s role in Human Rights & Journalism
5. Filecoin to Surpass 1EiB by the end of 2025
6. AI Storage & Other Growing Trends
7. The Bottom Line
8. FAQs
9. References

Decentralized Internet According to Filecoin

According to Belcher, the internet’s structure needs a fundamental rethink.

While most of today’s web is propped up by the infrastructure of a few centralized corporations, primarily Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, Filecoin envisions something radically different. An internet where no single entity controls the flow of information, and where people have the opportunity to regain full autonomy over their digital identities.

According to Belcher, one of the biggest issues with having the majority of our data controlled by primarily three companies is the creation of single points of failure.

Prominent examples include the AWS outage in mid-April 2025, which affected the operations of some cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, or the Google Cloud Storage outage in June 2025.

Instead, Filecoin is building a future “where people are actually in control of their own data”, Belcher explains. This means taking hardware from all over the world and combining it into a supercomputer-like network, which acts as “an alternative to big tech companies”.

The “Airbnb for File Storage”

One of the most prominent allegories that Belcher likes to use when describing Filecoin is to compare it to “Airbnb for file storage.” If Airbnb lets people rent out spare bedrooms, Filecoin lets them rent out hard drive space.

Belcher told Techopedia:

“You can think of [Filecoin] like the Airbnb for file storage. We have storage providers all around the world. Those could be individuals or small data centers that have extra storage capacity, and they can contribute their unused storage capacity to the Filecoin network.”

Storage providers must regularly submit cryptographic proofs that show that the files they have been paid to store at their data center are still being stored. In case they fail to do so, their Filecoin tokens ($FIL), held as collateral, are automatically burned.

According to Belcher, this is one of the primary aspects that enables Filecoin to scale a decentralized system in a way that would not have been possible otherwise.

Crucially, not all storage on Filecoin is private, and not all is meant to be. Belcher points out that the network supports both encrypted private storage and public data hosting, depending on user needs.

Belcher explained:

“There are different ways to store data, and we have a number of initiatives that are aimed at storing really high-value public data sets. For example, we have a partnership with the Internet Archive called Democracy’s Library, where the goal is to have government data from around the world stored publicly where it can be accessed.”

Preserving Truth: Filecoin’s role in Human Rights & Journalism

Filecoin’s mission goes beyond the technical infrastructure. It is also about preserving the public record, free expression, and historical truth. As someone with a background in civil liberties law, this mission also stands close to Belcher’s heart.

“There are all sorts of important data that is being stored on the Filecoin network,” Belcher said. “Data sets that are critical for things like human rights, journalism, civil liberties. We store a lot of genocide testimony on the Filecoin network from a joint project of Stanford and USC. There is also evidence of war crimes in Ukraine … that were actually submitted to the international criminal court.”

Belcher further notes that such data is not only preserved on the Filecoin network but can be proven not to have been tampered with.

Filecoin to Surpass 1EiB by the end of 2025

In the latest Q1 Filecoin report, the network announced that they expect to achieve a major milestone: exceeding one exbibyte (EiB) of paid storage capacity by the end of the year.

That amounts to over 1 billion gigabytes of data being actively stored. This would also raise the network’s utilization from its current 29% to nearly 100% with fully paid usage.

Belcher attributes this growth to product-market fit and a maturing ecosystem of users who now trust Filecoin as a core infrastructure layer.

“There have already been a number of areas where Filecoin and its underlying storage network, IPFS, have been used pretty broadly,” Belcher explained, adding that one of the most prominent examples is non-fungible token (NFT) storage. According to her, “the vast majority of NFTs are stored on Filecoin and IPFS.”

This same NFT example also demonstrates why decentralization matters. Belcher said:

“If you buy an NFT [that] is stored on a typical centralized service [like AWS] and the startup that sold it to you goes out of business and stops paying its AWS bill, then the image just disappears… So, it is absolutely critical that you store these NFTs on a decentralized network where the availability of information is not dependent on one person, one company, or one server.”

Beyond NFTs, Filecoin is also attracting enterprises demanding data requirements, from hot storage to archival needs.

AI Storage & Other Growing Trends

Moving forward, Filecoin is actively positioning itself as a foundational layer not just for Web3, but for the data infrastructure demands of the future, particularly artificial intelligence (AI).

“There is a lot of data that is required for the AI universe. And so, we have a lot of examples of AI companies that are actually already storing either AI metadata or AI training data sets or other AI-related data on the Filecoin Network,” Belcher said.

Among some prominent examples, she names Singularity, Kite AI, and EQTY Lab.

Beyond AI, the Filecoin Foundation is also promoting tools that give users greater control over their digital footprint. A recent example is the Bluesky Backup App, a Filecoin data onboarding Layer 2, which lets users back up their Bluesky social graphs on the network.

Big news: You can now back up Bluesky social graphs on Filecoin via @storachanetwork

Their new Bluesky Backup App lets you export data off your Personal Data Server, ensuring your identity is portable, protected, and future-proofed

Get a live backup of your Bluesky ↓ https://t.co/QAaUD0Nwaq

— Filecoin Foundation (@FilFoundation) June 12, 2025

The Bottom Line

According to Belcher, Filecoin’s incentive-layered architecture, which rewards reliable storage and cryptographic verifiability, makes the network a strong candidate to become “the decentralized storage layer for the next generation of the internet.”

Beyond the technical milestones, Filecoin represents a broader vision. One where users reclaim control over their data, where historical truth is preserved without reliance on gatekeepers, and where infrastructure cannot be erased or shut down.

FAQs