Crypto exchange HTX Global awarded tomi the best project award at TOKEN2049 for its surveillance-free internet last week. TOKEN2049 is the premier crypto event, organized annually in Singapore, where founders and executives of the leading Web3 companies and projects share their view on the industry.

tomi’s winning of the award comes on the heels of power players meeting in Washington to discuss regulating AI, a crucial concern of which involves the technology’s potential to violate data privacy. Of course, big tech companies and governments don’t need AI to steal consumer data—they’ve been under fire for doing so for years.

The traditional internet has made today’s world unrecognizable since even the 1990s by democratizing access to information. Since the U.S. Patriot Act was signed into law in 2006, however, government and corporate surveillance has slowly come to define the internet experience, as surfaced in high-profile revelations like the Edward Snowden leaks and countless others. Governments and corporations across the globe have also stepped up their surveillance efforts since the internet’s early days, drastically limiting user privacy.

To tomi, patchwork fixes to the Web2 landscape, which has normalized corporate and government surveillance, isn’t going to cut it. tomi offers an alternative to the world wide web that empowers anyone to surf the internet completely privately. The brilliance in tomi’s network comes in its governance mechanism—there are ways to govern the internet that don’t involve a top-down approach from countries or corporations. tomi employs a DAO, tomiDAO, to empower its community to vote on decisions and govern the network.

Earlier this summer, tomi announced it has opened auctions for top-level domain names on its tDNS (tomi Domain Name System) platform. Through the auction process, users and businesses can bid to secure the .com or .tomi address of their choice until May 2024.

Users can create domains that are subsequently sold at public auctions to the highest bidders. Other users can acquire these domains, maximizing the potential to own rare and invaluable addresses on tomi’s alternative internet network. The winning bidder owns the domain outright through a minted partner NFT, not a centralized registrar, and can then use the .com or .tomi domain however they choose.