
Rushkoff proposes we abandon the Internet, and create something better - ngorenflo
http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-next-net
======
cabalamat
I blogged about a proposal like this some while ago:
[http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/using-computers-
to...](http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/using-computers-to-promote-
freedom/)

In the long term I'd like to see that every computer sold in the western world
came configured as standard as freedom-enabled: this would mean mesh
networking, encryption, a steganographic filing system, etc, out of the box.

This would have two advantages. One is that western governments would find it
difficult to take freedom away from the internet.

The other is that authoritarian governments would either have to abandon the
free internet and implement their own locked-down and incompatible one, or
they would have to accept that they can't control their people's
communications. The advantage this would give the west in any future cold war
against China is, I hope, obvious.

I'm standing for election to the Scottish parliament later this year. If I'm
elected I'll try to get something like this implemented.

~~~
jamesbritt
"I'm standing for election to the Scottish parliament later this year. If I'm
elected I'll try to get something like this implemented."

I'd really like to hear how the voters are responding to such an issue. Do
people understand, more or less, the technology, the ramifications, the
options? Do they care? Do they care once <something> is explained? That sort
of thing.

There are a number of comments posted on HN to the effect that "mere" users
don't care, don't understand, can't be bothered, etc. That they only care that
Stuff Works, for some limited definition of "works". I'd like to think that's
not true, but my sample set of non-geeks is probably too small to make broad
statements about the general population.

~~~
cabalamat
> _I'd really like to hear how the voters are responding to such an issue. Do
> people understand, more or less, the technology, the ramifications, the
> options?_

The vast majority don't (yet). That's one reason why the Pirate Party is going
to have other policies as well!

------
evgenit
The author doesn't quite get it. Nonwithstanding the fact that physical
infrastructure is never free (his fido example is a case in point: phone
lines), once something turns big corporations will enter the game, and then
even freifunk-like architecture would suddenly be corporate-owned, as their
nodes outnumber private ones.

Also, what non-free internet? Pirate bay is still up (despite many attempts),
wikileaks is still up (!), etc. Wikileaks isn't even blocked by the search
engines.

~~~
cabalamat
> _Also, what non-free internet? Pirate bay is still up (despite many
> attempts), wikileaks is still up (!), etc. Wikileaks isn't even blocked by
> the search engines._

This is a good point. But I don't think we should be complacent: if the USA
and EU got serious about blocking these, they would be able to shut down both,
with the current network infrastructure.

------
enanoretozon
One can't escape the corporations or governments' influence. They are already
in every aspect of one's life. Rather than trying to build a super secret
treehouse away from their gaze it's more productive to find a way to protect
people's freedoms within the current system. To make it so senators do not
have the power to meddle with the network arbitrarily.

~~~
cabalamat
Why not work on both political and technological solutions to the problem? The
more ways the problem is attacked, the more likely one attack will succeed.

~~~
enanoretozon
Of course. I thought that was implicit, sorry. What I don't agree with is the
article's proposal to start over.

------
sfphotoarts
or tunnel through existing infrastructure, which you would be anyway with the
other options. I actually like that the internet is a library, a shopping mall
and any number of other things all at the same time and am not too fearful
that yanking DNS entries would be such a terrible thing. I never used fidonet
but I did have a uucp email address and set up dialers to get email working
between unix systems back in the 80's. I feel like we are always tunelling
over something existing, so why not use the most convenient. Wouldn't a VPN
over the public internet give you the same result? Of course, your provider
could pull the plug on you, but you switch to another, just like if someone
else started transmitting on your frequency if you're using ham radio. the FCC
tends to take a dim view of encryption (which they are also unable to define,
or rather differentiate between providing confidentiality vs message ciphers
for obscurity) so you would have to embed your subversive internet within
benign ordinary traffic.

There's nothing forcing any of us to use ATT or comcast or whomever, its just
a more fun place on a network where there are more people. If you grew up with
uucp as your mail carrier and progressed to ccMail and finally a netcom shell
account you'll remember how boring it was reading physics papers on gopher
servers and looking at fluid dynamics latex documents. There was a time though
between gopher and veronica and today's 500 million people wasting 2 hours
every day checking out each other's cat washing stories and playing at being
farmers. Maybe I'm just remembering it all wrong, but I kind of like the
current internet.

~~~
cabalamat
> _or tunnel through existing infrastructure_

This would certainly be how any new network started. If/when it got bigger, it
could outgrow the existing infrastructure.

> _the FCC tends to take a dim view of encryption_

Are they not aware that it is routinely used on the net, then?

> _you would have to embed your subversive internet within benign ordinary
> traffic_

Datastreams with lots of bits are best for hiding things. So I'd expect
steganography over video VoIP to be one mthod used.

------
powera
Typical worthless purist drivel.

Sure, let's throw away 25 years worth of infrastructure and progress and go
back to a system where people have to dial in to a centrally controlled system
via ham radios or the (corporate-owned) telephone system! We can even use our
old 56k modems! Or pigeons! And let's make sure not to use any money to
support it, since money is corporate owned as well!

------
iwwr
It may yet be possible to create a sort of 'commons' by opening up large
portions of the radio spectrum for free data interchange.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network>

------
WiseWeasel
Personally, I think the solution that could get some kind of market traction
would be to sell WiFi routers that can organize themselves into Metropolitan
Area Networks. A certain portion of the units is instructed to become 'long-
distance' nodes, connecting to other nodes a mile or two away, and shifting
large amounts of data between them. Another portion of the units is instructed
to become 'medium-distance' nodes, distributing the traffic from the long-
distance nodes to devices within a few thousand foot radius, and all devices
are simultaneously capable of being 'short-distance' nodes, connecting
directly to end-user devices. Since it takes more resources and a better
antenna to run a long-distance node, routers capable of acting as long-
distance could possibly be distinct from medium-distance-capable ones, and
sold at a premium, with an assurance that local devices connecting to it will
get better network performance. Apart from that, devices become either long,
medium or short-range nodes depending on network and geographical needs.

The market for these devices will of course get its start with piracy and
porn, just like any good burgeoning internet protocol, but you can bet local
TV stations, radio stations and advertisers would be all over them to get
their content out without having to pay the traditional network gatekeepers.
Content producers would get free access to the network if they just run a node
or two.

Eventually, as the metropolitan area networks become dense enough and spread
out widely enough, it will be possible to link the different cities to each-
other and start to create another wide-scale network. Until that happens,
though, there's enough going on in most metropolitan areas to give more than
enough value to a decentralized network such as this.

~~~
trotsky
I assume you haven't spent much time using mesh radio solutions - they have
their uses for sure but their performance and reliability are very poor
compared to traditional solutions. And even then most of them rely on
backending on wired plant for longhaul.

~~~
WiseWeasel
I have not, though I am aware of it. Perhaps the planned white-space open
licensing would give us the bandwidth to address this problem, and the
performance of such decentralized systems could be improved. If such an
improvement is possible, then something like mesh would have a good shot at
market success.

~~~
wmf
In a given channel, 802.11 mesh networking provides roughly 1/7th the
performance of non-mesh (and an ideal protocol only achieves 1/3) [1]; using
more spectrum increases throughput but the waste is still there. Many people
(especially telco lobbyists) would argue that spectrum shouldn't be wasted on
such inefficient protocols.

[1] <http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/grid:mobicom01/>

~~~
WiseWeasel
OK, plan B. First, we quantum-entangle a few million pairs of particles...

------
aaronsw
I support this project. I was hoping stuff like Meraki.net would be a good
tool for this, but it doesn't seem to have taken off.

------
Mithrandir
"Back in 1984, long before the Internet even existed..."

I believe he meant the Web or perhaps the other applications that run on top
of the Internet. Email, ftp, and the Usenet were on the "Internet" in 1984.

------
kevinelliott
The one fatal flaw is that the author assumes disparate hoards of people can
come together to create a new network to replace the existing one, which is a
difficult task (dare I say extremely difficult). Just look at how an
organized, business & government sponsored approach to creating a new network
has already failed to take much traction (re: ipv6). Hardly disparate, yet a
decade of efforts and still not truly active.

~~~
redthrowaway
I wouldn't say ipv6 has failed, merely that it isn't being adopted fast
enough. It'll get there. Sooner or later, reality will force ipv6 adoption.

~~~
kevinelliott
Yes, failed is a bit harsh, but see how difficult adoption has been? A near
apocalypse of ipv4 is required before the leap occurs. My point, though, was
simply to illustrate how insane it sounds for a bunch of random people to do
what an organized and financially backed group even struggles with.

~~~
redthrowaway
GNU/Linux? Firefox also turned out quite a bit better than IE. I'm aware that
money and organization are involved in both of those endeavours, but the
amount of each is miniscule by comparison.

------
Semiapies
I'm trying to figure out what the net neutrality reference was for, besides an
attention-getting throwaway line.

In some hypothetical future inter-net that is truly decentralized and
magically not subject to "lawmakers and lobbyists", _there could be no
neutrality_ , since the system would be (somehow) free from any authorities
who could impose neutrality.

~~~
wmf
Perhaps he imagines neutrality to be the default state of a lawless Internet,
not something imposed from outside.

~~~
Semiapies
That's definitely imaginative.

------
ShareableDesign
Holy crap, these are good comments. I agree that it's impractical to build a
new net from scratch, but there's some really good work arounds here from
cabalamat, wiseweasel, sfphotoarts, and others.

What other ways can we increase Internet freedoms working with existing
infrastructure? What other legal and technical work arounds are there?

------
s2r2
This definitely is related:

<http://wiki.freifunk.net/Kategorie:English>

They're around for quite a while now and with some success not only in urban
areas. (I don't know anything about them meshing together local networks, what
I suspect to still require the ISP internets at the moment.)

------
pohl
Maybe this would be an opportunity to start with a content-centric protocol:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8>

------
zandorg
It would probably be heavily based around RSA encryption.

~~~
jerf
While it is true that encryption will be involved, it is not the hard problem,
I think that's a bit like saying nails will be used to construct a building.
The hard problems are how to get a packet of data from here to there without a
central mediator (solvable with current tech but can have performance issues),
and how to create a human-usable naming service of some kind that doesn't have
a central mediator _and_ doesn't inevitably degenerate back into having a
central mediator by its very nature. Technically DNS is decentralized but the
way it works causes it to centralize naturally. I'm not sure if this is
avoidable.

~~~
bdonlan
Strictly speaking there's no need for a DNS-like system to use domain _names_
- you could use domain keys instead (locating the authoritative servers could
then be done with a DHT of some sort). The problem then is that it becomes
hard to type them in manually, but people could exchange such things with QR
codes, or abbreviated hashes of the keys. You do lose usability, but it's a
compromise that wouldn't be entirely unusable.

~~~
jerf
And you'd have to solve the issues of deliberately corrupting DHT nodes,
deliberately constructed collisions, and forged copies of the whatever-human-
key ends up being used, since it is pretty much out of the question that we
will all type in 128-bit numbers for website access.

Note I do not mean this as criticism of your comment, because you can't
possibly solve these issues in an HN comment. Just pointing it out. Designing
a decentralized network that works at all is a big enough challenge, designing
a fully decentralized network that stands up to hostile attacks by intelligent
adversaries is even harder.

