Rushkoff Proposes We Fork the Internet 487
Shareable writes "Douglas Rushkoff: 'The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network — its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation — is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them — that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.' And he goes on to suggest citizens fork the Internet & makes a call for ideas how to do that."
He's right (Score:5, Interesting)
Both the physical infrastructure and the logical underpinnings need to be forked. The current Internet is both insecure and not private enough. The physical infrastructure is easily controlled by a few central entities. It's all broken.
We should be building our own physical infrastructure and put fences in contracts that keep any entity from ever owning a significant part of that infrastructure. We should be adopting protocols that are secure, always encrypted and make it easy to be largely anonymous.
When its built, businesses will come, because that's where we are. But they will never, ever build it themselves. At least not big ones.
It took about 15 years to find some fairly effective control handles. This time, lets make sure it's at least 30 or 40 years before it can be figured out.
Just host IPv6 Net2 host servers (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not that difficult.
Just have NGOs run IPv6 stack Net2 servers that blacklist any upregulated commercial traffic and run them worldwide.
But you don't have the guts to do that.
All talk, no action.
In my day, ARPA*NET was clean and free of spam.
And then you sold us out for cash.
I have an idea... (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's have the internet operated by people working in autonomous groups of varying sizes, working to build group-to-group connections that work independently, and are controlled by terms totally independent of administrative and policymaker regulation.
Oh wait...
Newsflash: The Internet is a series of (mostly) privately-owned and privately-operated tubes. Keep your regulations off my tubes. If I want to purchase services from a provider available to me that prioritizes YouTube and Netflix over Torrent traffic, why the heck shouldn't I be able to?
Re:He's right (Score:4, Interesting)
More to the point, if it still runs on the same copper, fiber, wireless infrastructure, satellites and so forth that the current Internet does, then it's still just as vulnerable. You can do some things like create a large-scale VPN of some kind, but at the end of the day you're still going to be vulnerable to at least liberal of QoS traffic shaping, not to mention that you'll still have to have some sort of certificate authorities that are centralized.
I love his old school mentality... but (Score:5, Interesting)
Good fucking luck with that.
If you want to create something revolutionary, create a store and forward message system that can run on mobile devices and can transfer messages via bluetooth. It's akin to carrier pigeon, but it might actually work.
What we are doing now is tunneling INSIDE the corporate controlled networks to evade detection. Tor, old IPSEC tricks, encrypted BT - all these are methods of moving data around while avoiding the perception to the sniffing devices that data is being moved around, or at least what the data is. The idea that somehow there will be again some network of the people by the people is just a little too HAM radio modemish for me, despite the fact it can work technically.
Re:He's right (Score:5, Interesting)
plus you have to trust that a coalition of nodes on your non-internet doesn't form and start to control the direction of the network. And the likelihood of avoiding that is somewhere between 0 and never. At worst, the corporations would band together and make their own nodes, and make so many of them that the network became dependent on them. Or they'd just bribe the people who ran the nodes to run them the way the corporations want.
As long as humans are in control of a system in any way, those humans can be corrupted to bend the system to a large entity's will. That means that logically, the only way we can have a global information network that remains free and open is to have it designed, built, and run, entirely by machines.
Re:He's right (Score:5, Interesting)
First, law, as a concept, is morally neutral, but the rule of law where everyone is equal under the law, is unambiguously a good thing.
You claim that "IF" the law makes private interconnecting networks between two people without prior legal authorization, we will not be able to form a second Internet. What a huge If! Do you seriously think this will happen? Who would support such a law, and who would it benefit? What amazing logical leaps you make. If becomes when without explanation. In your final paragraph, you make the leap that your fever-dreams will certainly become reality, and if we want a free regulation, we will need to break the law. What a romantic and dashing freedom fighter you must imagine yourself to be. Too bad you have let the rich and powerful convince you to throw them into the briar patch of deregulation, and are thus fighting on the side opposing freedom.
Not necessarily (Score:5, Interesting)
Enter the Monkeysphere [monkeysphere.info], a project that leverages the GPG web of trust to build trust paths for secure browsing (among other uses). From the site: