Slashdot Mirror
Rushkoff Proposes We Fork the Internet
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."
I think all you need is one of those cable splitter things.
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.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This might (slim chance, mind you) approach the realm of sane if we assumed that people actually wanted to learn how to do something, instead of the popular approach of "I just want it to work." There appears to be no concept of costs, the eventual degrade of such a system due to human nature, etc. No matter how you start a system like this, you're going to end up with a governing body at some point. People want order, they want to be told what to do, and there's always people that are willing... and on rare occasion capable of doing such.
Macs, Linux, Windows... who cares, they all suck at something.
I agree with the idea, in theory, but it's not like we can just up and start a "new internet" from scratch easily. The infrastructure would be a massive undertaking... decisions about whether to reuse old protocols or create new ones would have to be decided... hardware support would need to be dealt with... And at some point, because it's bound to happen, some government(s) are going to want to step in and ruin the work all over again. I'm hopeful about the future of net neutrality by a simple line from Serenity: "You can't stop the signal, Mal."
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I've been telling people to fork off the internet for years
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?
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
oh bull. we ran ARPA*NET on telephone wires and 110 baud modems with RAM and disk that make your iPods look HUGE.
What infrastructure do you mean?
The average household in America or the EU has more computing power than all the servers and workstations and mainframes we had when HTTP first became important.
You're just lazy.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Ad hominem ignored, when I said infrastructure I meant everything. Pipes, computers, nodes, the whole thing. ARPA didn't have to deal with millions and millions of devices. It had hundreds, if even that. Technology was a lot less refined then. We learned great lessons from it and a lot of what created it was put directly into what the internet is today.
You're comparing a bag of rocks to the Burj Dubai.
His solution is to bring back FidoNet (popular on the Amiga!) and other BBS solutions (I just KNEW UUCP wasn't dead!) or overlap WiMax or some part of the spectrum and put something akin to IPv4 or 6 on top of it.
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.
Forking would only empower the mega-corps to invest in the locked down interwebs, while letting the free internet rot away into nothingness.
That depends upon what one means by forking. Several projects (like theconnective.net) aim to replace the last mile of the internet with community and cooperatively owned networks and allow those networks to interoperate and bargain collectively with core network operators. That is to say, if instead of Comcast or AT&T as your choices for home high speed internet, you could go with the city or county or community run mesh network which, in turn, buys a big pipe or two from whoever offers them not only the best price but also the least limitation, then there is little ability to mess with net neutrality, especially if a large number of these start making demands as a group or boycotting your service. It would be like trying to dictate to Comcast now.
The hard part is threefold, getting enough momentum behind it, overcoming the halo effects of TV and wires phone service, and keeping it from being outlawed by crooked politicians. I'm already part of one of the largest community wireless mesh projects in the country, but it needs to go a lot further. It needs organizers and people to show communities how to do it, technologically and politically, and to help organize.
Let the umm surfer unite?
You are wrong on most of your arguments. Take the xray scanners at the airports. They "randomly" send people to get xrayed, doing them no good, yet, 95%+ just go along with it. They don't care how they work. They don't care how much damage those devices are causing or could be causing. They don't care that their risk of dying from the scanner is higher than from a terrorist blowing up the plane (based on government's own numbers!). They don't care....
So I say, do not overestimate people.
How many stories do I have to find where municipalities decided they had waited long enough and started to roll out their own fiber-to-the-home networks, only to be hit by a lawsuit from one of the Big Companies citing unfair competition? You have to be a Business (written with a capital) in order to do anything that a Business Might Ever Do or else it's unfair competition.
Natural Monopolies of network service providers.
Network communication is a vast and popular societal service, almost everyone uses it, and yet it is dominated on the consumer-end by Natural Monopolies. Coming-up with an idea that can not only compete with net discrimination, but also the natural monopolies created by physical lines, would be quite a feat. For the same reasons roads aren't owned by companies, network lines shouldn't either.
Major network mediums should be owned and controlled by the state/federal governments in the same way roads typically are, then service providers would sell their services over that medium like cab drivers, to extend the road analogy. If the comcasts of the world didn't own the lines, there would be some tough questions that would need answers, but open-market competition would be a viable and most likely excellent solution to the problem. Net Neutrality would become a selling-point of providers, and if it truley was superior to Net Discrimination, then it would thrive in a fair market.
As a knowledgeable community of technical experts (slash-dotters), it is in-fact our responsibility to push forward these ideas. If technically inclined and concerned members of our society like us don't take action to correct this chronic and looming problem, who will... I believe the real solution to this problem is for us to get proactive about "socializing" communication lines. I understand "socializing" has a negative connotation for most, due to it's implied link to socialism. Yet, if you evaluate my argument, you will notice it is actually an argument FOR capitalism. The problem is a break-down of capitalism in disguise. Capitalism can solve this problem if governments did their jobs properly and broke-up monopolistic tendencies by ensuring fair markets of exchange. To do that, governments need to erect and own the physical medium, just as they do with roads. WE, as concerned and knowledgeable member of society need to influence our governmental bodies to do so. THAT, is the solution.
A solid and simple start would be for people to write their local representatives regarding this issue.
Most of you don't know the history, and are therefor doomed to repeat it.
For much of my life I have spent fighting the Ma Bell / AT&T monopoly. From the monopolistic control over Unix to all long distance services, to hicap pipes.
It wasn't until there breakup in the 80's that direct physical connection of modems was even allowed on to the phone networks.
Well we are down to the last few companies controlling the last mile, and many of the backbones. Legislation will just further this till we are all locked down to a few Internet services and the rest will be squeezed out or severely hampered.
IP TV and Cable TV over IP will be the largest changes coming. And companies like Cox and AT&T find themselves in a conflict of Interest.
Providing last mile Internet while at the same time watching it eat away at their cash cow, cable TV.
I think we can provide a VPN like tunneling service across the public Internet over to a private network. Most corporations already do this for their employees.
Getting that last mile has always been the hard part.
We could then make this private network host content only available on that network, but would anyone want too?
I mean if you are going to invest in a web server you'd want it to be accessible to as many users as possible.
Still I have some ideas I may be willing to discuss with an NDA.
For an interesting read checkout my ecip.com
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
This sounds like a great idea! A couple years ago I tried to get some people interested in building a community network based on some of the concepts from the Wellington Internet eXchange. Nobody wanted to touch it.
As soon as the people try to flex their muscle, they are immediately shouted down by the corporations. The laws in the USA have become structured such that corporations have all the power and the people have none. Just ask the citizens of Philadelphia, PA or Wilson, NC.
Both of these cities, acting as agents of their citizens, were attacked by the corporations. In the case of Philly, they got squashed. Wilson's system is still alive, but not for the lack of effort on Time Warner's part. At one point TW had someone answering the phone for one of the congressmen the night before a vote. It was only thanks to the dedication of a small group of citizens, many of whom had to take off work to attend the oddly scheduled committee meetings, that the system is still online. We know that at any point TW will try again to scuttle it.
Create a self-forming mesh network device (preferably solar powered). It can use a wifi-like technology. This is important for true democratic freedoms. Its power is not controlled by a central service. There is no central router to control access. All it requires is a little bit of spectrum. This is where all the tv spectrum should have gone in the US, to the people, not the corporations. I've been too lazy to do this myself, but have been thinking about it for a while. A few inconveniences in rural areas, but all can be over come. Our government paid ridiculous sums of money so that people could manage the digitial television switch just so that media wouldn't loose customers. Such a device would not cost much more and would be a statement for freedom and democracy because it would not be controllable.
That is the problem. The knowledgeable, intelligent minority can't effect change because the apathetic, easily-swayed majority is content to vote (or not vote) however the TV tells them to. Politicians will campaign on one platform and vote completely differently once they're elected - case in point, Obama, and I seem to remember the majority of Slashdot cheering him as the savior of the internet.
The point is, the political system can be gamed with relative ease by those already in power. American society has reached the point where you and I *can't* change the government through normal channels.
'The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost.
Once Congress and the commercial interests that fund Congress get involved (e.g., U.S. Chamber of Commerce), any hope of any manner of neutrality is lost to the money of lobbyists and special interests.
With the corporate takeover of the US Government how can anyone expect for net neutrality to survive once the lobbyists get involved?
It is no longer Republicans and Democrats, it is now individual citizens vs. corporate interests. And it looks like corporate interests have won. We no longer have a Republic. We no longer have a Democracy. We now have a kakistocracy run by corporate interests.
Enter the Monkeysphere, a project that leverages the GPG web of trust to build trust paths for secure browsing (among other uses). From the site:
The underlying system itself may still work, despite the rampant corruption, but I wouldn't say "no one" is putting energy into it. I know many people who do their bit, try to educate their friends, vote smart, write their congressmen and senators. How can you say they're the reason the system is failing?
The system is failing because there aren't *enough people* putting energy into it. The few who do aren't enough to outweigh the many who don't, and that's the problem.
Unless something seriously changes, I don't think there will ever be enough concerned citizens to make it work.
http://www.xkcd.com/841/
(esp. the alt text.)
This point cannot be made too often. Most supposed democracies are oligarchies ruled by a power elite who use elections as a PR tactic.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org