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Rushkoff Proposes We Fork the Internet

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the left-or-right dept.

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."

33 of 487 comments (clear)

  1. I think by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think all you need is one of those cable splitter things.

    1. Re:I think by masterwit · · Score: 5, Funny

      Make sure you get the Monster Cable version, we want nice strong clean signal!

      --
      We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
    2. Re:I think by mugurel · · Score: 3, Funny

      For that matter, coat hangers will do just fine. http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/03/audiophiles-cant-tell-the-difference-between-monster-cable-and/

  2. He's right by Omnifarious · · 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.

    --
    Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
    1. Re:He's right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But the Internet was always "in the hands of policymakers". They funded its creation and have regulated its development.
      Don't let the fact that the telcos have gotten away with so much convince you that the Internet has hitherto been some kind of golden age Wild West of freedom.
      This is just more anti-net neutrality FUD.

    2. Re:He's right by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, 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.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    3. Re:He's right by DigiShaman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Never underestimate the power of *Law*, or the overthrow of it. Creating a forked Internet either from the existing one, or from the ground up will do you no good if law has been legislated to address the citizen directly.

      In other words, if governments around the world preemptively legislate that under no circumstances may a private inter-connecting network between two people or organizations be established without prior legal authorizations...well, kiss that idea good bye.

      If you want your forked internet free from regulation, get ready to break the future law and live a rebel underground. Good luck with that!

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    4. Re:He's right by spun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Don't be stupid, we shouldn't give the Internet to policymakers, who are, after all, just tools of the rich. We should cut out the middleman and give it right to the rich.

      As with all debates about regulations, the rich and powerful would like us to think that we have two choices: regulations they will control and thus get what they want, or no regulations, which means they get what they want. They want us to think we can't win. They want us to feel that our best weapon for controlling their abuses, government regulation (otherwise known as "the rule of law"), is a tool they control. But they only control it if we let them. Regulations are like guns, useful and morally neutral tools, but dangerous in the hands of the uninformed or evil. Well, the rich and powerful can pry regulations from my cold, dead hands.

      To mix a metaphor, I am not going to throw the rich into the briar patch of deregulation, that is exactly what they want.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    5. Re:He's right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But the Internet was always "in the hands of policymakers". They funded its creation and have regulated its development.

      Not really. Before the mid 1990s, "policymakers" was mostly Jon Postel (a single person "ran" the Internet more efficiently than ICANN and its bureaucracy). Getting routable addresses was just a matter of asking for them, and anyone with sufficient competency was able to get a SLIP line up and running on a reasonable budget. The only "regulated" central point of failure was name resolution, and that's a service that runs on top of the Internet, not part of the Internet. There really was a "golden age Wild West of freedom"; just because you didn't experience it doesn't make it any less real to those of us who had "internet" before you were born.

      If you think the government will somehow make the Internet more "fair", then you are a fool. The very fact that they acquired regulatory power illegally (without any legal Constitutional or legislative authority to do so) demonstrates despotism on their part. At least with private corporations, you can choose a competitor.

      The best parts of the Internet exist in spite of government, not because of it. The best that can be hoped for its future is benign neglect. The power of the FCC should be limited to open air RF propagation. It is already a tyrannical organization that oversteps its power and limits freedom in a variety of ways, and there is nothing about its recent actions that suggest any goals otherwise. This is nothing but a power grab in the name of a mythical "net neutrality" that has never been and can never be.

    6. Re:He's right by shadowfaxcrx · · Score: 4, 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.

      --
      "I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
    7. Re:He's right by spun · · Score: 4, 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.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    8. Re:He's right by EdIII · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That would never work by itself.

      You are speaking of Mesh networking which is absolutely the way to go to help create a truly anonymous infrastructure beyond the controls that we so despise right now. However, you can't link Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix with Mesh networking. You also cannot get around the fact that the pipes need to be quite large between high density areas.

      Businesses and data centers could never operate on a Mesh network either. They will still need to operate the way they do now, which is actually fine. We let the telcos operate their networks with the peering and transit agreements that allow packets from Los Angeles to make it all the way through the desert to Las Vegas.

      What we need do to is get the city and communities to use their collective bargaining power and operate wireless POPs throughout the city and rural areas. Let the Mesh network attach to those POPs as needed. This would get us our anonymous infrastructure free of controls and still have the enormous bandwidth available to link our populations effectively.

      What needs to be stopped above all else are the ISPs selling customers bundled packages of bullshit when we could just as easily be getting all those services online and not attached to a physical address someplace.

      Of course none of this will happen because we need to be watched and controlled to be safe. Part of that of course is allowing corporations to butt rape us.

    9. Re:He's right by 1s44c · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ahhh, bullshit. We choose our government also. Even if only by being so compliant. We have crappy products and crappy politicians for no other reason that we enable it for the god of convenience.

      You don't choose your government. You get a choice between a few bad options every few years to create the illusion of choice.

  3. No account for reality.... by KiwiGod · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:No account for reality.... by Omnifarious · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      You underestimate people. First, the 'sheep' argument, even in the veiled form you give it, is a cynical and lazy cop-out. Out there, somewhere, is likely a group of people who similarly think you're a sheep because you don't question some choice you make that they think is bad. But you aren't. If you learned about it, you might agree or disagree with them, but it's just a matter of learning about it.

      Secondly, most people don't actually like being told what to do. They may not always understand how they're following orders, but they usually get pretty upset once they realize they're doing it. You talk to most people, and most of them are generally irritated by the various ways in which they feel they're supposed to be 'following orders'. Perceptions of those orders and their source varies widely, but almost nobody likes to think they just follow them blindly.

      So, as I said, I think you severely underestimate people. And I think you're doing it because you don't want to do the hard work you would feel compelled to do if you didn't have such a negative and pessimistic opinion. Pessimists are right much more frequently than optimists, and that's because pessimism is a fundamentally lazy outlook.

      --
      Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
    2. Re:No account for reality.... by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You are speaking in generalities. Look at what has actually happened on the Internet over time: usenet was driven out by moderated web boards. Home pages were driven out by Facebook. Decentralized email is being driven out by a small handful of huge webmail providers. Now, even the idea of general-purpose computing is being driven out by handhelds and tablets that only run software from a manufacturer-approved "app store."

    3. Re:No account for reality.... by shadowfaxcrx · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, I came in here to say this. Glad you already did.

      The sad fact is that 95% or more of the public doesn't give a damn if a corporation influences the internet. As long as they can still get their porn and play Farmville, they're happy. Those of us who understand what's actually at stake with net neutrality are in the vast minority, and everyone else is being inundated with messages from the corporation about how terrible it would be if they weren't allowed to shit all over the net. Those people won't care about net neutrality until they start having to pay $15/day in data fees to get new sheep in Farmville, and by then it'll be too late. We're long past the days when the government actually breaks up monopolies, and so unlike what happened when Bell Telephone got to big for the public's good, the few major companies who control the internet will be allowed to retain that control.

      And if someone, once people realize how screwed they are, starts making this new-internet-that's-not-the-internet, the companies will suddenly make Farmville data and 30 minutes per day of porn data-charge-free, and all the people who were pissed off will be placated, leaving once again only those of us who pay attention to what's going on, and again, there aren't enough of us to build the uncorruptable network of our dreams.

      --
      "I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
    4. Re:No account for reality.... by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are speaking in generalities. Look at what has actually happened on the Internet over time: usenet was driven out by moderated web boards. Home pages were driven out by Facebook. Decentralized email is being driven out by a small handful of huge webmail providers. Now, even the idea of general-purpose computing is being driven out by handhelds and tablets that only run software from a manufacturer-approved "app store."

      Usenet wasn't driven out over by one web board, it was driven out by millions of them so it's still distributed. Usenet failed because it had no effective means of dealing with spam and the decline was rapid because everyone had access to the web, usenet server access and quality varied greatly. And that instead of making two web boards and let popularity decide, you had many flamewars and again no one to settle them. And the role of sharing binaries has been taken over by P2P which is definitively distributed.

      As for home pages being taken over by Facebook, most people didn't operate their own hosting service to begin with (hello Geocities) but I'll agree this has been centralized. But for the privacy nuts out there, how many of you had a working login system for your friends so you could share something just with them and not the whole world? Or to interact with one person in particular? If you talk about losing privacy, then home pages and public blogs were getting up on the podium and blasting it out over a megaphone for google to index. Home pages covered not even 1/10th of the uses Facebook has.

      Regarding webmail, well the ISPs asked for it. If want wanted to change ISP - or had to change ISP as you moved, you had to take the hassle of changing email address and notifying lots of people and update all contact information everywhere and still there'd be people you can't reach or pay just to keep it active. Plus very, very often I couldn't send mail from anywhere else, like say at work or a web cafe or whatever as "relaying was denied". Which meant that everywhere you want, you had to get some local account to send mail. And no IMAP service so you couldn't just peek at it. There were so insanely many good reasons not to use it, I can't even begin to count.

      Finally regarding locked down devices, even as "general" as the iPhone and pretty much everything else with a CPU is I consider it more of an appliance. It has some need-to-have functions (shame on the alarm clock) and nice-to-have functions (playing Angry Birds) but I'm not killed over the fact that it doesn't do everything. Not really much more than that I have a Wii that only runs what Nintendo wants (I haven't done any homebrew) anyway, it's not like this debate is new. I have my general purpose computing device in a PC running Linux. I know I could probably get one in a mobile form factor too, if I wanted. But in my day-to-day life, an appliance does the job just fine.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  4. In Soviet Russia, Internet Forks You by NitzJaaron · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."

  5. Just host IPv6 Net2 host servers by WillAffleckUW · · 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.

    --
    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  6. N00bs by RealSurreal · · Score: 4, Funny

    I've been telling people to fork off the internet for years

  7. I have an idea... by Etcetera · · Score: 3, 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?

    --
    Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
    1. Re:I have an idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

      90% or more of us live in areas where other providers are not an option.
      Even if there were multiple providers, I doubt you could find one who wasn't forced to prioritize traffic.

    2. Re:I have an idea... by Omnifarious · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

      The problem is when that's the ONLY Internet you can realistically get. And given the monopolistic nature of Internet access, that's the likely outcome here.

      --
      Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
    3. Re:I have an idea... by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Newsflash:
      1. not everyone has a choice between providers.
      2. even with different providers, sometimes they themselves have to go through one of the big one, which filters even those connections.

    4. Re:I have an idea... by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

      What happens when the only provider in your area is one who prioritizes Torrent Traffic over Netflix and Youtube?

      Try to see it from everyone elses perspective - when you've only got 1 or 2 choices, there is no real choice. If both of them choose to prioritize traffic, against your interests, you are left with no alternatives. Too bad, so sad, a neutral net was fun while it lasted? Why are we having such trouble keeping it that way?

      If you are going to retort with some statement proclaiming the positives of Capitalism, this is one situation where a Free Market doesn't apply: it is virtually impossible for anyone to produce a competing product: They've monopolized the net. They own the wires. Which wasn't even built by them, it was built with taxpayer money. They paid a pultry sum, assumed control, and avoid spending any money to upgrade it and instead gouge customers.

      No really, do you think this would be an issue if everything worked the way you are envisioning it through your rose coloured glasses? If I could just start up an ISP with no traffic shaping, shifting, blocking, prioritizing, etc etc - I would make a TON of money from all the people willing to buy that service, more than half of Slashdot viewers I'm sure.

      The problem is - that's not possible. Even if I went and managed to set up this giant multinational organization with buildings all across the globe housing tons of servers, I can't just "plug myself into" the net. I'd still have to run through the backbones of giants like Comcast and their rules will always apply to their equipment.

  8. I love his old school mentality... but by GPLDAN · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:How about NO by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  10. Don't overestimate people by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  11. Unfair competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  12. The problem is the Monopolies that are forming. by John+Sokol · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  13. It's illegal by Nivex · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  14. Not necessarily by sunbird · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Well, how about we move away from certificate authorities. Impossible, you say? Not so.

    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:

    When you direct the browser to an https site using the Monkeysphere plugin and validation agent, if the certificate presented by the site does not pass the default browser validation (using standard, hierarchical X.509), the certificate and site URL are passed to the validation agent. The agent then checks the public keyservers for keys with UIDs matching the site url (e.g. https://zimmermann.mayfirst.org./ If there is a trust path to that key, according to your own OpenPGP trust designations, the certificate is considered valid, and a browser 'security exception' is put in place to allow connections to the site.