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Can There Be a Non-US Internet?
Daniel_Stuckey writes "After discovering that the US government has been invading the privacy of not just Americans, but also Brazilians, Brazil is showing its teeth. The country responded to the spying revelations by declaring it'll just have to create its own internet. In reality, although Brazil President Dilma Rousseff is none too happy with the NSA's sketchy surveillance practices, Brazil and other up-and-coming economies have been pushing to shift the power dynamics of the World Wide Web away from a US-centric model for years."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5tZMDBXTRQ
How about the entire world.
While it should be relatively simple for any country to set up its own DNS servers, interesting services and so on; the sheer amount of 'information' that is hosted in the US would make any 'internet' experience without it severely lacking.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
The day may be approaching when some countries will have their own DNS roots and root servers. That's been threatened before, but now it's more likely to happen.
anything can be non-us based
what's stopping them from building an internet 2.0 stack? financial resources, technical ingenuity and will power are all that is needed
There is no way to defend an undersea cable from the submarine that will be splicing into it far out to sea after a ship accidently drags their anchor across it close to shore.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The only thing unique about the United States is the resources. That is what is so sad about this: the entire idea of "American Exceptionalism" is the notion that the United States stands alone as a country; Unique in it's respect for freedom and human rights. The NSA's violation of every honor code existing in TCP/IP has demonstrated the United States to be equally mediocre as any other country, where virtue and abuse of power are concerned.
Once you lose your credibility you can never get it back. Its actions have left the entire internet community in search for new social & technological methods for enforcing these basic tenets of privacy that were previously easy to support via a fragile honor system: the United States promised to not be a dick and molest other people's cake as it got passed to the left.
Short of a new network protocol you might have issues getting the IP blocks for international routing. The only way I can see it happening is during the migration to IPv6 and only if either the world unanimously votes to start their own equivalent of IANA allows current non-US blocks to remain allocated without paying a second time (perhaps simply paying their next renewal fee to the Internationalized replacement to 'port over') and formally choosing to disconnect from the US portion of the internet in order to avoid any segmentation caused by US routing tables disagreeing on IPv6 address ownership.
Personally however I think skipping over IPv6 and adding some 'forwards compatible' region address blocks to the protocol to better handle future networking needs (notably for offering an easier way to avoid 'namespace pollution' by seperating the networks into regions based off a numerical 'country id', and perhaps eventually even a 'celestial body' id would go a long ways towards avoiding another IPv4 style migration when we begin approaching the new networks limitations in what will probably turn out to be the forseeable future.)
Fundamentally the reason that the internet is US centric is partially the fact that ICANN is located in the US, but mostly because the most used services are based in the US. To create a truly non US-centric model you would have to relocate ICANN and come up with significant competitors to people like Google etc who have no US presence(once they have a US presence they're subject to all the same laws that allow the NSA to spy on you in the first place).
You could technically achieve this, but the countries which could be candidates for replacing the US in this position are not Brazil and would also spy on traffic. So unless this is yet another pissing match where idiots go in with the slogan "Anyone but the US", making the internet non US centric is a gigantic waste of everyone's time and money. I mean does anyone seriously believe that if Chinese companies displaced the US ones that China wouldn't spy on everyone, or that the Europeans wouldn't either also spy or allow the NSA to spy?
Does the Tin Man have a sheet metal cock?
Over years the NSA has seen, predicted and pre positioned the US to always be at the forefront of any emerging export grade telco standards or code.
That global US backed standard infrastructure was invested into by many countries on good faith with 'private/public' hard currency loans with real interest rates.
The US and UK baited countries with speed, trade deals, low costs, crime fighting laws to ensure global uptake.
What can be done? Reconfigure all public and private core gov networking? No more wireless, on site staff or wired links. Water, gas, electrical, public/private medical billing, emergency services, transportation, police/jail/legal/gov... everything that a skilled outside spy agency 'needs' to track domestic patterns and target individuals.
Such an air gapped national system running domestic code would suggest to the US needs CIA/special forces teams 'on site' for long term database entry in the future.
An epic nation building boondoggle for domestic hardware supplies, skilled coders, telcos, engineers and private security firms.
The most important aspect the US seemed to have wanted to shape was standards of crypto, OS and database backends per nation. To be decoded and readable from the USA as needed with limited US or local staff 'knowing'.
So you need your own file system, own OS, own database, own crypto and understanding that all wider national and international networks are a constant threat.
Is your country any safer from the NSA and CIA/special forces teams on the ground than say the Soviet Union was? No, but the per site cost just went way up.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This isn't really a technical issue. Of course a non-US "Internet" can exist - at heart the internet is just a huge network of computers.
The real issue is content. What exactly would a Brazilian internet offer that would interest people in Sweden, the UK or Japan? Or for that matter, people in Brazil?
The US isn't just the predominant force on the internet for technical reasons, although they certainly help. The US probably have the world's largest group of creative people, and the websites and services they create are in English, the only real international language right now.
Big business has such a grip on popular web sites and services that it's easy to forget that many of the most popular sites today were started by a handful of people who had a good idea - like Google, Facebook and Yahoo.
Without good content and services, a non-US internet wouldn't get any visitors - it would be greatly reduced in value from what we have today. It's not impossible - the ability of other countries to ignore US software patents would be extremely useful - but it would take a number of years for the alternative internet to reach the level of usefulness that we have today. Is there enough incentive for companies and people to rebuild the internet from scratch?
...as if the United States was the first, last, and only country to hold a government that spies on its own citizens in some way?
Are we really THAT naive to think that A) the United States invented this concept, and B) no other government thought to do it too?
It's mentalities like this that shock me more than anything Snowden could reveal. I find mass ignorance far more alarming, as it tends to hint as to what governments are yet capable of doing to you. To all of us. While the deaf and blind vote for it.
We were ignorant enough to pay for and allow a program like PRISM to come to fruition. Sitting back assuming that no other country has a similar or same capability is like assuming no one masturbates because people don't talk about it.
It wasn't all that long ago that most stories about internet freedom covered the abuses of North Korea, China, and the Islamic Republics. Of course there were always a few comments, usually from our brave AC's, who claimed the US did the same but was better at hiding it. Bless all the slashdot anonymous cowards, keep up the good work.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
In reality, although Brazil President Dilma Rousseff is none too happy with the NSA's sketchy surveillance practices
In reality, getting a 'non-USA' internet won't do anything to stop the NSA. What difference does it make who gives out DNS names and IP addresses? (because that's what they mean when they say non-USA internet).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The US, over the coming decade(s), will maneuver itself into insignificance, what with the deplorable state its infrastructure is in, its surveillance state, its ridiculous and money-devouring War on Terror, the antipathy its permanent and futile interventionist wars in developing countries. Already now, practically 100% of the start-ups I see with cool new stuff are not US American anymore. They are European, mostly. As a South African singer put it, a few years ago: "The sun is going down over America".
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Say, PHP&MySQL were not made in the USA.
That is not what they declared, building local cloud, secure email services and infrastructure is different from "creating it's own internet" and I never heard this wording here, only in "international" press. The big difference is that when someone talk like that it gives the idea that it will be separated from the rest of the internet. That is not what the Brazilian government is proposing.
The national constitution (I'm Brazilian) states that the State has to provide the basic rights that are not met otherwise (if you can't buy water the State has to provide it, there is free medical care, the best universities are free, etc). Since private communications are a basic right (our constitutuion and the universal declaration of human rights), they are planning to offer alternatives for people who care.
Honestly, to force local clouds seems like a double win. On one hand you make companies accountable for our citizens rights, on the other hand - the one I think is the main point here - it creates investments, infrastructure, brings technology and high tech jobs. The cables to Europe are a need, our internet sucks. I hope they make some cables to China and Russia too, as online gaming is better over there.
But mainly, there is no censorship here, Brazilians will not be separated from the internet and nobody in the country thinks that even a possibility. Specially since this government is the one that fought against censorship in the past, you know, during the US created military dictatorship from 64 to 86/90.
Pssst,
Ever heard about China?
The Internet as we know it was invented in CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. The invention was released into the public domain by the CERN administration. That is why we have the WWW Internet.
Otherwise we would have several Internets: a Microsoft Internet, Apple Internet, IBM Internet, etc.
Geneva is an international city and the CERN is an international project.
It's not the Internet without the USA. Sure, take and do what you want, filter all and so forth, but once you disconnect the USA, in its entirety, from your little country's network then it is not the Internet. I am not saying this to condone or damn NSA surveillance; I am just stating the facts.
Hypocrisy, Latin style.
As if Brazil's spy agencies weren't using the Web to spy on other countries.
The WWW has been around for at least 20 years. Other countries have had plenty of opportunities to create amazing websites, internet service etc. While there are all kinds of great English-language websites in other countries (like the BBC), well over 80% of popular English-language internet sites were created by US people and companies.
So we can pretend that everybody else in the world is suddenly going to get creative and entrepreneurial, but they have already had 20 years to do it. Why would anything change now? If the US internet went dark, almost nobody would know how to find an alternate search engine, and everyone would be clamoring for their Facebook fix ...
Disclaimer: I am not from the USA and I dislike the internet being so US-centric, but it is what it is - I'm not about to start denying reality. Mod me into oblivion if you so wish.
Because the NSA is still going to p0wn your routers. And find a way to get the data home. Done.
The internet as we know it today was built out of a lot of national networks connecting into the US one. Initially charges for data transfer between such networks were very high so servers like mirror.aarnet.edu.au were set up to mirror popular content from other networks - in that case from outside of the Australian network AARNET. That address still has a mirror of a lot of popular content - now available with that newfangled http :)
Amazon's actually using the namespace partly because the publishing world has lots of weird national boundaries - a given book might be published in the US but not yet available in the UK because UK publishing rights haven't been sold to a UK publisher yet, or the UK edition may have different text, title, or cover - and they use the namespace to help keep that isolated.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The most common reasons governments want to have non-US "internet governance" these days are that they want to restrict free speech and free reading by their citizens, or restrict some kinds of commerce by their citizens (US restricts gambling, drugs, etc.) There are other issues; most governments used to have telecom monopolies, either state-run or quasi-nationalized, though the 90s liberalized much of that away. Some governments would like more money to stay in their countries, or keep people from buying goods online that are heavily taxed locally.
It really irks me when international groups get together to talk about internet policy, and advertise their shindig as being about "ending the digital divide" or "providing connectivity to Africa" or other noble-sounding goals, but actually devote most of their agenda to governments wanting censorship. These days, of course, the NSA is giving them a good excuse to want internet governance so they can do their own wiretapping in case the NSA isn't sharing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Gitcher own Al Gore!
Table-ized A.I.
"You cannot build The Planetary Datalinks here. The US have already completed this project."
And now they get to spy on everyone else for the rest of the game.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Which Brazilian websites would you visit?
Which search engine would you use? Which webmail service? What site would you watch videos on?
If there are no adequate alternatives for the most popular websites, then any talk of a non-US internet is hypothetical, because no normal users will be interested in the "Brazilnet".
Just use (better) encryption and they can analyse my traffic until they are blue in the face.
There are way more Internet users outside of the US many of them with faster Internet at cheaper rates. The two biggest Internet exchanges are in Frankfurt (DE-CIX) and Amsterdam (AMS-IX) and in terms of traffic peaks and traffic transfers they leave the US as a tiny dot in their rear-view mirror. The biggest e-commerce market in the world when measured by the amount spent per capita? The UK, in 2010. The e-commerce market in absolute numbers in China will at least equal but probably surpass the US in 2013. And that's only one of the BRIC countries. Now add Japan (Rakuten) and Europe and it's easy to see that the Internet is global and definitely not US centric. Anyone who thinks that follies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram make up the majority of the Intertubes is probably American, thinks Fox News tells the truth and has never left his/her country :-) The same goes for those fine optical cables transporting all those cat videos. Most cables are not owned by US companies. And most cables are not even near the US. US companies may lease fibre in those cables but that's not the same. Have a look at all submarine cables here: http://submarine-cable-map-2013.telegeography.com/ Building your own Internet is a matter of finding the cash, hiring one of those cable ships and put your cable between point A and B. Next thing you will do is hook it up to an Internet exchange at which point it will start to transport traffic from the US (the NSA, cat videos) and to the US (the NSA backup, when posting, tweeting, tumblering and instagramming about those cat videos). The only place where the Internet is US centric is in regulatory control: ICANN. It's time ICANN got replaced by an extension of the IETF located outside of the US in a neutral place like Switzerland. ICANN can keep .com, and .mil but anything else should get transferred to the new organization. And no I will not hold my breath for that to happen any time soon.
Their own internet might simply mean "not connected or dependent upon" the current network, and in technical terms, it's quite practical.
Furthermore, with the continued erosion of the US economy into a non-producing one, the value of our participation is changing from supplier and consumer of useful things into primarily consumer of things. For countries that are not marketing to us, that can change the value proposition of being connected to us.
A very large number of US network users see the net as twitter, facebook, etc. These are not nodes of productivity. Loss of connectivity to those people wouldn't make much -- if any -- difference to, say, Brazil.
Don't think it can't happen. It might be an uphill battle for a while, but then again, perhaps not. There's a damn big world out there outside the borders of homeland stupidity.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
it is simply breaking the dominance where "stuff on the internet" means in 99% of all cases that stuff is in the US or at least under US jurisdiction
So Brazil will develop also his own OS, is own hardware, CPUs, routers, and firewalls? idiots. The bigger problem of all is reliance on Windows.
There have been enough of these headlines inferring that other countries want to fork the internet. That has never been said anywhere. The real plan is actually in the TFA, surrounded by the author's unsubstantiated FUD:
All of these are perfectly sensible if you can wrap your head around the concept that US isn't a belevolent dictator, it's more like an abusive stepfather. Would you like it if all your data was stored in China? How about if most of your international traffic was routed through Russia? No? So maybe now you're getting a hint where Brazil's attitude is coming from. They have the power to become more self-reliant, and that doesn't mean creating a different internet, it means having more control over its own resources while being connected to the plain old internet.
TL;DR: Stop the FUD.
the sheer amount of 'information' that is hosted in the US would make any 'internet' experience without it severely lacking.
Given that the national language of Brazil is portuguese I would be amazed if there is much US-based information available in that language. As a result I expect that the impact would be a lot less than you imagine. In addition, if they set it up well under an international mode I expect other countries will want to join.
Started thinking about this and the shopping list came out a lot like one you'd need for your own top to bottom security. Would it really be other governments however? I mean as a private, highly technical individual I'd rather (in order of preference)...
1) Set up my own standalone infrastructure (DNS, IPv6, PKI, CA, eBGP?) and have that counter signed by friends, family, colleagues and the gov of any country of which I'm a citizen.
2) Rely on the infrastructure of multiple trustworthy external entities, both private business and gov.
3) Rely on a single, hopefully trustworthy infrastructure provider (where I am ATM).
Regards, Phil
In general I don't think it would work to completely separate the network. But you could make it uneconomic for big businesses to have their servers out of country.
1. Make sure you have control of the major inputs and outputs of the network.
2. Monitor and limit bandwidth for major sites (defined in the law) going in and out of the country.
3. Create a permit and pay-scale to allow for big businesses to communicate on large scale outside of the country as needed. (Eg. Twitter, Google, Facebook all need outside input to make their full offering available, but mostly could act within country and save their bandwidth taxes)
4. Being inside the country means they have to follow the local laws or risk punishment.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
worldofends.com
It is perhaps ironic that the nations putting the most serious effort into a non-US-centric Internet have governments even less trustworthy than that of the US itself. Which is saying something, in light of the recent surveillance stuff, but it's no less true for that.
That will allow them to bypass most of the US snooping.
Tell that to the crew of the USS Jimmy Carter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_(SSN-23)
Therefore, especially when it comes to the internet, the USA ***is the only relevant body to consider***.
And, frankly, you're shit at it.
Yes, and either during its construction or within 3 months of completion, the US will be tapped into it, gathering every photon possible.
There already are non-US internets. Every country has it's own section of the "Internet". Most, like Thailand, have gateways through which all traffic in and out of the country must pass. Some, like Canada, don't care. Every country has it's own block of domain names, like *.co.th.
Oh yes, I fogot to mention another global factor: The bastards at the NSA. The NSA wiretaps the president of Brazil; Brazil does not wiretap Barack Obama.
Nobody is stopping them.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Dear USA,
Please keep your warmongering version of "help" to yourself.
Sincerly,
Signed: The Rest of the World
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_(network)
I'm Not Antisocial, I'm Just Not User Friendly
Why is it only the US who is capable of spying??? This proposed solution will do nothing but fuel ignorance.
Seems to be exactly what Obama has always stood for: destroying the USA. And with results like he's having with things like the Internet, seems he's getting what he wants.
You say "That is why there are different countries", but to me at least, the world is becoming less 'country oriented' and more 'groups of people, potentially separated by space' oriented. I don't know you or where you live, but it's probably nowhere near me. Regardless, I'm communicating with you right now. Remove one country the size of the US and the pool of people just got noticeably smaller.
All the more reason to not let one single country have so much influence.
Personally I'd prefer a world in which no country has much of any overarching influence anywhere. Hold the locals to local laws, alright. Hold the entire world to your local laws (hello Ohio, hello Kentucky), not so much. In that, the biggest problem remains the US government(s), and that needs to change. Instead it all but literally declared itself enlightened dictator of the internet, only to go on and once more prove itself not-so-enlightened instead.
Very sorry, but if push comes to shove we'll just have to learn to make do without those 310-odd million very nice people. At least until their government stops being such an ass. And making their government see the light (instead of declaring itself be the light) is indeed just the job for those 310-odd million people.
But honestly, suppose they do get disconnected from the rest of the 'net and they don't even notice, what are we wasting our attention to them for? Yes, things will change, possibly quite a lot. But even so, there will be plenty more people to connect with and have meaningful discussions with and gain deep insights from.
My biggest fear with the NSA revelations has always been exactly this.
Brazil will just set up the same spying infrastructure for themselves.
hosts.deny
ALL:ALL
hosts.allow
ALL: .br .cl (for example)
If it keeps Brazilians and Turkish hackers, griefers, and bots off my MMO's then yes, by all means, PLEASE make another internet!
I think it's a matter of whom would you like to have at your backdoor. If they build out with a US or a Chinese based infrastructure stack, we now know these are compromised from the beginning. However feasible, they would need to use home-grown telecom equipment ( which would undoubtably then have a Brazilian back door) . Any trans-Atlantic or Pacific fiber would still have to be suspect. NSA or GCHQ can still tap these at the other end (or even under the sea).
JANET existed before the WWW too. So I guess it belongs to the European Universities, then.
Its all going to be unusable here soon anyway. It almost is now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Iran has already done it. It has built an Intranet like network which connects to outside world through few gateways. The transition of the network users to the new Intranet is being done at the time being and will complete in year.
The main purpose is the:
1- Avoid the internal Iranian traffic to travel over the internet (i.e. unknown countries). ....
2- To control in/out traffic (deep packet inspection, control access to outsider websites, attack and spying control, allow access to Iran-only websites just from inside Iran, emergency kill switch).
3- Force Iranian organizations to host their website in Iranian data centers.
4- Save traffic costs.
5- Flourish local hosting and cloud business and local peering between ISPs.
Compel the US to review its surveillance policies by ejecting US companies. Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. having the ears of congressman. If their bottom lines are being hurt by this stuff, they'll lean on policymakers.
I think the language advantage the US-centric internet has is that English is a lingua franca, and Portuguese isn't.
Can bridge them!
I've been saying we should de-peer Brazil for years.
If I never have to see "huehuehue" in an online game, it'll be too soon.
Thank you. This deserves an upmod
And we could dump all this hippy TCP/IP crap and go back to proper ITU standards after all no one really needs competition for telephone service do they :-)
Would make tapping the oppositions phones easy so when the coup happens you can easily round them up for the helicopter trip (on way) round the bay.
Right now if there is some guy in Brazil that wants to download gigs of Russian porn, their data has to go through a limited set of cables. The data will have to go through Europe, then across the Atlantic, all the way down the Americas, and finally into the pervy Brazilian's machine. If Brazil actually has the resolve to put in their own transatlantic cable, a continent worth of traffic wont have to go through my locale and I can download my porn faster.
We should all encourage more links, not for snooping nonsense, but for better redundancy and speed.
I wonder how many Brazilians are going to install American tech in their homes programmed to watch and identify everyone who comes near it, listen to every word, and (once required to be, now just usually) connect to the Internet to phone home. How many Brazilians will pay for the privilege?
XBone. Enjoy your illusion of privacy.
Welcome to the world of consequences and fallout.
At first I thought this was a bad thing; mostly I tend to think of the U.S. custodial duties on the net as a positive thing. However let's look at this another way.
The net is supposed to be international. There has been some international agitation to devolve some of the administrative responsibilities to other countries. Now that I think about it, perhaps this could be a net benefit:
1). International disapproval of NSA spying may rein in the NSA a bit. The leopard won't change it's spots, I'm not naive. However if the US federal government starts to decide that the diplomatic price it's paying is too high, they may withdraw funding from the more aggressive spying activities;
2). Devolution of internet administration is probably a long-term inevitability, as both a political and cultural matter;
3). Non-US countries will probably see greater participation in those administrative functions as a vote of confidence in their abilities. They may have better buy-in and contribute more;
4). New perspectives and voices, so long as we don't hand over the keys to tyrants, is a long-term good.
This is not to criticize the current & past administrators. We have to acknowledge that they got us to where we are. The future though is largely growth in lesser-developed countries.
Even if the rest of the world did this, too many other countries (notably those part of FIVE EYES / FVEY) will simply share data back to the USA. Then, you have the problem that other countries such as China, Israel, Singapore, and Korea will simply do the same sort of surveillance as the USA is doing today. In fact, if you think those countries aren't already engaged in such activities, even if only to a smaller extent than the USA, you're living under a rock.
Brazillians are among the most annoying internet users on the planet. Nothing would make me happier than if they decided to segregate themselves from the rest of the internet.