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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."
Initially, yes.
But after a couple of years I don't think there would be that much of a difference.
As long as all the on-line commercial entities in that country were okay with never having any US business. Otherwise the NSA (and others) can demand access to their data in exchange for access to our markets.
And that isn't even considering the old spy standby of either getting one of your spies hired by them or offering one of their employees money to get you access.
The problems are not technological. They are human nature.
There are two methods: satellite based infrastructure, and fortifying undersea cables against submarines and anchors.
The problem with both of them is that they are both economically prohibitive. The NSA essentially found a Sorority that had an unlocked front door and got caught engaged in the most epic panty-raid in the history of unencrypted communications. End to end encryption is going to become the new norm, and stronger defenses against MITM & encryption back doors are going to become a requirement.
Study Cryptography kiddies, this is only the beginning of the arms race.
Other countries have done lots of these things in the past themselves. They stopped doing it because they couldn't afford it anymore; some time in the 1950's and 1960's, countries like France and Britain increasingly just picked up the phone and asked the US to clean up their messes; it was cheaper, simpler, and less risky. And why did the US do it? Because it was pretty easy for it to do so, and because it gives it great power. So, the rest of the Western world doesn't just say "OK", it says "yes, please".
This is a common misconception. The WWW is not merely stuff transmitted over TCP port 80 on the Internet. It's an information space that has the ability to use the Internet as a transport mechanism. It's not a subset of the Internet, it's a higher level abstraction than the Internet.
Anything addressable by URI is a node in the WWW. For instance, POTS telephone numbers are leaf nodes because you can address them with tel:. They are on the WWW but they aren't on the Internet. Something can be on the WWW and not on the Internet and vice-versa.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Once you lose your credibility you can never get it back.
Well, apparently you've proven this not to be the case, since you're crediting the US government with credibility, even though they started eugenics before the Nazis, built and stocked concentration camps for US citizens, re-invented the witch hunt with McCarthyism, and still continue to use McCarthyist accusations and false threat narratives against their own people to manufacture consent for war atrocities, and frequently wage other forms of socio-economic terrorism on everyone, including their own people, and have installed pervasive domestic spying apparatuses, multiple times, and even been caught red-handed doing so.
And, somehow, miraculously, in the mid 1990's they suddenly became credible enough to hold DNS roots? Somehow you imagine that only now they have lost credibility that can not be restored? I'm sorry, no. We've always needed a decentralized infrastructure that's not susceptible to censorship or centralization. That's why the Internet was built to be resilient from entire cities or countries disappearing off the map -- Packets routed around the holes in moments.
However, you foolish morons built "The Web" atop the Internet. You used a hierarchical naming tree instead of an associative hash based naming convention where the data itself could be requested regardless of name or endpoint address. You fill data silos with information, causing congestion at "servers" by funneling all those "client" connections into single places -- When in reality there is no such thing as a client or server at the traffic level: Just source and destination addresses. You espouse separating content from style and form, but can't get it through your thick heads you need to separate data from URIs in much the same way, for similar reasons.
Because there is a centralized name system corporations and governments can be gate keepers for any who would make data available online. Instead of connecting directly to the people's systems you want to stay up to date with you fill data silos with all your personal information and (private) correspondences, and trust the untrustworthy 3rd parties to hold your data for you -- despite the fact that your own home computer already had such information in it and could have served it to only those you trust directly.... It's not like public key cryptography doesn't exist, but you refuse to use it out of ignorance or apathy, then have the gall to complain only now... your demagoguery knows no bounds. Threaten to build a whole "non-us" Internet, when it is only the web that is US based... If only it weren't for the hierarchical naming system which ties data to IPs and host names, the people could be free from much censorship and spying -- Perhaps consider using a distributed hash table instead? Oh that's the "crazy" talk... Pffft, looks who's talking, fools.
The BBS era was an interesting experiment. Because the Internet was taking so long to get off the ground, common folks built their own Internet. We drew out maps of local calling areas and scheduled batches of data to transfer from node to node via store and forward. My first email was via Fidonet. Took 1 to 2 days to get a message from Texas to California if the route was timed just right. With an always online system like the Internet, instead of nightly BBS to BBS sync, suc