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O'Reilly Media Asks: Is It Time To Build A New Internet? (oreilly.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article from O'Reilly Media's VP of content strategy:
It's high time to build the internet that we wanted all along: a network designed to respect privacy, a network designed to be secure, and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior. And a network with few barriers to entry -- in particular, the certainty of ISP extortion as new services pay to get into the "fast lane." Is it time to start over from scratch, with new protocols that were designed with security, privacy, and maybe even accountability in mind? Is it time to pull the plug on the abusive old internet, with its entrenched monopolistic carriers, its pervasive advertising, and its spam? Could we start over again?
That would be painful, but not impossible... In his deliciously weird novel Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow writes about an alternative network built from open WiFi access points. It sounds similar to Google's Project Fi, but built and maintained by a hacker underground. Could Doctorow's vision be our future backboneless backbone? A network of completely distributed municipal networks, with long haul segments over some public network, but with low-level protocols designed for security? We'd have to invent some new technology to build that new network, but that's already started.
The article cites the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer functionality everywhere from Bitcoin and Blockchain to the Beaker browser, the Federated Wiki, and even proposals for new file-sharing protocols like IPFS and Upspin. "Can we build a network that can't be monopolized by monopolists? Yes, we can..."
"It's time to build the network we want, and not just curse the network we have."
That would be painful, but not impossible... In his deliciously weird novel Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow writes about an alternative network built from open WiFi access points. It sounds similar to Google's Project Fi, but built and maintained by a hacker underground. Could Doctorow's vision be our future backboneless backbone? A network of completely distributed municipal networks, with long haul segments over some public network, but with low-level protocols designed for security? We'd have to invent some new technology to build that new network, but that's already started.
The article cites the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer functionality everywhere from Bitcoin and Blockchain to the Beaker browser, the Federated Wiki, and even proposals for new file-sharing protocols like IPFS and Upspin. "Can we build a network that can't be monopolized by monopolists? Yes, we can..."
"It's time to build the network we want, and not just curse the network we have."
Building new infrastructure doesn't fix the trolling/abuse issues: those are governance and I'm not sure how you fix that kind of issue without adding MORE oversight instead of reducing it as the article suggests.
The other issue is that infrastructure costs big bucks.
- Think interstate haulage, inter-country haulage.
- Wifi uses shared spectrum and just won't scale to the size we need for the most common applications these days. You see this in local free nets now & even in over-subscribed public networks.
- Additionally security requires additional bandwidth and compute. The compute is inexpensive these days, but the article is suggesting lower bandwidth infrastructure: there's going to be a collision of requirements.
The last line of the article shows the depth of ignorance: 56K modems require serious telco infrastructure to terminate the calls: a 56K modem essentially can't be used by hackers unless they terminate to a telco. the best non-telco analogue speed you can expect is 33K.
The Internet is almost perfect. Restoring the Internet to a network of PEERS would make it perfect. Currently most credible path forward is continued deployment of IPv6.
Remainder of authors concerns can be fully addressed by a robust implementation of RFC3514.
As a term of art "privacy" was getting to be too much of a polyseme, so it was downgraded to a "reason for rather than a kind of security" in RFC4949.
"Anonymity" as a term of art does not exclude an unmasking ability... the loosest form of the word may be used to describe a system that only protects association of an alias with an identity by uninvolved third parties (termed "identity protection" in some protocols), and the involved third parties are allowed to include, for example, a court that may ask for an unmasking. Just saying "anonymous" is rarely going to be specific enough... an actual explanation of the parameters is needed.
So for example, if you communicate with a website "anonymously" but the website can tell you are the same person that communicated with them yesterday, that is technically "anonymous." You cannot have any meaningful form of authentication if you are using a definition of "anonymous" that prevents communicating parties from knowing they are talking to who they intend to be talking to. About all you can do in that case is provide completely public services.
"Accountability" is an essential component of a lot of services we take for granted, especially "non-repudiation" which is essential for securing business and legal transactions. Accountability involves agreeing to some rules of behavior, which are specific to the service in question.
TFA is pretty meaningless to throw such terms out there without defining the terms and parameters, and shouting about what they mean is meaningless as a result.
Someone had to do it.