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."

Comments

Confusing wording/philosophy?

[Anonymous Coward]

"a network designed to respect privacy, a network designed to be secure, and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior."

Privacy, secure and... "controls on behavior"?

"designed with security, privacy, and maybe even accountability in mind?"

Again, it speaks of security, privacy and... accountability?

I'm not arguing against this as I don't understand what is meant. I simply want to understand how privacy can work together with that last thing they keep bringing up.

Re:Confusing wording/philosophy?

[skids]

Make your own wires and leave all the spies and rent seekers and thought police behind.

...and when you try to control the flood of criminal sploit traffic making those wires useless, you become the spy. ...and when you cannot afford to keep that wire working, you become the rent seeker. ...and when you decide you don't want your pipe used for something you find morally unconscionable, you become the thought police.

All I can say is, if the idea of a "new Internet" gets tried yet fucking again, there are plenty of technologies already available to implement it. Some of them are really well designed. Ignore them, because whoever implements it will select the worst of the bunch and/or roll their own amateur crap.

Reasonable to whom?

[BitterOak]

and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior.

Who gets to decide what controls are "reasonable"? What kind of "behavior" is to be controlled, and how?

Re:Reasonable to whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically IPV6 and end to end encryption. Sorry ISPs you do not get a say anymore.

Needs more than just that.

A new internet needs to be decentralized and anonymous to the point that nobody except participants can tell who had a conversation with whom. If the government decides A is bad and they know you talked to A or did a DNS lookup for A's website, then it doesn't matter if the channel was encrypted - they can beat whatever info they want out of you.

At the same time, a new internet needs to be able to absolutely prove (if and only if you want) that you are you and whoever you are talking to is who they say they are.

Maybe there are protocols out there right now that can do these things without too much hassle?

Unfortunately a little naive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

DECnet should be considered

[Tjp($)pjT]

DECnet lost out to IP. It should be reconsidered. The network was fairly easily expanded indefinitely where addresses were only bounded by specific specs for the implementation phases. The routing as to first of 1024 addresses where the next 1024 addresses under one of the first 1024, etc. Each node learned some basic weights to give its interfaces based on dynamic results of traffic passing. Could be improved over the last Phase V DECnet spec, based on modern knowledge. The architecture was not limited to address space. Any node could have 1024 sub-nodes to extend it. So no dynamic IP allocation issues. Then redo all the protocols used considering modern processors are very very fast and that human readable traffic is not required. So encrypt everything with very strong encryption. Make everything traceable to its source. If you have the keys. Lots of ways to revamp the Internet with an eye to the future. And instead of tunneling DECnet under IP, have an IP tunnel under DECnet. Or UNnet if you want to be politically correct. Done correctly I can have worldwide satellite offices and netboot a machine in Sweden from a server in Switzerland and do it in a secure encrypted manner. Can't spoof email if it is always signed and can be verified ... Can't spoof domain resolution if everything is verified and secure. Redoing the Internet? Make it secure from the start.

First World Problems

[Kohath]

I have instant access to the world's people and knowledge. But there are ads and Netflix might have to write a check to Comcast (or something equally dire).

So yeah, let's scrap it in favor of a bunch of stuff that's barely more than an idea.