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To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet (vice.com)
In light of reports that FCC plans to announce a full repeal of net neutrality protections later this week, Jason Koebler, editor-in-chief of Motherboard, suggests that it is time we cut our reliance on big telecom monopolies. He writes: Net neutrality as a principle of the federal government will soon be dead, but the protections are wildly popular among the American people and are integral to the internet as we know it. Rather than putting such a core tenet of the internet in the hands of politicians, whose whims and interests change with their donors, net neutrality must be protected by a populist revolution in the ownership of internet infrastructure and networks. In short, we must end our reliance on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure. The great news is this is currently possible in most parts of the United States. There has never been a better time to start your own internet service provider, leverage the publicly available fiber backbone, or build political support for new, local-government owned networks. For the last several months, Motherboard has been chronicling the myriad ways communities passed over by big telecom have built their own internet networks or have partnered with small ISPs who have committed to protecting net neutrality to bring affordable high speed internet to towns and cities across the country. Update: FCC has announced a plan to repeal net neutrality.
There's a the flaw in this plan. If there's a publicly available fiber backbone, I'm not aware of it.
The issue with this mentality is the last mile problem. Communities have monopoly agreements with ISPs (comcast/att/etc) that restrict the ability to get a new ISP to the home. Radio based internet is still a possibility perhaps since it avoids much physical infrastructure. I think another good option is community provided (aka utility) internet service. Comcast/Centurylink caused a law to be passed in Colorado that disallows municipal internet unless a community votes to allow it again. In Colorado alone, it has happened MANY times.
Oh wait...
FCC: Enjoy your corporate owned internet!
Bender: Yeah, well... I'm gonna go build my own internet infrastructure, with blackjack and hookers.
In fact, forget the internet thing!
I'd be interested to see how these "communities" manage to afford to lay their own billion dollar T1 backbone infrastructure. Good luck rattling the tin for the funds for that! You might as well say people who are fed up with traffic laws should built their own highways - a dose of realism is needed here people. Infrastructure is NOT cheap.
Sounds like he thinks that all politician are corrupt and accepting brides from corporate interest to go against their sworn oaths to represent their constituency, undermining democracy and in some cases being guilty of treason. But that can't be true. cynicism?
Let me know when I can subscribe to the ISP you set up. Oh, you want me to set up an ISP while you pontificate about it? Not a plan then.
We're being pitted against each other folks. Put another way, consumers are being played by elites. "Protections" is how some politicians 'who prefer to control the language', refer to the real term "Regulations". Who gains when the government regulates the internet? Is it the people, the politicians or the owners of the providers? You tell me. Regardless, we're being played by politicians here.
To end government control of the Internet we need to build a government owned Internet. Funny they don't even see the problem there.
My Quantum Entanglement network is working fine.
we must end our reliance on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure. The great news is this is currently possible in most parts of the United States
If you want me to join this effort, there are some conditions. First, no Google, Facebook, or the like. Second, no government involvement in setting policy or in enforcement.
You know what? Forget it. I think what I am actually looking for is FidoNet.
To a first approximation, at least as seen from public media and other pronouncements, it *is* true. Not just cynicism. As the saying goes: you may be paranoid, but they also may be out to get you. OTOH, the level of cynicism may not be appropriate to the level of government at times - local government in particular is more accessible to actual people than state and federal. OTthirdHand, the activities allowed for local government are subject to limitation by state and federal government, so it doesn't always work to try to bypass monopolies and cartels that way. Leaving one with the remaining option to form small companies or nonprofits or even real profit-making companies to try and compete with the Big Boyz - as used to be the case with rural phone companies, that might be an option in the future as the Big Boyz concentrate on the areas with a lot of customers and gradually abandon rural service.
wildly popular among the American people
Have you ever met any people?
People love monopolies. Look around.
Do you see "openwireless.org" anywhere? Nope.
Do you see "xfinitywifi" absolutely everywhere? Yep.
The Open Wireless Movement already failed utterly. People want Comcast. People DO NOT WANT your community internet bullshit.
It makes up 80% of the Internet but needs Tor to access. However, three letter agencies want everyone to think its only for perverts and drug dealers, yet many popular news agencies and search engines have a .onion site for privacy.
however, the big issue is the connection to our old friend, The Connected Internet. if you don't live next to a peering point, you are going to have to backhaul to it, or hook to another Tier 1 or 2 provider who is. money, money, money. lighting the glass is not free, either.
pipe dream.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Their technology looks very promising.
Use a LoRaWAN.
https://hackaday.com/?s=lora
Also, unless there are massive advances in satellite internet (which there very well could be), the reliance upon massive corporations who own backbones will always be there holding us back.
We need advanced technology to free us but the problem is that R&D projects are always going to be hamstrung by lobbyists and big corps.
The other big issue here is student debt, tbh. Take any PHD and unless they sell their soul to big corps, they are penniless. It reminds me of guys like Tesla, who despite all of his advancements for human technology, died alone and completely depressed and broke.
If we could eradicate reliance upon educational institutions for furthering human knowledge, we could then start seeing more and more open source solutions to big problems.
AI is going to somewhat solve this problem. The AI arms race will be all about computing power. As quantum computers advance and become more accessible, an average person will eventually be able to do way more than they could today, including research and also personal protection, on the same level as large corporations or governments. But even then, we have the problem that everything we use for computing is sourced by massive corporations. Sure, eventually 3d printing will make home computer construction a possibility, but that's a long ways away.
If the world starts embracing a fair universal income standard, we could also see huge advancements happening from basements and garages at a much higher rate than today but still these efforts will face roadblocks designed by massive companies like MSFT and Apple who prefer to keep us in the dark about most of their design and getting worse every day for selfishness.
Today? Students are caught within the politics of old boys networks. That also is a huge obstacle. That said, most of these kinds of problems could potentially change dramatically as we further deplete our natural resources and our governments continue to be terrible examples of human beings.
But if you look at Health Care, for example, in many countries where a proper health care standard exists where people aren't bankrupted by hospital bills, that is always a public service and never is there a case supporting 3rd party health care where citizens are better off short term or long term.
I guess if there was a state security element to health care, we might see worse results with a public health care system, but overall the private healthcare systems are just terribly corrupt.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
But it's getting cheaper, and that's the point.
We're entering an era where reliable, unlicensed frequency gigabit radios are small thousands to buy and install. Buried fibre may still be the most reliable option, but for residential and SOHO internet this is generally "good enough" and easily comparable to uptimes for Cable/DSL/GPON. That puts cost recovery on a small investment + monthly internet within 2 years for most projects.
Communities have monopoly agreements with ISPs (comcast/att/etc) that restrict the ability to get a new ISP to the home.
That is false. Such monopoly agreements were literally outlawed 25 years ago by the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 The problem is that the cost of a cable plant is a high barrier to entry, so monopolies happen "naturally" — especially when companies decide to divvy up territory to avoid competing.
And, as you mentioned, the companies also bribe state legislatures to pass laws making it hard for municipalities to build their own cable plants. For that you can blame ALEC for providing templates laws and lobbying to get them passed in roughly 22 (republican dominated) state legislatures.
Side step the corroded copper!
https://www.extremetech.com/ex...
https://hackaday.com/2017/04/1...
https://thenewstack.io/laser-r...
If Google failed at becoming an ISP with all its experience in the internet domain and all its billions of dollars. All I have to say is good luck with that grand idea.
What makes this guy or anyone else think that we, The People, will be 'allowed' to build our own Internet replacement? Think about this: if the government is taking the leash off ISPs, what's to stop them from eventually buying out backbone providers, or otherwise using leverage to prevent them from providing backbone connectivity to this upstart Internet 3.0? For that matter, what if ISPs use pages out of the Starbucks playbook, and saturate any given market with their services, even if they're taking a loss overall, just to squeeze small startup Internet 3.0 providers out of the market? Then buy them up, absorb or liquidate them. The phrase 'uphill battle' doesn't even really begin to describe the situation. Now consider this: Ajit Pai is clearly in the pocket of the telecom industry. To my mind that makes him corrupt as hell. What's stopping him from putting any roadblocks he can in the way of Internet 3.0 companies, to either stop them from happening at all, or hamstring them so much that they're not viable? There apparently isn't going to be any 'fair play' anymore, so anything is going to be possible. Add to all this, that the general public, who don't even know what 'net neutrality' is in the first place, is completely oblivious to all this. They just pay their money because they think they have to, and so long as they can see Facebook on their phones, and watch movies and play games on the Internet, they really don't give a damn. It's only when things aren't working that they care; they aren't going to be sold on 'Internet 3.0' because why should they change?
The whole situation sucks. ISPs, greedy companies, and oppressive governments are destroying the Internet for everyone, everywhere, not just here in the U.S.. It may not be possible to save it, and it may never be possible to create a viable alternative to it.
This reminds me a lot about what we're currently seeing happening with the Rust programming language. It's following a very similar path, and I think the outcome could be the same in the end.
So there's the incumbent. In the case of Rust, the incumbent is C++. It has been entrenched for decades, and has become very successful.
Then we have these Rust upstarts come along, who want to do things their own way. It's not necessarily the case that they can do any better; they're more interested in just being different.
So a huge amount of time and effort and money is invested in creating Rust. Lots of infrastructure, such as compilers and standard libraries, are built. Meanwhile, the incumbent, C++, continues to evolve.
Now it's several years later, and after much turmoil, Rust finally hits its 1.0 release. It's widely hyped as being able to compete with the incumbent, C++.
Yet by this time the incumbent, C++, has also undergone some significant changes. C++14 is bringing some huge benefits, and there's even more great stuff in progress with C++17.
Despite being different, it turns out that Rust isn't so great after all. In a lot of ways it has far more flaws and warts than the incumbent, C++, has. It turns out that it isn't "better" in any meaningful way, and is actually a lot worse in many respects.
You're right when you say "infrastructure is not cheap". This doesn't just apply to networking technology, either. It applies just as well to programming languages, and the Rust versus C++ debacle is a perfect example of how such a situation almost always turns out in favor of the incumbent, and not the upstart.
C++ beat Rust at its own game. I don't see why the same couldn't happen with the Internet versus any other upstart.
Building your own Internet is difficult, but VPNs and onion routers are already pretty well established. The technological solution is to move to protocols where the network has no visibility into the traffic and little visibility regarding the endpoints.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Because what you are now motivated to do, was the only robust solution anyway. Market pain beats political bootlicking. Don't beg for what you want, build it.
The average person today has way more computing power in their cell phone than any government or corporation several decades ago - it hasn't changed the balance of power because governments and corporations *also* have radically increased their computing power, so it still dwarfs that controlled by individuals. AI capable of solving endemic social problems is unlikely to help much, because the people profiting from those problems will have their own, far more powerful AIs dedicated to improving their profits. The result being that not only would the profiteers be more powerful than the disordered masses, as they are today, they'd also have radically more powerful intelligence at their disposal than the masses.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
don't work. If you get it big enough to matter they folks in charge will just buy it out. Money corrupts everything eventually unless something above and beyond money takes control. That something is a Democracy that leaves nobody behind. Right now stuff like this happens because we abandon large swaths of our country's people to a miserable fate. You've got 60% of us living paycheck to paycheck. Net Neutrality is the last thing on their minds. They're worried about food, shelter and medicine. Until you take care of those things for everyone then we're all going to get picked apart by the oligarchy.
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Also, unless there are massive advances in satellite internet (which there very well could be), the reliance upon massive corporations who own backbones will always be there holding us back.
And satellites are put up and run by...leprechauns?
What happened to Internet2? Remember all the press announcements of them breaking speed records all the time.
I can't even remember an internet speed record announcement.
I doubt it; this is probably going to be modded down, which is rather unfortunate because it would be fruitful for everyone if we could have a real discussion of the net neutrality issue using the lens of economics.
I love the free and open internet; so do virtually all of my fellow libertarians. There are many, many of us who believe that the BEST way to ensure a free, open, private internet is to repeal the net neutrality rules, and the reasons for this are largely economic.
https://reason.com/tags/net-neutrality
Net neutrality rules put greater control of the internet into the hands of the government and large, well-connected corporations like Google, Apple and Facebook. Do we really trust those entities?
https://fee.org/articles/net-neutrality-is-about-government-control-of-the-internet/
I would like to see genuine engagement with the economic issues at stake here and how they affect all of us. We do not need more government and corporate control over the net.
The best times for opening a new ISP was in the dialup and DSL days, where the lines were regulated common carriers that had to make your ISP available on published, standard commercial terms. Yes, the resulting cost to your customers was effectively limited to what the Big Company with the lines wanted to charge, but that was usually enough to make a tidy profit though usually not a large one.
Things have changed. The people with the lines are now "information services" that have no responsibility to carry anybody else's signal (cable was always that; phone moved into that space over the last 10 years or so). So somebody wanting to set up an ISP these days either has to negotiate access to an incumbent's lines (likely difficult and expensive) or has to install their own (very very expensive - see Google), or try one of the other methods (various forms of wireless) that have their own costs and, at least in my area, never seem to last very long.
There might be some room for independent operations in rural areas and small towns that are either abandoned by the big ISPs or are ignored by them in the first place. That's not a big market (which is why the big ISPs are trying to get out of it), but over the next few years there might be a few openings for somebody with less overhead.
No. The real problem which you'll find out real quick is why there's oversubscribing (making connections affordable) and the effect "unlimited" hogs have on the whole network. People are always going to be the problem, not technology.
Net Neutrality today is not what Net Neutrality was back in the days. These days, we're actually discussing 2015's FCC Title II rules. See :
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
Part of Micheal Orielly's dissent to this (he's an Obama appointee for anyone thinking this is a Trump thing), the part relevant to framing our understanding of old vs new Net Neutrality, is as follows (see page 399) :
The FCC "fact" sheet promised bright line rules, but the reality is that the bulk of this rulemaking
will be conducted through case-by-case adjudication, mostly at the Bureau level and in the courts. To be
sure, there are three bright line rules: no blocking, no throttling, and no paid prioritization. But those are
mere needles in a Title II haystack.
Essentially, Title II is too vast, to burdensome and basically serves as a stiffling mechanism to Internet growth, while failing to promote the 3 essential rules of Net Neutrality we've fought a decade and more for. How anyone just wants to hang out to a 2 year old set of rules that are simply too heavy handed and do not serve our goals is beyond me. It's not like we're discussing repealing 2 decade old rules here. We didn't have Title II prior to 2015 and the Internet was just fine.
True Net Neutrality would be simple as Mr. Orielly points out.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
So 300 a month times 20000 or more. Yeah sounds feasible.
That's "OTGH" (On The Gripping Hand). Don't you read?
Internet 2 has existed for 20 years or so but it's only available to government and universities.
Internet 3 needs to be a independent mesh network with zero dependency on government or corporations in order to prevent any of them from getting control.
it needs to have no dependency on DNS, DHCP or any registration service which means IPv6 or some other protocol.
Start by hosting your own stuff, and running a cable to your neighbors, or by using a radio router or laser router or packet radio to network all over the world.
Let's get our lives and communications back under our own control.
No censorship!
It's electing people who are committed to CITIZEN'S INTERESTS to Congress. They can actively appoint qualified, and public-interest-minded heads of departments, like the FCC.
During Obama's presidency, we had Tom Wheeler, who ruled (almost universally) in favor of citizens' interests...and, in fact, established the "Net Neutrality" rules in 2015...against the wishes of one of his Commission members, Ajit Pai. When Wheeler retired, Ajit Pai (who is a legal shill who worked at Verizon, who benefits from his decisions) ascended to the Chairman post, and started dismantling the good work done by Mr. Wheeler...mostly (I posit) because he wants that job back at Verizon, when he is replaced in the future.
The Republicans are notoriously favorable to providing more advantages to large corporations (e.g., Verizon) and couldn't care less about you and me. With the Buffoon in the White House, and a Republican dominated Congress, we can expect virtually every government-sponsored benefit to citizens to be abolished or diminished.
So, to my mind the ONLY ONE SOLUTION is to restore our government to attending to benefits for citizens...it's not going to be done by a party that passes legislation to give Fat Cats tax breaks, and make you and I pay MORE taxes to cover the giveaway. Have YOU figured out the solution yet? It's a plain as the nose on your face! Make sure that we elect people who CARE about the citizens' interests, not just lining their own pockets. They will do the work of replacing the people who are engaged in wholesale destruction of every potential good for citizens. I reason that there is NO REASON our country should be favoring large businesses over individual citizens. Others' may believe differently.
UBI will only result in government stealing money out of one of your pockets and giving a little of it back to put in the other, but you won't have any control over it.
In a free society there is no such thing. You get a free high school education, and that has proven to be enough for lots of people that did well for themselves. Anything beyond that is up to you.
I will KEEP and maintain the fruits of my labor. I will not pay for your UBI, nor for education beyond High School.
I will keep it under my control by ANY means.
Before going directly for the last-resort option, maybe try to keep that no-good Verizon goon from rolling back net neutrality? I think the mother of all protests is in order. Think SOPA blackout protest times a hundred. Give that a try and see how it goes.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I've said this multiple times on slashdot, but in my experience, the best option is to resolve this issue at the County/PUD level. My favourite example is what is available in Chelan and Douglas counties, in Eastern Washington state. In both of these counties, the PUDs have built out nearly ubiquitous FTTH networks.
The trick is that the PUDs only provide the last mile service, they don't provide the content (in the case of TV) or Internet service. When a local resident wants to sign up, they have the choice of some 8 or 9 ISPs, and 6+ TV providers, all of whom in turn transport that service over the County network. Businesses can also buy transport from Zayo, Cogent, and some other peering provider. For the resident, it's easy... Their bill for TV or Internet (or both), has something like a $6/mo line access charge which covers the fiber connection, and the rest is for service. On the flip side, the service provider doesn't need to maintain the last mile.
The PUDs themselves are responsible to their residents through elections, and from my observation are very responsive to faults in their systems. I was involved in the summer of 2015 when a wildfire burned through and knocked out a significant chunk of their infrastructure, both power and fiber. They had the fiber truck rolling right behind the power trucks, and had the system back up and running as soon as they could source and plant 50+ replacement power poles.
This kind of thing really does work.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
New Internet: No Ads.
User accepts using energy for mining in exchange for access. Consent-driven and encouraged.
Passion is not a replacement for logic.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
You're right. However, my more nuanced point that possibly wasn't explained well enough is that we need to start actively thwarting that stranglehold. Individualism is good to a point. Collectivism is good to a point. These ideals are trumped by Oligarchy because they control the collective and also the individual in ways that impact short term sales volume. We all need to start deciding which companies will survive and which ones will bankrupt out.
Personally I'd like to see Google, MSFT and Apple all go belly up. They are horrible companies now. Once they were each demonstrating some potential for moral good... but MSFT and Apple veered way off their message very early on. Google took a little while longer to start doing evil... but nonetheless, here we are.
What we need are more companies like Tesla. We need Tesla now more than ever to step up and compete directly against corruption of all forms. Corruption is killing our species.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
What a fantastic idea! All he is proposing is entering a regulated business (becoming your own "Internet Service Provider"), and simply ignoring the existing regulations! It's amazing how many brilliant ideas these Internet Wunder-kind come up with that have as a basic part of their business plan the simple disregard/ignoring of any applicable regulation.
So the plan is to exploit a non-existent "public backbone", erect your own wireless towers and maybe even lay cable along the right-of-way? I can't imagine anything standing in their way. /sarcasm
Ken
All it takes is a few hundred billion dollars. Maybe Uncle Sam will pull it out of his ass?
Sounds like a leftist wet dream.
In the olden days, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, several people in my town used computers connected over 27 Mc (citizen band radio), called packet radio. We could play (text based) games, send eachother emails, and share files (small ones of course). There was even an email gateway to the then "brand new and shiny" internet. I ran a small BBS with doorgame and a few files. The range was rather limited, but we had a lot of fun. Something like that would be doable today I imagine, with better protocols to achive higher through-put.
Trump voters did this. And worse.
Please, rethink your politics. This is just the beginning of the train wreck.
that's not how this works. That's now how _any_ of this works. They raise their rates and we all pay it because high speed internet is becoming more and more a necessity. Your kid's homework will be delivered on it. You'll be required to work from home on it. You're electronics won't work without it. A few will cut the cord, live without. They'll just raise the rates higher for those that have to have it.
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maybe you support abortion, maybe you don't. Maybe you want to take my guns away. Maybe you'd like an end to mass shootings. Maybe you'll raise my taxes and I'm barely making it as is. Maybe I need my schools federally funded because my property values tanked when the jobs went overseas and there's not enough tax base left.
The working class is fighting among itself for scraps while the elites take everything from us. But I have no idea how to stop that fighting. In the 30s, 40s and 50s churches were used to organize the working class. The right wing picked up on that in the 70s and 80s and took them over with wedge issues and mega-pastors. We need to get people to stop clawing at each other's throats, but I'll be damned if I know how to do that around stuff like gun control and abortion.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Telecoms exist and the internet exists. they have their fast lanes and the Internet has net neutrality. If you take away net neutrality then anyone who starts up an ISP who says they will respect the principals of net neutrality would be on the "honour system" just like all the others. But what happens when they realise they can get easy cash by bending to the will of big business? In other words this proposed solution ends back at the problem it is supposed to solve.
On a related point, ending net neutrality is really (as I see it) just killing the internet and replacing it with a Telecom. We already have them! I have never ever ever subscribed to cable, dish, etc because they do not provide enough value for the cost. If so-and-so wants a fast lane he should launch a satellite or pay the price instead of stealing a successful infrastructure and modifying it for his own means.
Ok, I'm finished.
If there is, and its use starts to cut into corporate profits, look for the federal government to privatize it and sell it at a bargain-basement price to a huge company in the name of "smaller government". And people who cry "state's rights!" and "local control" and "That government is best which governs least" will shamelessly support this tragedy of the digital commons.
I have my own internet it's called the darkweb.
But if you look at Health Care, for example, in many countries where a proper health care standard exists where people aren't bankrupted by hospital bills, that is always a public service and never is there a case supporting 3rd party health care where citizens are better off short term or long term.
Are you under the impression that there is no 3rd-party private healthcare option in places where there is a national health service, like in Canada or the UK? You may want to take another look at the situation... Bespoke healthcare is fairly common in the UK, and countless Canadians cross the border into the US for their medical needs.
Ken
This dude is a fucking moron. He should go huff some glue or something.
You are correct. The whole idea of public utilities is a farce and based on a faulty understanding of property.
https://mises.org/library/8-regulation-and-public-utilities
Abolish so-called public utilities, enforce contracts and private property, and we would not have these problems.
There is no technical requirement that the Internet have ISP's at all. They are the prime points of profit-making, control, and spying on people. We are blinded to this by service providers and powerful interests that maintain their status quo by killing off other approaches. All of the routers and cell phones which are ubiquitous today can already talk with with each other and route data to more distant locations if only they had the software to do so. In fact, re-purposing existing equipment is how many of the coops and home-grown providers originally built out their networks and provided service to people the large companies didn't see as profitable enough. The problem all of these providers ultimately face (and the thing that most often kills them) is the cost of interconnecting with a carrier of the "public" Internet and the cost of backhaul to that interconnect. Back in the early 2000's Verizon cut a plum deal with the government in exchange for it deploying service into unserved areas but later reneged and payed a fine for refusing to expand service into those areas. Verizon's CEO was heard saying that the fine only constituted "9 minutes of revenue" for the company, a fraction of what keeping its promise would have cost. The Internet, at its heart, is quite simple. Everything on the Internet has a unique address. All data is broken up into packets, placed in an "envelope" addressed with the source and destination and, sent to its destination or on to a router that connects further out. Currently that router connects to your ISP but it just as well could connect to your neighbor or someone else's router nearby. In fact, there was a time when ISP's operated that way. Your phone (or pc or whatever) could keep the packets meant for it and route packets onward to more distant locations through anyone within radio range who would then also do the same. Today this could be done with a "Routing Daemon" system module replacement and some small changes to the wifi and other protocols. The service would at first appear slow by today's standards due to the number of hops but with time, technology, and political will it could quickly improve bandwidth and performance to today's expectations and well beyond. Instead of using "pipes" owned by corporations and governments it would use the wide open physical space we all live in - an open 4 dimensional bandwidth space instead of metered linear toll pipes. Ultimately the space-bandwidth performance would be much better than is possible with today's narrow techniques. BGP and other current routing protocols do not work well in that environment. Discovery and other supervisory packets quickly swamp the infrastructure and can't keep up with the dynamics of the large constantly changing network. There have been attempts to build peer-to-peer networks but they are either not scaleable or ultimately rely on connections to the commercial Internet to work. It will take a new approach to routing. Back in the late 1990's I worked on that problem and helped develop an Internet infrastructure that embedded GPS data in IPv6 and distinguished between fixed locations (such as wifi routers) and mobile devices. Routing became simple. There is a whole other story about what happened to that project but in any case the ideas did work. Each device also had its own private and public keys for encrypting both link and end-to-end traffic for integrity and security. DNS and other necessary services could also be implemented as distributed services that reside on users hardware eliminating another stranglehold. Social networks could exist distributed across user's equipment instead of on corporate servers, perhaps using a blockchain approach, shutting out another privacy theft. With encryption built into its core and data traversing the countryside in pieces on random paths it would be extremely difficult to tap, monitor, censor, or control. No backbone or service providers needed. No monthly bills. The amazing things is that all of the hardware needed to implement this is already in place right now!
So the FCC, up until a couple years ago had no "net neutrality" regulations, then they implemented some regulations, that the FCC is now considering rolling those "net neutrality" regulations back, and the best answer it to create your own unregulated internet as an alternative to the soon-to-be unregulated internet?
Ken
In cities where the density of privately owned computers is high enough, it would be technically feasible to use mesh networks for most of the local traffic. You scratch my back, I forward your packets and provide local caching services for viral content. Something along those lines. Still need some gateways to long-distance networks, but most of the infrastructure doesn't need to be owned by giant cancerous corporations. Let's not forget soulless and driven by nothing but profit maximization. (Ranting now, but "All our attention are belong to them" and "There is no gawd but profit, and Apple is gawd's #1 prophet." I was surprised the google was so far down the list...)
Won't happen because the government and the corporations and the professional politicians all agree that they want to control our data. Their motives differ, but they can still agree where it counts. (Ranting again, but I think today's most entertaining battles are mostly between proponents of government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% and #PresidentTweety, who wants the simpler government of, by, and for the Donald.)
Anyway, I still like to dream. I think the best design would need to use variable power transmitters so that the cell size could be reduced as density increases. The goal would be to retain uniformly high bandwidth without interference as the density of [privately owned nodes] increases.
Obligatory rant against Facebook? Naw, you can look through the comments and see for yourself where Slashdot is now.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Letting your emotions control your reason may cause trouble for yourself and those around you.
So, no. Not a replacement for logic. More like a slaver of.
Soooo ... does this mean that if the few major ISP's that serve the bulk of the USA decide to back one political party then they can block access to campaign material from the others ..?
Call me a cynic, but I think there are other flaws as well.
For one thing, it seems fairly obvious to me that moving from a national+state-government-regulated Internet to a local-government-regulated Internet is just creating many opportunities for problems where before we had, nominally, "only" 51.
And that's not to say that the feds, and the states, wouldn't step in and regulate from afar either; after all, how do you think we "got regulation" on the Internet we have? Early on, there were almost no regulations. Now there are loads.
Legislators, to put it kindly, continually meddle. You create a new venue, and particularly so one that has such obvious social and business consequences, they're going to be on that ASAP.
No, I think the thing to do is try to fix the Internet we have, by which I mean punish the regulators for screwing it up and reward them for backing the hell off. Better 51 of these tasks than tens of thousands.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Libertarianism (freedom of person and property) is the natural condition of mankind. The oligarchy you rightly decry is, by definition, the government and its crony allies in big business who reign over all the rest of us with our apparent consent.
https://mises.org/blog/democracy-god-thats-failing
Democracy implies that 51% has the right to dictate to the 49%. Where are rights in that scenario? They are subject to mob rule. What we need is freedom, not democracy, if you want to keep away the oligarchs.
If we could figure out how to utilize quantum entanglement for practical use within routers, we might possibly have no need to lay down fiber lines or have the massive infrastructure we have now. Last mile concerns, WiFi limitations, and municipal deployments would all be things of the past. The networks and ISPs of today would be obsolete.
Unfortunately, the farthest we've gotten entangled particles to mirror is only a couple of miles. So it is nowhere near a viable solution but quantum computing in all its various forms offers the next greatest overhaul of Internet infrastructure, obsoleting Comcast and friends in the process.
You mean the evil, incompetent FDA which is controlled by Big Pharma and kills millions of people every year?
https://fee.org/articles/the-deadly-incompetence-of-the-fda/
Yes, please.
Many, this NN thing must really be needed to screw the people from freedom or liberty somewhere, the shills are out in force spouting off about it today. Here's some details for you, a great article on how the FCC has overstepped its bounds with Title II proclamation. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-fcc-can-save-the-open-internet-1511281099
"Encouraged by light-touch regulation, private companies invested over $1.5 trillion in nearly two decades to build out American communications networks. Without having to ask anyone’s permission, innovators everywhere used the internet’s open platform to start companies that have transformed how billions of people live and work.
But that changed in 2014. Just days after a poor midterm election result, President Obama publicly pressured the Federal Communications Commission to reject the longstanding consensus on a market-based approach to the internet. He instead urged the agency to impose upon internet service providers a creaky regulatory framework called “Title II,” which was designed in the 1930s to tame the Ma Bell telephone monopoly. A few months later, the FCC followed President Obama’s instructions on a party-line vote. I voted “no,” but the agency’s majority chose micromanagement over markets."
Uncle Sam pulled $785 billion out of his ass (QE, QE2) to bail out bankers. By printing money via The Fed. This is why the stock market has been on a tear since 2010.
When the Feds give money to rich people, somehow that's ok. But heaven forbid they give money to poor people.
Except what you're talking about is competition driving innovation. Problem is there's little competition. So following your lines, we'd have to create a private internet for them to improve enough that we'd throw our private internet away.
Beyond the costs and regulations, which were initially implemented in order to help whiny cry babies like you net neutrality asshats, there's getting tied into the Internet itself; which, if you're too small, you have to pay to gain access, or you have to obtain some kind of mutual agreement from the big boys (that you helped make big btw, w/ all yo rules, regs, and req)... so all I'll say is pfft!
So essentially what is being said is that when Government gets the hell out of the way, innovation prospers. Makes sense to me!
It's about time to just fork the internet and place this new network in the hands of the people. It looks like Big Telecom is going to get its way and we will be paying even more and getting substantially less. Soon we'll have to pay a base price of around 50.00. Then add 5.00 extra for streaming, 5.00 extra for HD streaming, 5.00 for social network access, and so on and so forth.
With the abundance of commodity hardware, open source software, and the relative ease of wireless deployments, it is easier to do than it has ever been. I am about to move into a new neighborhood and I am going to see if I could do something like this and maybe help Big Telco bleed some customers. It will be small, community network projects like this that will begin the process of subverting the Comcast, Verizon, and AT&Ts.
And the people that did well for themselves, can't be outliers. Or to be in the end of a Bell curve?
Regarding the fruits of your labor, I'm afraid that private property, although an useful concept, it exist only because others allow it. If you can keep yours, good for you. But not everyone can.
Since Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, et. al. have all advocated for net neutrality, they should form a coalition that agrees none of them will provide their services through ISPs that don't practice Net Neutrality. ISPs will have little choice but to sign-on since their customers will not go without those services. Leverage their power against ISPs who leverage their monopolies against them and us.
People talk about decentralized, P2P networks but don't understand that current versions (FreeNet, I2P, IPFS, ZeroNet, etc.) are not true P2P. Peers connect to the Internet via ISP, which are part of a collection of star networks. Peers act as hosts or "service" providers when they make connections to several hundred peers and host a copy of their websites on a local HD. Many ISP's ToS forbid such activity. Some ISP's block P2P connections, considering them to be torrents used for illegal activity.
A true P2P would be computers connecting directly to each other via bridging wifi connections, for example, without the need of an ISP. Such networks are called wireless mesh networks. Most are built using special wifi's that extend an Internet connection to an entire house or property.
https://www.pcmag.com/roundup/...
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
the fight continues at the local level in Colorado for energy and data local autonomy from terrible corporations: https://muninetworks.org/conte....
The institute for local self reliance has been at this a long time: https://ilsr.org/ and the specific site for local internet, https://muninetworks.org/ .
Comcast succeeded in throwing its weight around in Seattle: https://ilsr.org/comcast-money... .
The battle of Pinetops North Carolina is critical here, there is a documentary about it even . https://muninetworks.org/conte... Trailer https://vimeo.com/222595040 .
Imagine having twenty service providers https://muninetworks.org/conte...
It's a hassle to figure out but it is possible to achieve victories in this area.
--hongpong.com
Pretty much. It's a beautiful idea, but good luck building the infrastructure. Once the telcos and providers control access, you'd have to operate on their backbone, and I doubt they'd hesitate to gleefully shut you down. I smell millennial on this sunmission. The web may have 'just existed' when you were born, we actually had to build it. This is not a realistic solution.
Rather than putting such a core tenet of the internet in the hands of politicians... There has never been a better time to...leverage the publicly available fiber backbone, or build political support for new, local-government owned networks.
We don't want the principles of the internet in the hands of politicians, so let's create a government owned internet? And we don't like nasty corporations so let's use the (corporate owned) fiber backbone?
I'm lost what this guy wants. I guess it's local ownership and I'm sympathetic to that. I like farmer's markets as much as the next person. It's just a little hard to build a cross-country network one town at a time.
It doesn't have to be lightning fast so you can stream your favorite series on Netflix. You can pay for a conventional internet service for that.
What we need are sub-networks for communities to freely share information among themselves without having to worry if [insert favorite ISP name here] is snooping on them. Should we find an effective way of connecting the nodes (communities) then we effectively have a "new internet" in the making.
Networking from a technical level is not my strong point though, so I'd love to know the limitations of such an idea.
I tend to rant.
Is Tesla doing anything to fight corruption? I must have missed that press release. They're doing an end-run around corrupt regulations in order to do business, maybe even fighting those specific regulations that interfere with their profits, but that's hardly the same thing as "good".
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
ramble on..
yep, for a long time, i had the concept to take WRT and mesh it up open ospf bgp derivative and merge that into wrt fork .. create neighborhood bridges that are guest like networks where local resource invisible and look for the fastest way to get there... sort of like ATM on nuclear steroids..
ramble off
There's a the flaw in this plan. If there's a publicly available fiber backbone, I'm not aware of it.
The other side of the coin is that if you want to connect your network to the internet, you'll have to follow FCC laws, rules, and regulations. They'll likely pass rules to prevent any such 'people's internet revolution(TM)'.
No, the only way I see for taking back control is to either remove government regulation of the internet or to reduce the size, power, and scope of the government overall.
As long as Big Government and it's inherent corruption and cronyism controls it, it will not be operated in the best interests of the people, it will be operated in the best interests of those in power.
That's just the nature of an overly-large authoritarian bureaucracy.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Has anyone considered just leaving the US, and going somewhere else?
Canada, England, Australia, NZ.
Most European countries speak English just fine.
As someone that's moves across countries, it's hard, especially with a family. But with all the crazy stuff going on in the US, if "too difficult to move" is the only reason you're still there, you may want to put in the effort.
"Rather than putting such a core tenet of the internet in the hands of politicians, whose whims and interests change with their donors"
"There has never been a better time to... build political support for new, local-government owned networks."
See? The solution isn't politics. It's politics.
Understanding that the leaders of our society form an oligarchy seamlessly spanning the private and public sectors, let us rephrase that.
The solution isn't empowering our oligarchy.
The solution is empowering our oligarchy.
See the difference?
Me neither.
There apparently is no way around the greedy oligarchical gatekeeper(s) and their conflict of interest against positive societal health.
But defeatism is never the right choice.
Sines of Impending Sines
ISPs do, and will continue to, throttle encrypted or otherwise obfuscated traffic. If they can't charge you for it, they'll just deprioritize it.
Yes, but if we move to 100% encrypted data or close to it, they won't be able to do that anymore.
"Massive advances in satellite internet"
Yes, all you need to do is repeal the laws of physics. Simple.
OMG Dude. Paragraphs. Please!
Some of those - Freenet and IPFS at least, I don't know enough about the others to say - are capable of operating in an almost fully distributed manner using only short-range wifi mesh. But that won't work right now because there isn't enough user density. The chances of you having another person living within a hundred-meter range of your home who also runs Freenet or IPFS are rather remote.
"Massive advances in satellite internet"
Yes, all you need to do is repeal the laws of physics. Simple.
Indeed. Geosynchronous orbit is at 35786km altitude. A satellite connection has a minimum 239ms overhead in space travel round trip time.
They do now, because it's a small proportion of the total. If, however, Google moved YouTube and its other services over to another protocol that isn't amenable to in-flight inspection, and made Chrome default to using this protocol, then ISPs would quickly find that they're getting complaints that people can't watch videos on their 20Mb/s connection and wanting to know why.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Part of FidoNet raison d' etre was to get around long distance charges. It was to be augmented with radio to jump artificial political and telephone boundaries.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Sorry! Not sure what happened there. It looked OK before I posted it and earlier posts are fine.
There are plenty of small businesses creating exchanges out there. As long as the regulations don't push all of the little guys out of business, we're doing our best to get competition out there and coverage where there is none.
http://berec.europa.eu/eng/net...
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Same as roads for instance.