The internet itself is probably gonna die soon anyway. Every country wants to impose its own laws on it. I think it'll eventually fragment into multiple segregated continental networks, if not national ones, all with heavy filtering at the borders.
I'm happy to have experienced the free internet. Truly a jewel of humanity.
> The real value of the old internet was showing us what is possible.
Of equal value is that it showed us what not to do.
We have 30 years of documentation for research on exactly what a
successful intra-planetary network needs to be immune to. A
successful future network must build-in resistance all forms of human
pyschopathology from the ground up.
This is a nice fantasy, but it's a fantasy. The tech stack and network we have is too dense a forest to be replaced by clean slate designs. But maybe some of the problems could be improved with some new platforms and APIs. Mind you, ML is making so much progress so quickly that what happened over the last thirty years is at best a partial model of the problem we have to solve now, and the tools we have to do it with...
> ML is making so much progress so quickly that what happened over the
last thirty years is at best a partial model of the problem we have
to solve now, and the tools we have to do it with...
Sorry I don't see how ML can help here. It seems like another thing to
pin hopes of repairing an already too broken system on.
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we
created them." -- Albert Einstein
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with
it." -- Max Planck
We are the dying generation my friend. We built it. They came. It
didn't work. Surely if ML can do anything it's telling us that we need
to tear down the old system completely and start again, don't you
think? Adding sticking tape won't help.
> I think it'll eventually fragment into multiple segregated continental networks, if not national ones
That's exactly the world in which the Internet grew. There were multiple segregated national and sub-national networks, and the Internet was built as a means to interconnect them. After some time, the Internet protocols ended up being used even within these networks, but that was not originally the case. And even today, there are still things like the AS (Autonomous System) concept which permeates the core of the top-level Internet routing protocols, which still reflect the Internet being a "network of networks" instead of a single unified network.
That's why I'm not too worried about the Internet fragmenting; we've seen this before. What happens next is gateways between the networks, and there are already shades of these in the VPN providers which allow one to connect as if one were located in a different network, often from a different country.
This made me sad, the optimist in me believes that some alternative will be built, that could take us back to those days. Honestly I do feel for most of my life I experienced an American Internet mostly (From South Africa), as long as one can still hop from one internet to another, in as simple a manner as possible it might not as bad as it could be.
I'm sad as well. To me it feels like we're already living in a cyberpunk nightmare, things just keep getting worse and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.
The networking may have been open like that, but I'm not sure the content ever was. It seems to me like a lot of internet users consume mainly the content of sites from their country. Kind of hard to blame them when that content is probably going to download fastest. But the language barrier has also kept the internet from becoming truly global.
> I think it'll eventually fragment into multiple segregated continental networks
i think it already has.
the Great Firewall of China is the classic example, but I think the trend started in the west with the Right to be forgotten/right to erasure in Europe, and subsequent HTTP Status 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons. GDPR just further cemented the split between Europe and the rest, and the new DMA & DSA regulation in the European Union finally makes it clear. The writing is of course on the wall, so countries like India or Australia aren't too far behind. Places like California also have their own "right to be forgotten", and I'm sure the US will not be left behind for too long before we see regulation further splitting their internet from the RoW. And I don't think the RoW will hold off much longer till it also splits into multiple big blocks. It's the start of the new "nationalist" internet, and I'm sure we'll all be poorer because of it.
Exactly what I mean. There is no way to have an international network with national borders. Telecommunications providers have always been centralized and have always been in bed with the government. Only way we'll ever be free is if someone invents some kind of decentralized long range wireless mesh network.
Good luck, spectrum is highly regulated in every country I can think of. If national governments don’t want you networking across borders, you’re definitely not going to be broadcasting long range radio transmissions that way. In fact, it’s currently illegal to transmit encrypted data or to relay packets via ham radio in the US.
Who knows? The whole point of decentralization is for there to be so many nodes in the network they can't possibly take them all down so that it's pointless to even try. What if all smartphones formed a mesh network? There aren't enough prisons in my country for all those criminals.
I agree with your ethos, but I don't share your optimism. If the state wants to enforce networking firewalls along national boundaries, no technological solution will save us in general. As a resourceful techie with the right know-how you may be able to sneak your packets through, just like people in Cuba receive a literal packet of data via sneakernet, but if the state doesn't want widespread meshnets circumventing their firewall, they will imprison you for emitting pirate radio signals, they will penalize any electronics manufacturer that makes non-compliant hardware, and rest assured that companies will go right along. Liberty requires more than technical solutions.
I'm saying this as someone who once wrote a decentralized P2P mesh for instant messaging[1]. I was inspired by the HK protests going on ~2014 after hearing that they were using Bluetooth chat apps. Luckily Matrix, Telegram, Signal, etc. mostly solved the problem. Still, I don't think any amount of mesh networking would turn back the tide of Hong Kong now.
>What if all smartphones formed a mesh network? There aren't enough prisons in my country for all those criminals.
There don't need to be. You publicly gruesomely execute the first 100 or so you catch, and the practice of running a mesh node on your cell phone will fall so far out of fashion that the network breaks.
Societal shortcomings cannot be fixed via tech alone. If you can't build a society resilient to authoritarianism in the first place, tech will not help you. It can be used to increase resilience, but that's far from fixing the problem by itself.
Starlink is maintained by a company, it's an internet service provider. One visit from the police and they'll censor anything.
The mesh network should be made out of common hardware in order to be viable. I'd suggest phones but those devices are owned before they've even left the factory.
One visit from the US police. US-unfriendly countries have no leverage over it, and similarly, the US has no leverage over satellite ISPs based in countries they aren't on good terms with.
It's probably easier to just cut off outgoing payments to Starlink anyway. They're not a charity, so if they don't get paid, they probably don't want to provide service just to send a message to some random government.
On the other hand, if you want to demonstrate that you have anti-satellite capability it's probably a better idea to shoot down a corporate satellite than a military one. The Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 and it didn't start a war, after all.
> It's probably easier to just cut off outgoing payments to Starlink anyway.
Cryptocurrencies might be a problem in this plan, and satellite internet access itself might become a currency (since unlike cryptocurrencies, this one both has almost an intrinsic value and provides its own infrastructure that's very hard to block, where as cryptos rely on external sources of Internet access).
It also depends - drugs have consistently won the war on drugs despite being a physical product that needs a local supply chain and various anti-money-laundering and banking/finance regulations that should make it hard to fund the operation. Satellite internet access is likely to be even easier as it doesn't rely on a physical product (if we reach this stage there's going to be clandestine satellite terminals built locally, so blocking shipments of the real thing isn't going to cut it).
The only solution, apart from North Korea-levels of isolation (and even then, NK has the advantage of their population being isolated & indoctrinated since birth, something most other countries won't achieve even if they turned authoritarian overnight) would be detection followed by harsh punishment, but this has the downside of not only wasting the disclosure of detection capabilities (that are useful to the military) but also outsourcing the R&D of evading such capabilities into the open which enemies will no doubt pick up on too and use against you in a conflict.
IIRC there was mention of it providing some p2p network style communication capabilities for Ukraine's military, and one of the reasons it's appealing to the US's military is the ability to route communications entirely within the network (well, with the gen 2 satellites which have laser interconnects).
So it can (at least eventually) function without 'regular internet', although I would still be hesitant to call it a viable infrastructure choice if the goal is to get around government control, simply from how much SpaceX have to appease the government to do anything space related.
I'm happy to have experienced the free internet. Truly a jewel of humanity.