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[Kogan Loloklam]

I'm just saying I am ignorant as to why you would need a completely deregulated internet. Thank you for not enlightening me with your responses to my post.

I did enlighten you. It is so we can create Skynet!
Seriously though, it is mostly a "is this possible?" and not a "this should be done!"

How do you think the freenet project kind of mindset fits into this? It seems to me like it already handles data transfer in a manner similar to how this would have to operate. (although it uses the internet for the connections instead of closest physical neighbor)


Maybe if a portion of the bandwidth the wireless connection could handle were devoted just to routing requests, a portion to actual local data transfer, and a portion for personal usage, it might work alright. The biggest problems would be city to city transfer rate, since transfer through cities would have multiple potential paths and therefore not face congestion related slowdowns.

I -believe- that one of the trunks between Atlanta GA to Birmingham AL is 2 oc-192 cables (with room for 2 more).
That provides a transmission rate of 20480 mbps current, and 40960 mbps potential (before they have to rip up the ground)
A wireless router currently provides 300 mbps max, assuming that the routers and such manage the data so that 1/4 of it is usable for transmission, you'd have to see 274 full separate paths to be able to match that, transmitting 146 or so miles. That is just one trunk. Of course some speeds would be increased, since instead of going to one node and then another, it'd route directly. Speeds would be lowered a bit since each router would have to process the data and send it the right direction though.

[Eugenitor]

So basically the entire Internet would work like TOR (a very useful network for rebels and kiddie-fiddlers alike).

Having a semi-centralized Internet serves a very important purpose: Spamfighting. If everyone was untraceable, IP bans would be impossible.

[Muz]

I couldn't really find the mechanics of how Freenet works, but it looks like a big network thing. Not The Internet, but like a WAN. But it already strongly supports my point about security problems, just glance through the FAQ. You're sacrificing your security for your liberty here. This would be the best security weakness since wireless LAN. There's also a lot of questions Freenet doesn't address, but it does show that CPUs can handle it.


I'm not so sure about whether lots of little paths would work better than a few huge ones, but I'll see if I can look into it in a few years, then I'll gravedig this thread But naturally, when one thing is designed one way, it's hard for it to work with a radically different change without unexpected side effects.

Also, there's the ultra high speed cables, like the ones built under the oceans from Japan to the USA. You won't ever be able to simulate that without some kind of government control. Those are core to how the Internet works. I'm not sure how much they hold, but it's enough to exchange all that porn to and from Japan and the USA, and that's a hell lot of data. Can't imagine users doing something like that.

And you have things like DNS servers. How are you going to keep the government away from those things? If they can't control the ISPs, they'd just go and monitor the servers people are visiting.

[Grimlocke]

The OPs idea is interesting, but doesnt realy seem freasable even if we dont regard whether or not people would actualy want it.

How would you connect to anyone a continent away? Living in a remote city? Living in a country with strong censor? (Iran, China, etc)

You need a proper infrastructure for all that, even wireless internet wouldnt work without satalites and radio towers. Infrastructure is expensive as hell, building requires loads of permits, and it all needs to be maintained. No centralisation means there is no way to invest in these things, and of course no ISP would be stupid enough to let a free internet freeload on their lines.

And theres the issue of radio frequency usage rights. Competition is pretty fierce there, and a decentralized internet wouldnt be able to defend itself against it.

[Muz]

I don't think radio frequency rights would be much of a problem. You could just not use the same wireless channels as another wireless in your area. Frequency reuse has worked very well so far. And the govt/standards can still control rights, just not the content, if it ever comes down to that.

[Grakelin]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extranet

Hopefully, before too long ISP's will be required to share their infrastructure, at which point competition will kick in.

Nobody else has touched on this, but there already is competition.

I, for example, can choose between a variety of providers, including Bell and Rogers.

They're still competing with each other even if they're all corporations.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Nobody else has touched on this, but there already is competition.

I, for example, can choose between a variety of providers, including Bell and Rogers.

They're still competing with each other even if they're all corporations.

You're Canadian, right?

Yeah, we don't have that newfangled thing called "competition" in the US, just malevolent monopolies with conflicting interests who spend more money trying to pay off congress not to make them improve or share their networks than they spend improving the networks.

[RedKing]

Nobody else has touched on this, but there already is competition.

I, for example, can choose between a variety of providers, including Bell and Rogers.

They're still competing with each other even if they're all corporations.

You're Canadian, right?

Yeah, we don't have that newfangled thing called "competition" in the US, just malevolent monopolies with conflicting interests who spend more money trying to pay off congress not to make them improve or share their networks than they spend improving the networks.

Not at all true. I have the option of cable modem, DSL (with multiple providers), satellite-based Internet, and now even broadband Internet like Cricket or Embarq. There may not be much competition within a single technology solution (for instance, Time-Warner has a monopoly on cable service in this area) but there is certainly competition among the technologies available.

And, I have to agree with Nikov here--a decentralized Internet is not necessarily a good thing. Law enforcement has a ton of valid reasons to want to be able to trace information. And we're not necessarily talking wiretaps or packet tracing here. Posting YouTube clips of yourself with illegal firearms or bragging on Facebook about how you and your posse just iced a guy from a rival gang...not bright.

I'm not sure why you'd want to get around regulated internet except for software piracy and kiddy porn, but whatever creates an anonymous network for communications between rebel freedom-fighters in a future dystopia, I'll support.

Which is ironic, since ARPANet was kinda designed to be a decentralized network to allow for military communication between isolated outposts in the event of a nuclear war and/or Soviet invasion.

There's one other implementation of the sort of "decentralized P2P net" idea floating around: you could use a virus to "conscript" peoples' computers without their knowledge or permission. This is in essence what a botnet does in harnessing thousands of computers to launch a DoS attack. In theory, you could pass information from one infected computer to another in a P2P fashion, so that eventually it winds up where you want it to go without a clear, traceable trail.

[Kogan Loloklam]

So basically the entire Internet would work like TOR (a very useful network for rebels and kiddie-fiddlers alike).

Having a semi-centralized Internet serves a very important purpose: Spamfighting. If everyone was untraceable, IP bans would be impossible.

We aren't talking about untraceability. This data has to have some way of knowing where to go. Spamfighting isn't within the scope of this discussion, although I imagine it'd put a personal touch on every bit of spam since instead of going through AT&T's OC-128s it is going through your Linksys WRT54GL.

The OPs idea is interesting, but doesnt realy seem freasable even if we dont regard whether or not people would actualy want it.

How would you connect to anyone a continent away? Living in a remote city? Living in a country with strong censor? (Iran, China, etc)

You need a proper infrastructure for all that, even wireless internet wouldnt work without satalites and radio towers. Infrastructure is expensive as hell, building requires loads of permits, and it all needs to be maintained. No centralisation means there is no way to invest in these things, and of course no ISP would be stupid enough to let a free internet freeload on their lines.

And theres the issue of radio frequency usage rights. Competition is pretty fierce there, and a decentralized internet wouldnt be able to defend itself against it.

Wireless internet wouldn't work without satellites, no. This is because wireless internet is about connecting to the infrastructure that currently exists that keeps the entire internet connected. HOWEVER, the reason that wireless internet works is because it creates a connection that is as real as a cable running from your house to the server that you wish to access.
How this thought works is creating that same real connection by going through thousands of small 100 feet jumps to the next node instead of one great 150 mile jump to the next node. Your wireless internet by satelite sends the data to the satelite, which then sends the data back down to earth at a point near one of these wired connections. Your radio tower wireless internet works by sending the data from your reciever/broadcaster to the radio tower, which then sends it down to one of those wired connections. Some towers send to towers that send to these wired connections. To get internet access, at some point you will find your connection connects to a real node, which is connected in some way to the server you are trying to access. This idea is about a different kind of infrastructure, something that creates an infrastructure independent of throwing down miles of cable.

This makes Chinese style censorship harder, because the "connection points" have gone to a measurable amount to anyone who is in range of a currently existing connection. The continent away does create a problem though, since (to my knowledge) it really isn't possible to connect across the sea without hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, although maybe some research into the amateur radio stuff might change my mind on that, since I think I read somewhere about amateur radio operators talking to people in Europe.

As for how the people in the "boonies" connecting, I've lived out in the "Boonies". It'd probably happen pretty slowly to get any decent connections up, but people actually genuinely cooperate more often then you think to make simple things like roads into town. Wireless connections into town aren't much different than that, or power (which is occasionally cooperatively done, but usually the cooperation is regulated when you make your own connection, where you have to reimburse the person who brought it out an amount that equals a fair share of bringing it out to where he did to where you made your connection, with a 10 year timeline on it and the amount you have to put in to share proportional to the time it's been there I think. It's complicated, but there. Wireless connections using repeaters would probably be cheaper, although you'd have issues of who pays for the power popping up. I think in the end it'd work as long as it was desired there.)

I don't think radio frequency rights would be much of a problem. You could just not use the same wireless channels as another wireless in your area. Frequency reuse has worked very well so far. And the govt/standards can still control rights, just not the content, if it ever comes down to that.

Yep. Something else to consider, Wireless routers already have a frequency that they use. You start restricting that frequency and then none of them work. The key to preventing the elimination of something like this would be to put the giant electronics manufacturers against the giant telecommunication groups. May the best lawyers win!

[qwertyuiopas]

Some considerations:

DNS:
 There is potential for people to set up a partial DNS that stores a fraction of the entire set, but with enough of them, the entire range of domain names would be covered. Alternatively, why not create a P2P DNS? Cache a few tens of thousands of DNS records on each machine, keep some semi-centralized main record, but otherwise see if anyone in the local area can resolve it for you first. Ideally, to resist tampering in such a distributed DNS, multiple requests would be made to different sources, but considering how the aerage internet user tends to revisit a few sites often, they would probably cache most of them within a few days and rarely need to look anything up. Periodic checks for changed records would be required.

Security:
 Split the packet into multiple ones, in such a way that some of them, but neither one nor all, are required to retrieve the original, so that if a few are lost or read, it can still work, and the contents remain protected. This only works if each takes a different path and it is hard or impossible to identify what packets need to be grouped and how.

The software itself:
 You need to share the client/server software *somehow*, and the current internet is certainly the easiest. Due to the initial scarcity of connection points, it would have to be a background sort of thing that allows regular use to proceed uninhibited. Many people would probably be fairly excited at their first connection, but it would probably take months for that to happen, if not years.


Undoubtably, some people would create their own smaller infrastructure, so planning for such possibilities would be important, both "can we trust it?" and how to interact with it seamlessly if it can be adequately trusted.


If such a network started, it would probably be in small islands where one person gets their neighbours into it for easy and fast LAN gaming and file sharing, with an occasional overlap between islands encouraging growth.

IPv4 would be inadequate, and IPv6 is still ISP-oriented, so a distributed IP format would probably be required, especially if it was designed to carry a standard IPv4 or IPv6 packet until it reached the centralized internet, allowing full compatibility for old programs.

[Nikov]

I'm just saying I am ignorant as to why you would need a completely deregulated internet. Thank you for not enlightening me with your responses to my post.

I did enlighten you. It is so we can create Skynet!
Seriously though, it is mostly a "is this possible?" and not a "this should be done!"

Oh, so its even less irrationally useless than solar powered cars, because you can at least get eco fanatics on board for that. Basically since I can only see porn, propaganda and pirates having a profit incentive for this sort of network, I think it will only come about under the control of those interests. The government won't make something it can't tax, businesses won't make something they can't charge for, and hobbyists are the long-odds chance this gets created, because I'm certain the infrastruture won't be free to upkeep.

So yeah, have fun with the mental exercise.

[Grakelin]

Porn gets no profit incentive from deregulated internet. They are already suffering because of piracy. Propaganda doesn't really get a benefit from deregulated internet because the organizations who want to feed you propaganda do so by regulating the internet, whereas deregulation constitutes the ability for anybody to say anything, and you will be bombarded with all sorts of different ideas.

With the right advances, solar powered cars will one day be far cheaper than gasoline powered cars because their fuel source does not require regular recharging.

It's like you packed as many of the most incorrect things you could into a post and hit the reply button before ever thinking of what it was you were saying.

[Muz]

DNS:
 There is potential for people to set up a partial DNS that stores a fraction of the entire set, but with enough of them, the entire range of domain names would be covered. Alternatively, why not create a P2P DNS? Cache a few tens of thousands of DNS records on each machine, keep some semi-centralized main record, but otherwise see if anyone in the local area can resolve it for you first. Ideally, to resist tampering in such a distributed DNS, multiple requests would be made to different sources, but considering how the aerage internet user tends to revisit a few sites often, they would probably cache most of them within a few days and rarely need to look anything up. Periodic checks for changed records would be required.

I see some nasty security issues there. What if the multiple sources are wrong? You can easily create a lot of phishing scams. The different sources would all have to be reliable, but having a reliable source gives some chokepoints for governments to control. If you have a few unreliable sources, they can easily route the site to a fake one, and multiple other users will already have directed it to the fake site instead of the real one because they don't know what the real one is. It's unlikely, but possible with deliberate effort, and becomes sort of a cancer.

[Nikov]

Porn gets no profit incentive from deregulated internet. They are already suffering because of piracy. Propaganda doesn't really get a benefit from deregulated internet because the organizations who want to feed you propaganda do so by regulating the internet, whereas deregulation constitutes the ability for anybody to say anything, and you will be bombarded with all sorts of different ideas.

With the right advances, solar powered cars will one day be far cheaper than gasoline powered cars because their fuel source does not require regular recharging.

It's like you packed as many of the most incorrect things you could into a post and hit the reply button before ever thinking of what it was you were saying.

Its not worth refuting any of this, just like it wasn't worth refuting my original post. Sometimes I just feel conversational.

[Kogan Loloklam]

Porn gets no profit incentive from deregulated internet. They are already suffering because of piracy. Propaganda doesn't really get a benefit from deregulated internet because the organizations who want to feed you propaganda do so by regulating the internet, whereas deregulation constitutes the ability for anybody to say anything, and you will be bombarded with all sorts of different ideas.

With the right advances, solar powered cars will one day be far cheaper than gasoline powered cars because their fuel source does not require regular recharging.

It's like you packed as many of the most incorrect things you could into a post and hit the reply button before ever thinking of what it was you were saying.

Nikov is actually right here. Solar power cars won't be adopted. You can blame the big corporate lobbyists deliberately sabotaging their ability, or people not caring. There is a reason that our cars are run on oil, and to overcome the culture ingraned you'd need to control everyone's mind and make them comply.
Solar powered cars are pipe dreams just like this idea, which is what Nikov was trying to get at.

Of course I disagree about his statement that the infrastructure wouldn't be free to upkeep, since I think he is referring to the network itself and not individual bits of it. It would be free to upkeep, because all the costs would be on the individuals. The individuals who run the servers, or individuals who help make up the network. This means all upkeep would be the responsibility of each person with a computer, and not what it seems he is getting at here where infrastructure Upkeep is the responsibility of a corporate or government entity.

As for DNS...
DNS is mostly used to translate IP addresses into names that humans can remember. For example, bay12games.com is 216.97.239.212. Put that in your address bar and you'll end up at the same place as if you put in www.bay12games.com. I don't see how the concept or physical structure behind DNS would have to change. You'd still query a centralized server for the translation of the name to the location identifier. That wouldn't have to change, although how the data is stored would because IP addresses are insufficient for this sort of network.