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To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet

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11–20 of 170 posts

Re: To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet

#11
I have a proposition: You know how Tor works? Onion routing? Send traffic encrypted multiple times through a list of nodes before exiting at an edge?

What if everyone sent their traffic back and forth to eachother. One hop, encrypted, and then forwarded. Just like Tor, but a single hop. Not anonymized, just peer-to-peer distributed.

If everyone did that (build it into browsers) the internet would function _full-mesh_. I mean, that's how IP works, right? Full mesh, peer-to-peer?

Hey ISPs! Good luck filtering on the entire internet.

Re: To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet

#12
post #9

> A future in which ISPs are owned by local governments, small businesses, nonprofit community groups, and the people they serve are the path forward and the only realistic way of ending big telecom’s stranglehold on America. I'd like that. These day internet access is more like a utility. It helps people telecommute, do banking, grocery shopping even, pay bills, etc. If municipalities can handle providing water and…

>The free market competition among the providers is just not happening and will probably never happen in a lot of areas. It has been enough years already, fiber technology is here, wireless as well, but hasn't helped enough. Time to stop pretending and using it as an excuse.

It's important to remember that the FCC is our nation's censor, and will be far more cozy to government censorship of the internet than what we're used to. You're right that free market competition hasn't been as strong as it could/should be in the ISP market, but I doubt that the FCC piling on a bunch of regulations, increasing the barrier to entry even further is going to help. I fear whatever benefits we see will be only temporary and that overzealous FCC regulators will stifle internet innovation the same way it stifled telecommunications for over a century, resulting on Bell.

TLDR: I'm generally for net neutrality, but I think the FCC taking over regulating the internet is going to have a lot of unintended consequences.

Re: To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet

#14
How about a decentralized internet software that works on local wifi and mesh networking and only needs to send its signals to the cloud when absolutely necessary?

Watch this video to see what I mean:

https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/the-future-of-decent...

And this architecture:

https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0

Re: To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet

#15
post #14

How about a decentralized internet software that works on local wifi and mesh networking and only needs to send its signals to the cloud when absolutely necessary? Watch this video to see what I mean: https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/the-future-of-decent... And this architecture: https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0

https://substratum.net/ << these are doing exactly that

Re: To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet

#16
Decentralising the Internet is the only way we are going to be able to stop corporations from lobbying (aka bribing) the government to make decisions in their favour.

Check out https://substratum.net/ - they have an idea to do just that. As our computers get more and more powerful then there is no reason why we cant distribute more of what forces the internet to be centralised, if no one controls it then it can be free and open (which also raises a whole new set of problems but one step at a time!)

Re: To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet

#17
post #3

I would love to create my own neighborhood wired network, but up front cost would be a problem, and I don't think my neighbors care that much.

Definitely true. Supposedly Motherboard will be publishing some guides on this, so I'll have to wait and see how helpful those are.

Re: To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet

#19
The somewhat ironic thing is that this is literally the core reason for the ideology of government being more hands off. Bad behavior enables competition. Google Fiber is an interesting case study. There are indeed major barriers to entry to competition in telecoms, both financial and regulatory, yet Google managed to overcome them in a variety of areas. However, after 6 years in business they only managed to obtain 0.07 million television subscribers and 0.45 million broadband subscribers. They've put all expansion plans on hold and have been downsizing current operations.

The reasons for their failure are complex (for instance they discovered that in poorer regions, families were inexplicably not even willing to sign up for the free option - they responded with grants for digital literacy) but the fundamental problem is simply that they didn't get anywhere near the marketshare they expected. So thus in spite of what every inclining would lead us to believe, people didn't really feel incentivized enough to go through the hassle of moving away from Time Warner/Comcast.

The masses move like molasses. And people only really feel incentivized to change things when actions against them become particularly onerous. I think we should not really make this sort of 'onery' unlawful, but instead embrace the positive change such negative actions can foster. Make companies consider not only profit, but ethics and consequences of unethical activity. The recent events with EA are a similar example. There are no real regulations in video games and so you ended up with EA turning a major franchise title into a burdensome 'fee-to-pay' style game and it finally resulted in real action from the consumers. Now people want to try to get laws stopping companies from including loot crates. In other words stopping companies from engaging in behavior that actually gets the masses to do the one thing that gets actual change from companies - speak with their wallet.

Granted, this is uncomfortable given the monopolistic nature of Comcast/Time Warner. If no competition does emerge then instead you're getting screwed by the one and only real option you have for service. But as I think this article is showing, so long as companies know they can get the marketshare - options will emerge. The one major condition on all this is that companies must also be allowed to fail, regardless of any possible consequences. 'Too big to fail' means 'too big to ever be held accountable' which, in turn, means 'too big to exist.'

Re: To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet

#20
post #5
post #4

No. To save the internet, we have to make the most gigantic stink the world has seen since the Trump election. The solution is not "give up and let this pass, and then quietly try to work around it." It's "make the people in power pay DEARLY for their transgressions."

Your solution needs to be refreshed with each election, we need a permanent solution that won't be reversed 2 years later.

Step 1: Try to convince the FCC to not vote to kill NN.

Step 2: Call your members of Congress and tell them to enshrine NN into law.

Step 3: Vote your Rep out next year if they refuse to do what you ask for.

Step 4: Vote out the President in 2020 if he vetoes NN.

Pretty straightforward, imho.

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