Rushkoff Proposes We Fork the Internet

From Slashdot:

"Douglas Rushkoff: 'The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network — its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation — is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them — that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.' And he goes on to suggest citizens fork the Internet & makes a call for ideas how to do that."

The problem is the Monopolies that are forming. (Score:3)

by John Sokol (109591) writes: on Tuesday January 04, @07:07PM (#34760346) Homepage Journal

Most of you don't know the history, and are therefor doomed to repeat it.
For much of my life I have spent fighting the Ma Bell / AT&T monopoly. From the monopolistic control over Unix to all long distance services, to hicap pipes.
It wasn't until there breakup in the 80's that direct physical connection of modems was even allowed on to the phone networks.
Well we are down to the last few companies controlling the last mile, and many of the backbones. Legislation will just further this till we are all locked down to a few Internet services and the rest will be squeezed out or severely hampered.
IP TV and Cable TV over IP will be the largest changes coming. And companies like Cox and AT&T find themselves in a conflict of Interest.
Providing last mile Internet while at the same time watching it eat away at their cash cow, cable TV.
I think we can provide a VPN like tunneling service across the public Internet over to a private network. Most corporations already do this for their employees.
Getting that last mile has always been the hard part.
We could then make this private network host content only available on that network, but would anyone want too?
I mean if you are going to invest in a web server you'd want it to be accessible to as many users as possible.
Still I have some ideas I may be willing to discuss with an NDA.
For an interesting read checkout my ecip.com

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 Burz (138833) writes: Alter Relationship on Wednesday January 05, @12:04PM (#34766352)

I think we can provide a VPN like tunneling service across the public Internet over to a private network. Most corporations already do this for their employees.

Getting that last mile has always been the hard part.

See I2P link below. It's completely decentralized so even if the creators wanted to compromise it, they couldn't. Addresses cannot be censored and end-to-end security is assured (unless you are using an outproxy to access regular Internet sites).
It isn't a speed-demon but its much faster than Tor and its friendly to P2P and general-purpose traffic.

--
I2P : Anonymous, quick network with built-in web, torrent [geti2p.net]

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by John Sokol (109591) writes: on Wednesday January 05, @01:30PM (#34767416) Homepage Journal 

 

I have thought about P2P based VPN like networks, but there are political/legal issues with that.
Without a "legal entity" in charge they can just block it. Also it's not possible to grow it as a real network.
By copying the private corporate network model your afforded some legal protections and if they where to block it, they would also have to block every major corporations VPN's that they use for there employees to telecommute.
Another nice benefit is that it would be considered a private network and therefor free of public scrutiny to some extent. So pirated content could be argued to be view completely differently then on the open internet.
In addition as a real physical network, other networks could join, and people could become directly physically connected. T1's etc.
There are some real advantages.
I am thinking that replacing the protocol though would be the strongest way to differential it. Not sure how viable that is though.
But it could be free of the current DNS IETF system.