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IT'S OUT, maybe my biggest blog post to date.

Ever since the recording industry capitulated ending the P2P War, internet freedom has been SO GOOD that research into decentralized networking has practically stalled. Throughout the Western World, you can just stand up a website and post almost anything.

And because of that, nobody has been particularly motivated to move off of centralized ICANN DNS, IPv4, and x509 Certificate Authorities.

Now, governments are thinking about changing that. And while the apocalyptic amount of force it would take to actually end the open internet is almost certainly beyond them, the force it would take to end the era of bad centralized protocols could almost be applied by accident.

https://thegoodwork.substack.com/p/the-next-internet-war

Thanks @matty for the post.

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22

They may be less risk averse than I imply, but the sheer number of fronts they would have to be willing to begin fighting on, in order to actually shut down the internet is enormous. And "shut down" is really what we're talking about, everything short of a full on nuclear option shutdown is just going to cause mass migration into the darknet.

It's not 2%, it's probably closer to 30% but you don't see them because they're spread out across different ideologies. You have to add up the wignats, libertarians, antifa left, open source developers, crypto community, etc. Internet shutdowns are a problem for ALL of them, so a lot of people would activate.

And then on regime stability, their risk is not some kind of popular uprising (those really don't exist), their risk is that someone like Elon might say "hey, you know what? I could become king" and then all of the sudden shit goes kinetic when the day before there was absolutely no sign whatsoever that anything like this might happen.

Because OF COURSE, anyone who might consider planning a coup d'etat will swear up and down that they would never never never never never even so much as daydream of such an idea - until one moment they're holding a rifle to your head...
I'm already working on a proposal which will allow federated protocols such as AP or SMTP to bridge between networks such as Tor, I2P, cjdns, Yggdrasil, DN42 etc.

When you boil it down to what literally needs to happen, it's remarkably simple, it just requires everyone to have a little bit of extra code in their masto/pleroma/etc instance.
Thank you!

Very very technical article aimed at Fediverse developers coming soon (probably Monday). Cross-network federation of course...

> The biggest issues to freedom in reality are corrupt courts

Need to replace them with something, hard problem figuring out how to do it right, baby steps :S