| To all the people suggesting we approach this and other political problems from a technological/engineering perspective: how do you think it could be pulled off? Put aside all the technical limitations - they can (have been or will be) solved. The real question is adoption. What's a darknet without Facebook, Google, etc. worth? Who will use it? There are already countless projects implementing parts of suggested darknets, some of them very cleverly. They've been around for literally decades. None of them are perfect, but they're not so fatally flawed either. The fact of the matter is, the internet is one big, huge de facto standard. No one will use your pet project. No one will look at it. People would far rather shoehorn or build on top of existing infrastructure (thereby being bound to the limitations of the underlying architecture and design requirements). Just look at IPv6. It's a new technology with the full force of all the giants in the industry.... and it hasn't gone anywhere. Actually, IPv6 would have been a good place to add the support for decentralized everything, as it is pretty much the only "authoritive" replacement for the current generation of technology. But it doesn't and it's not. You can build it, they won't come. History proves it. |
One of my VPS providers recently started offering IPv6 addresses to all customers. Linode is starting to roll it out too. My residential ISP doesn't offer anything natively, but the router they provided lets me set up a 6to4 tunnel in a couple clicks, which automagically gives all my devices an address starting with 2002::/16. I can even go to ipv6.google.com on my iPad with no extra configuration.
Progress is slow, but it's hardly stagnant. A few months ago, I didn't have any of that. Ancient infrastructure is gradually being replaced by necessity, and then it's just a matter of configuration.