[Patrick_Devine]

We could ultimately replace our internet infrastructure with something more distributed which makes it difficult for ISPs to determine what traffic they're carrying. Ultimately traffic analysis works right now because the ISPs can detect where the traffic is coming from. In a more distributed internet, that wouldn't be the case. If all packets are encrypted, it would also make it harder to snoop and shape traffic that way.

Bit Torrent already does this with Message Stream Encryption/Protocol Encryption, and it can potentially hide on port 80/443. But why stop at just Bit Torrent traffic? Why not build a new web out of something more akin to this?

[wmf]

Hiding the source or destination of traffic (which is one of the major things ISPs want to discriminate on) requires onion routing which will make things ~2x slower and more expensive. If we end up in a situation where a significant fraction of Internet traffic is being onion routed I would consider that a massive failure.

[Patrick_Devine]

I actually wasn't trying to suggest onion routing, but a more peer-to-peer distributed internet, similar to the way bit torrent works. If a CDN was spread across multiple sites instead of concentrated at one place (ala S3), it would be very difficult for an ISP to track.

[foobarqux]

A distributed data store would achieve this and at the same time provide inexpensive versatile cloud storage.