Or am I the only one remembering this opinion? I felt like it was common for people to say that the internet couldn’t be taken down, or censored or whatever. This has obviously been proven false with the Great Firewall of China, and of Russia’s latest attempts of completely disconnecting from the global internet. Where did this idea come from?
The internet was originally designed to withstand nuclear war, so that a functioning military network could coordinate a retaliation quickly.
The network protocols themselves are self-healing, routing around failures, very resilient.
The internet itself, even today, is incredibly difficult to destroy. It is nearly impossible to take it down.
However, the internet that most people think of as the internet, Facebook Google etc. Are centralized services that are trivial to take down.
Peer to peer protocols like email, torrents, are also nearly impossible to take down.
The examples of Russia and China isolating themselves, are different. That’s the network designers isolating the network. It’s not a third party trying to destroy the network.
Yes, mostly. It’s distributed and federated. Peer to peer at the email server level
Domain A users can message domain B users directly without going to any other domain.
Fun fact email can also handle variable availability networks and use forwarding agents to get a message through even indirectly (though most people don’t configure this anymore, in the days of dialup this was more common)
This opinion remains largely correct - the Internet as a network is very difficult to take down.
However things have happened that have undermined the Internet in favour of commercial priorities.
Net Neutrality was a major principle of the Internet but that is under attack, particularly in the US, where infrastructure providers want to maximise profit by linking their income to each Gb used rather than just paid as a utility. Their costs are largely fixed in infrastructure but they push the lie that they need to be paid for how busy that infrastructure is. A network router doesn’t care whether it’s transferring 1gb or 10gb, it only matters if you hit capacity and the network needs to be expanded. The Internet providers instead want profit profit profit so are pushing for a way to maximise it.
The other major issue has been consolidation and that’s thanks to monopolies being allowed to form and dictate how the Internet works. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple - they’ve all used their services to try to manipulate customers into their walled gardens and prevent competition.
So the Internet as many people think of it is very vulnerable - big centralised services can have outages that affect everyone because people don’t have much choice.
But the reality is the underlying protocols and infrastructure remains robust. Google might have an outage, but the Web itself is still functional. Email protocols and file transfer protocols still work. The problem is people who are sitting in Googles walled garden of services are locked out of everything. And with Googles huge monopoly on search and advertising it means lots of other major services are out too.
So the Internet itself is fine. It’s the services and monopolies built on it thay are the problem.
A 1993 Time Magazine article quotes computer scientist John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”[7]
That applied a whole lot more when most connections were using a phone line, and a decent size city could have hundreds of ISPs. But part of the design of a redundant mesh network is that there are tons of different paths to any destination. Cutting any of those links would simply force traffic to other routes.
The early Internet was decentralized in other ways, too. Rather than flock to corporate platforms like Facebook, people spent a lot of time on federated and independent platforms. This included Usenet, IRC, and BBSes. In the event that the feds, lawyers, etc could take one down, a dozen more could spring up overnight. There was such a small barrier to entry, and many were run by hobbyists.
It’s somewhat true today. There are countless Lemmy instances that are completely independent. Pirate Bay famously references the Hydra, and it applies to their peers as well. But these are limited in scope.
Xitter has shown us just how quickly and thoroughly a platform can collapse through hostile admins, and how slowly people will reject it.
I moan about it regularly but this…
Rather than flock to corporate platforms like Facebook, people spent a lot of time on federated and independent platforms. This included Usenet, IRC, and BBSes
Is just tragic isn’t it? We really had it. A global free flow of hobbies, interests, research, debate, exploration.
I don’t know what’s so fundamentally flawed about human nature a) that something that started so well like facebook gets enshitified to the extent that it has and b) why people flock to it like flies round a steaming turd
That’s a big part of the appeal of the fediverse for me. Setting up a personal site used to be fairly easy, but was largely isolated and unidirectional. With the AP protocol, and frankly a lot of self-hostable apps in general these days, you can make something to converse with the whole globe and you don’t even need to make a big effort to help people find it.
Webrings still exist, but finding them is less than trivial when they get drowned out by the noise of corporate sites. I’ve used IRC within the last year, but had to look up the proper use of nicserve commands. The old web mentality is still out there, but for the major part people want simplicity. Few want to go through the learning curve to deal with some of the more esoteric parts of it when they can just auth into a site and do a thing.
The answer to your second point is simple.
Meta’s properties (FB, Insta) have something that most other social networks are lacking: A network of real-world family and friends.
Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Lemmy, Tiktok, and the rest all tend to have communities built from the platform’s population, based on shared interests. Meanwhile, FB is the platform that you use to connect with your oddball uncle and high school friends from way back. That’s the sunk cost that makes it so much harder to leave than the strangers on reddit who share your love of lime jello.
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
As an example of this, one of the easiest and most performant methods a nation has of blocking a website is dictating which DNS records its ISPs return for domains.
This has the advantages that it doesn’t require traffic inspection and doesn’t slow traffic at all.
But it has the disadvantages that it has an all-or-none effect on the domain e.g. it can’t be used to bock specific pages.
It can also be bypassed by simply using an international DNS server. There are people bypassing this kind of censorship without even knowing they are doing so.
I’m confused. You’re citing the actions of a country to impact its own Internet as evidence they can take the Internet down?
That’s like saying me disconnecting my microwave proves that I can take down the power grid.
disconnecting my microwave proves that I can take down the power grid
DO NOT DISCONNECT YOUR MICROWAVE!
Because then it was a robust network with a myriad websites and not just those four websites linking to each other. Also, they weren’t all dependant on adsense or akamai to function.
