Building an Independent Internet

Whatever you think of Mr Assange's leaks, the one thing that has got all "Net Neutral" people a-twitter is how easily some of the Big Names in the online world rolled over to a bit of (unofficial) US strong-arming. That Senator Liebermann & Co were able to pull Wikileaks from Amazon and Paypal (and now MasterCard have pulled them*) (Update - now Visa too) sans lawsuit, sans argument, sans any pushback that one normally expects is a scary thought to anybody who is not part of the US Establishment and who wants to rely on the Internet in a tough period. In that classic rule of opposite effects to those intended, this has (predictably) sparked off a lot of interest in building an Independent Internet - New Scientist:

It all started with a tweet on 28 November: "Hello all ISPs of the world. We're going to add a new competing root-server since we're tired of ICANN. Please contact me to help."

This missive, complaining about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, was from Peter Sunde, an anti-copyright activist based in Sweden and one of the founders of The Pirate Bay website, which tracks the locations of copyrighted movie and music BitTorrent files. It instantly lit a flame among file-sharers. "That small tweet turned into a lot of interest," Sunde blogged two days later. "We haven't organised yet, but are trying to… we want the internet to be uncensored. Having a centralised system that controls our information flow is not acceptable."

What really caught my eye was this:

Ben Laurie, a London-based security consultant and a former technical adviser to WikiLeaks, thinks the alternative internet idea is eminently feasible. "Technically, this is all pretty easy. What they have put together already is really quite professional. Persuading everybody to use it is going to be the difficult bit. Why should people trust it more than ICANN's root server?"

He thinks WikiLeaks is the kind of premium content that could convince people to take it up. If it works, a sort of "shadow internet" could form, one in which legal action against counterfeiters and copyright scofflaws would be nearly impossible.

Ben knows his stuff - if he thinks its possible, then it is.... this is something to watch carefully.

*It would appear that one can still donate money to the Ku Klux Klan and buy porn via Visa and Mastercard....