Can This New Technology Be the Ultimate Solution to the Net Neutrality Issue and Create the Decentralized Internet of the Future?

A Review of Decenternet

When I first got online in the early 90’s, the Internet was a very different place from today. At first, I didn’t even have a web browser, nor did I have access to WWW, the World-Wide Web.

My experience of the Internet was limited to participating in the USENET conferences, sending and receiving e-mail, and occasionally connecting to the local BBS (Bulletin Board Systems), run by cyberpunks and computer enthusiasts in my area. The ethos of that time period was strongly influenced by the open-source mindset, hackers’ practical philosophy, and cyberpunks’ ideas (and ideals). We were uploading technical manuals and fantasy literary works, sharing software freely, modifying its source code as we saw fit, publishing our work in relevant mailing lists on the USENET, encrypting our emails with PGP to prevent censorship and snooping by the governments.

The following decades saw an increased mainstream adoption of the Internet protocols and services, like WWW, which almost became synonymous with the Net itself in many people’s minds. But they have also seen increased centralization, commercialization, and drastic increase of state and corporate control over the flow of information and the access to it. A computer and net enthusiast in me rejoiced, witnessing hundreds of millions new people getting online and accessing the global repository of human knowledge and expression. A cyberpunk in me dismayed at the examples of centralized control, censorship and filtering of the content that was supposed to be free, according to the cyberpunks’ ethos.

Even as more and more people were using the Internet for all kinds of purposes, the onslaught on privacy and freedom of the individual Net users was only increasing as the time went by. Recently the public debates on the highly contested issue of Net Neutrality brought these concerns to the forefront of people’s awareness. Suddenly the old ideas of the cyberpunk movement felt fresh and relevant once again.

Enter Decenternet

A solution to the current unfortunate reality where state authorities and large corporations have control over users’ data and access to the Internet comes from a start-up known as the Decenternet – or Dnet, for short. The goal is grand-scale and ambitious: to lay the infrastructural foundation for the peer-to-peer, decentralized, neutral, censorship-resistant, hyper-speed internet of the future. This foundation will be built upon the blockchain technology – an invention of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, described by him in the Bitcoin Whitepaper, published in the beginning of 2009.

Dnet aims to populate this technological foundation with an entire ecosystem of tools, products and services, including a web hosting platform, a Linux-based operating system called Anuvys that will interact natively with the blockchain, a search engine Liberty (just like Google search, but without storing user’s data), the fast and secure Osiris browser that can navigate Decenternet and on which Dnet’s dApps can run natively and efficiently. Add to this Spyce (a wink to Frank Herbert’s fans), a native currency used to transact all trade and economic activity on the Dnet and paid out as a reward for stable and reliable nodes of the network. All of these elements of the decentralised and neutral Internet of the future are described and explained in the Decenternet whitepaper. When you read it, it becomes obvious that it was written by computer scientists very familiar with the foundational protocols and tools of today’s Internet. And, besides their technical expertise, they also share ideals and vision akin to the ethos of the cyberpunks movements from the 90’s.

^{Anuvys, the blockchain-native Linux-based OS}

Since Dnet’s vision has many different components, it might be difficult to grasp it all at the first glance. You may want to check out Decenternet’s Mindmap, published on their website:

This mindmap will give you the big picture and an overview of the entire project and how its different parts build upon and interact with each other.

According to the Dnet Roadmap, the Main Net will go live in the 4^th quarter of 2020. It means that the developers will have plenty of time to build, test and debug the software before it is ready for the mainstream deployment.

ARPANET’s Endorsement

It’s interesting and worth noting that the ARPANET Foundation sent the letter of support to the Decenternet’s team, endorsing and encouraging this start-up. If you haven’t heard about ARPANET before, it was basically the mother of the modern Internet: the first network that implemented packet switching and the TCP/IP protocol. ARPANET was the technological and infrastructural core from which the Internet emerged and spread all over the planet. In my eyes, their endorsement of Decenternet grants a lot of credibility to this project.

It is impossible to give a detailed coverage of all the interesting and exciting aspects of this project in one single article. Therefore, I collected some links to the project-related resources that I encourage you to explore on your own and form your own independent opinion of Dnet and its structural elements. I am also interested in learning your impressions and opinions of this project. I will be covering some of Dnet’s individual aspects in more details in the coming articles on this blog.

If you want to learn more:

• Visit Decenternet’s website: decenternet.com

• Visit Anuvys website: anuvys.com

If you want to engage and interact with the team behind Decenternet:

• Follow Decenternet’s page on Facebook

• Follow Decenternet on Twitter

• Join Decenternet’s official group on Telegram

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Sources used in the work on this article:

• Net neutrality. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

• Cyberpunk, Style and Ethos. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

• The Open Source Ethos, ver. 4.5.17. Retrieved July 15^th, 2018

• The Decenternet Initiative, whitepaper ver. 3.3 from April 19^th, 2018. Retrieved July 15^th, 2018

• ARPANET. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

• ARPANET Foundation’s letter of support to the start-up Decenternet Project. May 8^th, 2018 Retrieved July 15^th, 2018

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DISCLAMER:

^{The information contained within this post shall not be taken as a financial advice. I am not a financial advisor and none of your investment decisions should be carried out based on any information presented here. You can lose all of your money by investing. The information presented in this article is for educational and entertainment purposes only.}