Move over Internet, make way for BaconNetsteemCreated with Sketch.

in #technology6 years ago

Motherboard (part of Vice) is saying here https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x4y8a/net-neutrality-fcc-community-networks that now is a good time for communities to be building a non-corporate Internets. So that in the absence of net-neutrality rules (which Trump's robber barons seem hell-bent on eliminating to appease their corporate sponsors) these networks would not be subject to price gouging and pay-per byte surcharges from content that is not blessed by the carrier such as Comcast or AT&T. For example, having to pay extra to watch Netflix because Comcast doesn't like Netflix taking away subscribers from its content or competing for bandwidth with them.

They have some more articles about municipalities (basically that means cities for non-Americans) voting to be allowed to install their own local-government funded networks. Some small ones have done that. But the reality is installing fiber networks is hugely expensive and only bigger companies can really afford it. If you're a Google, AT&T or giant national network - maybe. But small cities building out and maintaining fiber... is that really going to happen?

They also mention some other cases - like a city using TV spectrum. Unfortunately many if not all of those ideas don't scale reliably or are still subject to restrictions because they use someone else's fiber or copper to get the global Internet "dial-tone" in the first place. Perhaps you can negotiate a non-evil ISP that doesn't rely on AT&T etc. to bring unfiltered, un-constrained "net-neutral" Internet but I don't think you can bet on it.

Plus for consumers who are mobile, you're all out of luck - your can bet your life your mobile carrier is going to be all kinds of content deals to maximize the revenue stream from its wireless networks.

At this point, IMO, for a truly unfettered network to replace the Internet we are limited to a person to person mesh over WiFi which is all the government gives us basically. Or we hope for one or more truly "not evil" corps launching balloons or drones into the stratosphere to create non-AT&T, non-Comcast etc. backbone that could connect these island meshes. Or they somehow all chip in to buy their own fiber interconnects of municipal or Open meshes.

There are some apps already that allow folks to set up an ad-hoc mesh using phones - Serval Net is one. There are certainly others. But you will still need to add gateways to the existing Internet, or have others completely rebuild all those other services within your private network like DNS, email etc. That will limit it's popularity since the point was to build Internet infrastructure but still be the Internet, just without the douchey corporate entities leveraging their wealth to maximize their "rent" for controlling it.

For non-urgent stuff we can go back to protocols like uucp file transfer, usenet newsgroups, and uunet email. Or just off-line comms via ad-hoc person-to-person messages. Need to get data outside of your local mesh, or even overseas? Your phone takes the data, passes it off via Bluetooth to someone who knows someone who works at an airport, then it passes it off to someone who is heading to that country, then their phone passes it off to someone else when they arrive... Call it the BaconNet after the 6-degrees of Kevin Bacon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon) Sure you aren't going to be doing live streaming or sending gigs of data like this (ever tried to send even a medium-sized file over Bluetooth? Painful!) but if you just want to send an email of smallish file. Why not! Back in the 1980s uunet email could easily take several days to reach another party over a mesh of point-to-point dial-up connections. But it worked - mostly!

Screen Shot 2017-11-22 at 5.56.46 PM.png
-- Point to point WiFi network being put together (photo: motherboard)

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Sounds good to me. Do you know about Funkfeuer in Austria?

I had not heard of it until now.. https://www.funkfeuer.at/

Sounds a bit like the mesh network that Meraki was creating in San Francisco, but I think it is now defunct - at least I haven't heard of it recently since Meraki was bought by Cisco: https://meraki.cisco.com/blog/2008/09/free-the-net-san-francisco-makes-great-progress/

Ive only heard of it from someone who was peripherally involved.

Do you remember the 'Bad Actors' back in the 80's?

Lots of possibilities.

I see this as a potential boon for small towns in America.

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