Net Neutrality & Equality
You can’t get Net Neutrality from the Government, simply because the Government is above the law. You can’t create equality if you appoint a supreme entity to arbitrate things into equality, that is automatically an oligarchy.
Just as Stalin didn’t create an egalitarian communist utopia in the Soviet Union, instead he created a totalitarian “red bureaucracy”, a vicious tyrannical Government that only brought misery and pain.
If you think the Government will make the internet equal, then you are a fool. No it will totally subjugate it, and whoever controls the Government will have a totalitarian control over the Internet as well.
So if there is any equality to come, it must come from below. Can you treat your fellow human being equally or will you subjugate him? That is the question, if you can’t do that, then don’t expect any equality.
Internet
In the technical world, there is a big problem. Just as humans, information wasn’t created equal either. You have information that is more valuable than others. So for example if you visit your bank account versus visiting a random forum, the bank information is more valuable, so potential spies and criminals have a bigger interest in gathering that data compared to a random one.
The internet is open and public, it shouldn’t have been designed like that. The internet should have been made to be anonymous and encrypted from the get go, so that all information should have been hidden from snooping 3rd parties by default.
For example the IP protocol, the basis of the internet should have been made to be anonymous, and not tied to a specific user. Early internet engineers regret this mistake, so because of this we can’t have anonymity on the internet by default.
Instead we can only have anonymity by 2nd layer solutions like VPN’s and things like that. It’s still effective, but inefficient and it can be blocked like you see with China and Russia banning VPN’s and other countries are to follow.
The tyranny is obvious, the internet should have been made anonymous, so that all information would be equal by default.
Not just anonymous but completely dark as well, so that not even the metadata would be public. This would have ensured that in a 2 way communication, a 3rd party spy could not eavesdrop.
But unfortunately the Internet is already the way it is, we need an Internet 2.0 to correct this.
Cryptocurrency
In cryptocurrency we have the same problem. Bitcoin is like the total transparent coin that is totally surveillable.
Then you have the Dash and things like that which has opt-in encryption and anonymization, which is the equivalent of VPN’s on the internet.
But still these nodes could be censored or banned, it’s still the same problem.
The currency should be anonymous and dark by default, not even the metadata should be public.
So the only coin that had smart people think about this big problem is Monero. Both anonymous and dark.
The internet just as any other communication system or financial system should follow the same principle. Privacy and anonymity by default, not opt-in. Otherwise we will have the same problem over and over again.
Conclusion
So either you have equality or you don’t. And if you do, it must come from below, and of course voluntarily.
The voluntary protocols to “enforce” equality should be default, simply because people are too stupid to figure it out why they need privacy by default.
You have an age of Big Brother coming, and it’s very hard for your average person to figure out these things on their own, so smarter people have to design things to be secure and private by default.
It is better if people have privacy than if they don’t, and don’t expect most people to realize this, since they are too brainwashed.
It’s better if good and smart people take the lead and design things to be beneficial for people, instead of detrimental, because you can’t rely on the stupid masses to figure it out for themselves.
While privacy awareness is increasing, not everyone is tech savvy, so better safe than sorry.
So the possible solutions could be:
- VPN’s temporarily, but a strive for an Internet 2.0 built totally on privacy and anonymity
- Bitcoin & Dash temporarily, but a strive for Monero-like coins in the future to ensure privacy and anonymity
Sources:
https://pixabay.com
Good points.
I have an issue with this:
"The internet should have been made to be anonymous and encrypted from the get go, so that all information should have been hidden from snooping 3rd parties by default"
Right now, the deep web & dark web has that if you choose. One could argue that effectively centralizing the security in a single protocol may make it more vulnerable to exploit compared to the random/heterogeneous 2nd party solutions. Perhaps it would merely add another layer of security though...
If all security has vulnerabilities, is it more secure to lock something twice?
Is it desirable to create something so secure that all criminals below state level actors are removed from competing in the crime game?
If you think of security like an antibiotic, how do you use it to cultivate a desirable biome of microbes?
What are the properties of a beneficial vs a malignant biome?
Yes that is the debate focus point between layer 1 anonymity and layer 2 anonymity.
Since TCP/IP is very hard to change, if a major vulnerablity would have been found since it's implementation like MD5 which was a standard hashing algo back then turns out to be rubbish by now.
That would have been a crucial failure if we'd have to swap the entire internet right now.
However if there is no anonymity by default then you always go back into the hamster on a wheel problem.
Most people are ignorant, they don't know why privacy is good for them, and they can't possibly concieve how the lack of privacy will come back to them in forms of identity theft, real theft, and other kinds of bad things that come from knowing too much about somebody.
So the debate is between security vs privacy.
You either have something very simple as core layer with no privacy, just basic stuff to keep it simple and secure.
Or you have full privacy built in it, and then you risk the algorithms becoming weak later once some flaw is discovered.
This is the debate between BTC and Monero as well. I'd personally like the Monero concept better, if enough research would go into making sure the enryption is solid and flaweless.
Hear hear. Net Neutrality is bull. Nothing ever happened. It's just more legislation which they can use to screw us over. The Free Market is not regulated. Right now, ISPs compete wildly for our business. The less legislation the better.
And from the horse's mouth: