Fix The Internet With This One Weird Trick

tl;dr — make the web truly peer-to-peer, by giving people public IP addresses, so that we may communicate directly.

The Internet is not working as designed. It was supposed to be about connecting our computers to each other and accessing information. Instead, we all connect to the same 4 computers in the cloud and give up information we barely understand. The web should look like interconnected hands holding, but creepy businessmen squeezed in between every connection.

As a result, the web is controlled by powerful corporations, which have a lot more influence than we have oversight. These companies control the design of interfaces, the collection and use of data, and they leverage their control to force compliant use their services. But this can all be traced to a single “point of failure” in how the internet is implemented. The failure is that we are not first class citizens of the web; machines are, and they are easy to control.

Here’s how the web is woven today. You will be able to deduce the problem on your own. You connect to the web via some internet service provider (ISP). You use this connection to send and receive packets of data. However, unlike when you send packages in the mail, or call somebody on a phone, you almost never send internet packets to a person or entity directly. You send them to a computer “in the cloud”, aka a server, which runs programs, just likes yours. So, even when you send that message to your friend, you are actually sending it a proxy, owned and operated perhaps by a large corporation, which sends the message to your friend when they connect. These are supposedly “services”, but we shouldn’t need most of these services in the first place.

Do you see the problem? Why don’t we just send our data to each other directly? If we did this, we would have far less need for patronizing social networking monopolies. The web would be a completely different landscape. Everything would be designed differently, and web-based services could not leverage users the way they do now. Almost everything the big tech companies provide we could provide for ourselves, and to each other.

How do we fix the internet so that it works this way? It’s a low-level detail, but it is not very complicated. The internet uses a special addressing system so that your computer knows how to send packets to publicly available servers. These are called IP addresses. Some are public, some are not. And yet, like the location where you reside, they are simply addresses. The problem is that your computer is not publicly addressable. This is because the ISP routes the web through their tendrils, and you actually do everything from within that layer. The fix is simply this: force ISPs to give us public IP address, perhaps using the power of democratic law.

So, what would the web look if we all connected to each other directly? It would be a beautiful and free place. It would be more like a neighborhood than a mall. You could say whatever you wanted, and nobody could take it down. Your blog could be a folder on your computer, instead of a service you have to sign into with an email address. You could build communities and not have to share that space with trolls. The interfaces you use to communicate would all be open source, and you’d have many options. Vlad Putin could not so easily buy advertisements aimed specifically at those distant relatives of yours who voted for Don Trump. Privacy, anonymity, and identity security, would be in our own hands, instead of handed over to the same control freaks that attempt to dictate your behavior with crazy End User Licensing Agreements, and punitive reactions. The NSA could not simply poke Google for your entire web history. We could send files to each other, OMG.

I work with web technology. I’m deep in it. That’s why I am certain folks in the industry are going to shout that this would be a security nightmare. That is mainly because the “infosec” people live in the nightmare of infinite possible security threats. That’s their cross to bear. We ought to know better by now than to let Red Alarmists take our liberties away based on mysterious security details. Connecting everybody to each other, using IP addresses just like we do now, would flip the web on it’s head. It would create a new paradigm, and that would be the one “the industry” would have to deal with.

What about the web services we have today? The ones we like and use despite the state of affairs? Would they be affected? Only in good ways. The mechanisms for paying for micro services might improve if companies had to find a different business model than “harvest users”. They would have to beg for your data, and would recognize the privilege that it is to access private details. Many of the companies would probably fold altogether, and never be replaced, releasing many talented programmers to work on something more important than AdTech. Remote computing is here to stay; the cloud would persist, and anybody could run services out there, we’d just have more options and could choose to do it ourselves.

My next article will be about those ISPs, free access, and the failure of net neutrality. Thanks for reading.