Douglas Rushkoff: What Wikileaks tells us about the need for a second, “People’s Internet”

Excerpted from Douglas Rushkoff:

“The real lesson of the WikiLeaks affair and subsequent cyberattacks is not how unwieldy the net has become, but rather how its current architecture renders it so susceptible to control from above.

It was in one of the leaked cables that China’s State Council Information office delivered its confident assessment that thanks to “increased controls and surveillance, like real-name registration … The Web is fundamentally controllable.”

The internet’s failings as a truly decentralized network, however, merely point the way toward what a decentralized network might actually look like.

Instead of being administrated by central servers, it would operate through computers that pinged one another, instead of corporate-owned server farms, and deliver web pages from anywhere, even our own computers.

The FCC and other governing bodies may attempt to defang the threat of the original internet by ending net neutrality. But if they did, such a new network — a second, “people’s internet” — would almost certainly rise in its place.

In the meantime, the internet we know, love and occasionally fear today is more of a beta version of modeling platform than a revolutionary force.

And like any new model, it changes the way we think of the way things work right now. What the internet lacks today indicates the possibilities for what can only be understood as a new operating system: a 21st century, decentralized way of conducting political, commercial and human affairs.

This new operating system, even in its current form, is slowly becoming incompatible with the great, highly centralized institutions of the 20th century, such as central banking and nation states, which still depend on top-down control and artificial monopolies on power to maintain their authority over business and governance.

The ease with which PayPal or Visa can cut off the intended recipient of our funds, for example, points the way to peer-to-peer transactions and even currencies that allow for the creation and transmission of value outside the traditional banking system.

The ease with which a senator’s phone call can shut down a web site leads network architects to evaluate new methods of information distribution that don’t depend on corporate or government domain management for their effectiveness.

Until then, at the very least, the institutions still wielding power over the way our networks work and don’t work have to exercise their power under a new constraint: They must do so in the light of day.”

3 Comments Douglas Rushkoff: What Wikileaks tells us about the need for a second, “People’s Internet”

  1. Avatarkatie

    such a shame that the packet radio p2p back and forth 2 way, was not developed into live functioning wireless digital *networks*
    http://www.tapr.org/pr_intro.html

    http://wireless.oldcolo.com/course/texas/charts.htm
    and with it, the possibilities of p2p spread spectrum *networks* rather than dns hierarchies and main node controller points

    http://wireless.oldcolo.com/course/

    there was a moment in the early 90’s when the net could have developed along peer to peer wireless and small hub networks.

    but the intelligence agencies were terrified of the possibility of decentralized and completely hidden-from-view networks
    http://cryptome.org/prd-27-prep.htm

    and the 1996 telecom act (mccain’s giveaway to the telecom/media corps) sealed the fate of p2p wireless from going mainstream by diverting the several billions collected annually off our telephone bills in what was originally known as the schools&libraries connection tax–those funds were channeled strictly into major telecom connection via corporate fiber, cable, wire, and microwave transmission systems.

    IIRC, spread spectrum was actually being used by the early mid 90’s by the intelligence folks for undetectable wireless p2p transmission (undetectable, in that frequency sniffers could not detect or find the digital streams because they existed below the level of background noise, and jumped frequencies too fast to be detected as non-random streams.)

    archives of listserv at telecom-l will demonstrate the kind of overwhelming firepower that the cables&phones brought to bear to squelch any tax funded development of p2p wireless. and they have vacuumed up literally hundreds of billions now of tax money to secure centralized control of the digital transmission systems.

    lots of people know more about this than i do. i don’t think the story has ever been told properly–how we lost the public decentralized internet.

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