When Anarchy Powers Civilization

Despite its origins as a Department of Defense project, the Internet is possibly the largest human anarchy ever attempted. It works and we should aim to keep it that way.

It started with a first message in 1969, with a student programming attempting to login by sending the word "login" between two networked computers. The actual message was "lo", because it crashed after only two letters, setting the tone for everything since.

The architecture of the Internet is one of distributed control. What is centrally managed is minimized, now down to how top level domains are handled. That is, .com, .org, .io, and .Vegas as examples among hundreds. That is kept as cryptographically signed database and a group of non-government individuals hold the keys. We call them Trusted Community Representatives.

Decentralized by Design

Originally, even that was relatively distributed with no central authority. The closest to holding that title was the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA. The director was Jon Postel, who started tracking what numbers (addresses) were assigned where in a notebook three years after that first message was sent.

Postel rather famously did a "test" (that some believe was a protest against government control) where he emailed eight of the twelve operators of the root zone servers and asked them to reconfigure to point to his IANA servers instead of where they were. They had been on contractor servers by a company that's now part of Lockheed-Martin and was under authority of the Department of Commerce.

Somebody must have blown a gasket. He was directed to put them back, which he did, and new proposed standards were circulating within a week.

Still, in 2016, some 18 years later, the project to transition centralized domain name systems out of the government and fully into private management was complete. The TCRs hold the keys. Everything else is distributed.

Postel died from a heart condition late in the year after his "coup d'etat", presumably unrelated. His views, though, and those of many like him, were for the Internet to be owned by everyone, controlled by no one. That is generally true today.

Centralized by Desire

Big Tech, in the form of companies like Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Meta, have been the topic of much public debate. They have significant centralized control over public discourse. Less discussed is how companies like Apple or Valve (for gaming) have similar gatekeeper abilities over applications on both desktop and mobile.

This centralization runs counter to the intent of the Internet, but is very natural whether one's motivations are pursuit of money or control of what software is and does. I believe a new paradigm is needed.

We've seen attempts before and we've seen what's happened. Think about the music industry and Napster or Limewire. Or the Tor network followed by infiltration and subversion of it by US government. Or even the desire to bend cryptocurrencies to fit in the traditional systems of financial regulation and taxation.

Now What?

It's going to be more and better peer-to-peer technology, encryption of our personal data during transit, and massively distributed computing and data storage that is going to break central control.

It's coming and coming soon. It will be upheaval of how we think about the way we handle data and how we use computing. The challenge isn't entirely the tech, because we mostly have it. The challenge is thinking of all the new and better ways we are going to use it.

Are you ready?

Photo by mia swerbs on Unsplash