3 Projects to Create a Government-less Internet, and Why It’s Needed

There are 3 projects 4 projects underway to effectively create a government-less Internet. This is badly needed …

[EDIT: See update below for project #4]

DATELINE ZERO – Klint Finley — who blogs at Technoccult, and writes regularly for ReadWriteWeb — has a great article over at ReadWriteWeb about creating a government-free Internet; the necessity of which is illuminated by recent events in Egypt, which include the government “shutting down the Internet.”

This happened in Egypt on Thursday Jan 27th; at 22:34 UTC the Egyptian Government effectively removed Egypt from the internet. Nearly all inbound and outbound connections to the web were shut down. Yes this could happen here in the U.S., or in the UK, or in Australia, or anywhere else in the world.

Last year Senators Lieberman and Collins introduced a fairly far-reaching bill that would allow the US Government to shut down civilian access to the internet should a “Cybersecurity Emergency” arise, and keep it offline indefinitely. That version of the bill received some criticism though Lieberman continued to insist it was important. The bill, now referred to as the ‘Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act’ (PCNAA) has been revised a bit and most notably now removes all judicial oversight. This bill is still currently circulating and will be voted on later this year. Lieberman has said it should be a top priority.

In Finley’s article he mentions the inspirational young adult novel Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow. In it the protagonist starts a wireless ad-hoc network, called X-Net, in response to a government crack-down on civil liberties. The characters use gaming systems with mesh networking equipment built-in to share files, exchange message and make plans.

We could have something exactly like that very soon. Here are a few projects working to create such networks.

Openet

Openet is a part of the open_sailing project. Openet’s goal is to create a civilian Internet outside of the control of governments and corporations. It aims to not only create local mesh networks, but to build a global mesh network of mesh networks stitched together by long range  packet radio. See our previous coverage here.

Netsukuku

Netsukuku is a project of the Italian group FreakNet MediaLab. Netsukuku is designed to be a distributed, anonymous mesh network that relies only on normal wireless network cards. FreakNet is even building its own domain name architecture. Unfortunately, there’s no stable release of the code and the web site was last updated in September 2009.

OPENMESH

Not to be confused with the mesh networking hardware vendor of the same name, OPENMESH is a forum created by venture captalist Shervin Pishevar for volunteers interested in building mesh networks for people living in conditions where Internet access may be limited or controlled.

Pishevar came up with the idea during the protests in Iran in 2009. “The last bastion of the dictatorship is the router,” he told us. The events in Egypt inspired him to get started.

It’s a younger project than Openet and Netsukuku, but it may have more mainstream appeal thanks to being backed by Pishevar. It’s not clear how far along Openet is, and Netsukuku’s seems to be completely stalled so a new project isn’t entirely unreasonable.

To learn more, continue reading from the full article at DATELINE ZERO. (Includes information about a 4th project that is now in the works!)