Media futurist: Time to replace the Internet

'Contact' summit to study replacing DNS with peer-to-peer, democratic networks
By Nathan Diebenow
Friday, February 18th, 2011

How can the stranglehold on humanity's digital communications be broken? One media studies professor has a revolutionary idea.

"If we have a dream of how social media could restore peer-to-peer commerce, culture, and government, and if the current Internet is too tightly controlled [by the network owners] to allow for it, why not build the kind of network and mechanisms to realize it?” asked Douglas Rushkoff, writing for Mashable earlier this month.

Rushkoff is the author of Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age and a noted Internet futurist. He also teaches media studies at The New School University in Manhattan.

To foster this emerging, peer-to-peer Internet, Rushkoff announced plans for a summit called “Contact” in October at the Angel Orensanz Center in New York City.

“From the development of a new non-hierarchical Internet to the implementation of alternative e-currencies, the prototyping of open source democracy to experiments in collective cultural expression, Contact will seek to initiate mechanisms that realize the true promise of the networking revolution,” he said.

Rushkoff told Raw Story last December that authorities already have the ability to quash cyber dissent. This is due to the Internet's original design as a top-down, authoritarian device with a centralized indexing system.

Rushkoff concluded that the Internet in its current form is simply unredeemable. From the near expulsion of WikiLeaks to Egypt's Internet blackout, it became clear to him that a fundamental change must be made.

As evidenced by the troubles dealt to secrets outlet WikiLeaks, essentially all one needs to do to halt a website is delete its address from the domain name system registry. A peer-to-peer Internet would use individual computers to route traffic to sites, as opposed to one centralized server, making it more resistant to censorship.

"This is not rocket science," Rushkoff quipped.

“A p2p network protected only by laws -- that exists but for the grace of those in charge -- is not a p2p network,” he wrote. “It is a hierarchical network allowing itself to be used in a p2p fashion, when convenient to those currently in charge.”

Rushkoff previously theorized that the new system might operate like FidoNet, a pre-Internet network that relied on personal computers acting as their own servers connected by modems via telephones.

“25 years of networking later, lessons learned, and battles fought; can you imagine how much better we could do?” he asked. “So let's get on it.”

Douglas Rushkoff: Internet was never free or open and never will be

Author: If Americans want a truly free network, 'we've got to build it from scratch'
by Nathan Diebenow
Sunday, December 12th, 2010

Secrets outlet WikiLeaks' continuing struggle to remain online in the face of corporate and government censorship is a striking example of something few truly realize: that the Internet is not and never has been democratically controlled, a media studies professor commented to Raw Story.

"[T]he stuff that goes on on the Internet does not go on because the authorties can't stop it," Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age and Life, Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How to Take it Back, said. "It goes on because the authorities are choosing what to stop and what not to stop."

Rushkoff told Raw Story that the authorities have the ability to quash cyber dissent due to the Internet's original design, as a top-down, authoritarian device with a centralized indexing system.

Essentially, all one needs to halt a rogue site is to delete its address from the domain name system registry.

"This is not rocket science," said Rushkoff, who also teaches media studies at The New School University in Manhattan.

For example, the Dutch teenager arrested Thursday for helping to organize a denial of service attack an 'Operation Payback' online chatroom: "They just took him off. He had his own server, and they just go, 'Oh, nip this one!'" Rushkoff said.

This is why, he noted in a recent CNN editorial, the actual threat to PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and Amazon last week were "vastly overstated" in most media.

"The forces of bottom-up anarchy have reached a similar impass, and the authorities of the Internet have once again demonstrated their ability to fend off any genuine peer-to-peer activity," he explained. "This is a tightly controlled network, and you know, that's why I think the Chinese do have it right in that they understand, 'Oh, we can control this thing. We just censor the fuck out of it."

"[The general public] didn't realize that the only difference is now we can see that we've been censored."

Rushkoff said that until the recent WikiLeaks attacks, no one has talked about plans to create truly democratic, peer-to-peer alternatives to the Internet's centralized domain index since political activist Paul Garrin's work in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Garrin's anti-trust lawsuit NAME.SPACE v. Network Solutions, Inc. paved the way to lower domain registration costs by breaking up the monopoly-based domain name registration system into a wholesale-retail market.

"What [Garrin] showed was that if you don't want to use the domain name servers that are officially in charge of the net, you can create your own network of domain name servers," Rushkoff explained.

"You can set up your computer to look them up instead of the official ones where we can create our own names database, so I could be 'Douglas.Rushkoff,'" he said. "You know, we could have any name we want. It's arbitrary and artificial that they've limited domain at top-level registrates to what they have. I mean, they have their reasons for it, of course, but it's artificial."

Most people, he said, would rather "just stream Steve Jobs' authorized movies" than connect to an open public space that would almost certainly become demonized as a haven for terrorism and lawlessness.

"If we want to have a true peer-to-peer network, we now understand what it might look like," Rushkoff said. "If you want to have something real, we've got to build it from scratch."