Comment by speedylight a day ago
I think eventually we will reach a point where laws like the Online Safety Act become so prevalent that it is basically impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet across the globe. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10 years or so every country has its own version of the internet only intended for their own people.
I've said it for years and I'm sticking to it that you can't solve political "problems" (real or otherwise) with technology.
Not for the masses and not sustainabl,
It's always easier to have a paper say "do this" than finding a tech to circumvent it.
Politics is fundamentally people business and involves lots of people who can't or won't understand the details of what is going on but who may still be interested in the end results.
i also want believe the same, but i am increasingly disillusioned that there's a political process that is capable of reforming it - think about the fact that no one asked for these measures of censorship, but they keep creeping in, as though some vested interest has been pushing it through at every opportunity.
So the lack of ability to solve this politically has made technological solution the only out.
> So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?
The option here is to stop trying to solve everything with tech when a lot of the time it's not viable and actively makes things worse. Start putting that time into the non-tech options. Not as fun though, is it?
Applications based on QUIC and/or P2P might be an option. QUIC is designed to not be as easy to filter as TCP + TLS. But then right now it can be blocked by just blocking UDP. But if majority of the internet would use QUIC then blocking UDP would mean blocking most of the internet so the governments wouldn't be so eager do nationwide firewalls (hopefully).
Encrypted Client Hello is also a puzzle piece towards that - makes it much harder to kill TLS connections that are trying to reach specific websites. Also makes it easier to conceal proxies.
The adoption speed is critical, exactly because of what you're saying. It's easy for a wannabe authoritarian to make a decision to "just block all of ECH and QUIC traffic" if that breaks 0.8% of all traffic - but not if that breaks 80% of all traffic.
QUIC or any other technology still needs domain name and both the domain name ownership and DNS could be blocked by governments. Also IP could be blocked.
There is DNS over QUIC, and in case your current Connection ID or IP is blocked during the connection, QUIC can use multiple IPs and CIDs for single connection, and CIDs are negotiated in encrypted part of packet. It's a mechanism for migrating connection over changing networks. Servers can also take advantage of that.
Server could have multiple QUIC output nodes to migrate connection in case one of them is blocked. The output node network can be shared by many servers and DoQ endpoints so blocking it entirely would scare government.
This solution still needs to connect to some known IP in order to establish connection first. And the same goes for DoQ. To mitigate this we can use Encrypted Client Hello as other commenter mentioned and connect to a pool instead of single IP.
Reticulum is interesting. It's basically flowing through all network interfaces available on the devices and routing data packets. Making it very easy to connect say lora and bluetooth to the global internet, even using i2p.
Yggdrasil is a decentralized mesh IPv6 network. It automatically forms one big network as more people connect together. It has end-to-end encryption, it's fast (unlike darknets), and it's pretty simple.
In such a "splinternet" scenario, it'd be a matter of setting up PTP links across borders. As long as a few people do so, it becomes one big network again.
Well, it's also what has enabled foreign nations to spread misinformation, what enabled people to disappear into their own bubbles filled with falsehoods, etc. Since these things are now tearing at the fabric of democracy, I wouldn't say it's a clean win for the internet so far.
Im sure you will be able to get a passport for digital travel
We do still have limited entry and exit points to other Countries internets. You could end up with Great Firewalls across the globe if it got bad enough. It doesn’t deter VPNs though
They will put you behind bars for years for using VPNs once they win.
The actual great firewall deters VPNs. Western internet blocking tends to be weaker for some reason (cheaper?) but there's no reason they can't be just as effective if the political will was there.
> impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet
We'll have 2 kinds of apps and websites.
One will be super nice products that only work in your country and you can't use it to communicate with outside people.
The other kind will work worldwide but because they would be spending so much more on compliance their product would be a bare minimum ad riddled crap.
> still have a unified internet across the globe.
which might be the end goal - the internet, with freedom of communication, is a way that the plebs can organize and resist authoritarianism. And as countries are growing increasingly authoritarian (and i include UK here), they may be planning on preventing the old free internet that has enabled so much.
So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?