SOPA, The Internet Blackout, and the Future of the Parallel Internet

I find it interesting that Google, Craig's List and Wikipedia are bedfellows on this, and that Google is with Conservatives for once, though, of course, a lot of Conservatives would be on the side of the protection of property rights as well.

This bill has really split up alliances,

Is it possible to build alternative Internet gateways which would evade governmental laws?

If the government wants to play the censorship game, they will not win. The word "Internet" denotes a concept which essentially means nothing more than sending information through communications lines and airwaves.

Alternative Internets are possible.

Governments can no more stop groups of citizens from creating Alternative Internets, than they can stop people from making phone calls, or sending signals through the air.

From ARS Technica:

A group of Internet activists gathered last week in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to begin planning an ambitious project—they hope to overcome electronic surveillance and censorship by creating a whole new Internet. The group, which coordinates its efforts through the Reddit social networking site, calls its endeavor The Darknet Project (TDP).

The goal behind the project is to create a global darknet, a decentralized web of interconnected wireless mesh networks that operate independently of each other and the conventional internet. In a wireless mesh network, individual nodes can relay data for other nodes, ensuring that the routing of data remains robust as nodes on the network are added and removed. The idea behind TDP is that such a network would be resistant to censorship and shutdown because there would be no central point of control over the infrastructure.

"Basically, the goal of the darknet plan project is to create an alternative, more free internet through a global mesh network," explained a TDP organizer who goes by the Internet handle 'Wolfeater.' "To accomplish this, we will establish local meshes and connect them via current infrastructure until our infrastructure begins to reach other meshes."

 Here's some information from a technical discussion on creating an land-based Alternative Internet:

When you type an internet name into your browser (facebook.com, for example) the name must be resolved first, converting it into a numeric address that the internet uses to communicate.  For example, facebook.com resolves to 69.63.189.11.

This name resolution is performed by name servers, special purpose computers that typically do nothing else.  Because they play such a significant role, you can imagine they're sort of important.

Well, the internet's root servers resolve the name servers, so they're one level up and as you might expect are even more important.  There are only 13 root servers in the whole wide intertubes, and they're all under the control of ICANN, an American organization that purports to work for the whole world but tends to favour American interests.

 The head of ICAAN is warning some may already be creating an Alternative Internet:

Rod Beckstrom, the CEO of ICANN -- the firm which oversees how the Internet is organized -- said unnamed nations had tried to create parallel networks, but he expressed confidence they would eventually stick with the global-used original.

"It has been done," said Beckstrom. "We don't speculate about who is doing it, it is really their private business."

Beckstrom heads the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a California-based firm which controls a master list of domain names and IP addresses known as "the root," which is crucial to all Internet use.

The blogosphere has been awash with accusations that China and Russia are developing alternative Internet roots, which would mean requests would bypass the ICANN system.

"People want to test their own capabilities to do these things and update their root zone files," said Beckstrom. "Some are concerned maybe for security reasons and some want to have alternatives in case any regional problems might arise and others might have political objectives."

Stressing ICANN's goal was "to keep everyone talking at the same table," Beckstrom admitted problems would arise if countries duplicate top level domains -- like .com, .cn or .net -- with new Web addresses.
"Conflicts would start to develop if we had a top level domain, and someone starts using a top level domain with different addresses and assignments. If it starts creating a conflict globally, that could be a problem," he said.

"That has not occurred and I think that is unlikely," said Beckstrom, defending ICANN's independence in the face of accusations that it serves US interests.

"I think the network effect of the Internet tends to keep people wanting to use the root," he said.

Mr. Beckstrom must realize that attempts by the government to control the information that is distributed through the internet will make it imperative and inevitable that we will not all want to be "talking at the same table", or using "the same root".

In fact, the backwardness of the existing structure of the Internet is already making it incumbent upon Scientists to build a parallel internet in order to relay the information provided by the Large Hadron Collider:

If you're a fan of particle physics (and really, aren't we all?), by now you know scientists are on the verge of opening the Large Hadron Collider, which will use ultra-powerful magnets to race proton beams around a 17-mile circular underground tunnel and smash them into each other 40 million times a second.

Besides being awesome, these collisions will produce tiny particles not seen since just after the Big Bang and perhaps will enable scientists to find the elusive Higgs boson, which - if theories are correct - endows all objects with mass. The Large Hadron Collider may also help scientists figure out why all the matter in the universe wasn't destroyed by anti-matter, which would have been inconvenient for those of you who enjoy residing in a universe that isn't a great vacuum devoid of life.

Perhaps just as complicated as answering these questions of origin, however, is setting up a worldwide network capable of distributing the mountains of data produced by the seemingly infinite number of particle collisions. The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid was set up to perform this task. Data will be gathered from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which hosts the collider in France and Switzerland, and distributed to thousands of scientists throughout the world.

One writer described the grid as a "parallel Internet." Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid, which oversees the US infrastructure for the LHC network, describes it as an "evolution of the Internet." New fibre-optic cables with special protocols will be used to move data from CERN to 11 Tier-1 sites around the globe, which in turn use standard Internet technologies to transfer the data to more than 150 Tier-2 centres.

 "It's using some advanced features and new technologies within the Internet to distribute the data," Pordes says. "It's advancing the technologies, it's advancing the [data transfer] rates, and it's advancing the usability and reliability of the infrastructure." 

In the future, the Internet will be the mediator of reality for most human beings, just as the senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch are the mediators of reality for human beings now.

From Al Fin:
Kyle Munkittrick came very close to getting some key ideas right, in his piece "The AI Singularity is Dead. Long Live the Cybernetic Singularity!

As neuro-interface technology improves (hat tip Greg Fish) the information on the internet and stored in our external brains will become more expansive and more intimately connected with our nervous systems. The steps toward the Singularity will not be progressive improvement of general AI but of the gradual blending of the biological wetware of the human brain with the artificial hardware of computer technology. The Singularity will be the perfection of the mind-computer interface, such that where the mental processes of the human right-brain ends and the high-powered computer left-brain ends will be indistinguishable both externally by objective observation and internally by the subjective experience of the individual. I call this event the Cybernetic Singularity. _KM 

The Creation of  Parallel or Alternative Internets will quite literally mean we will be living Parallel realities, or alternative dimensions. The old saying, "You can't get there from here" will take on new meaning.

The public debate over the SOPA legislation is only the first volley in a battle which will become the war of the future. The war over the processing and passing of information from one mind to another. The decisions and actions that will come out of this public debate will not only effect law, but will change the nature of reality and the human mind itself.

I watch, fascinated.