Rich people want to control everything by locking down the internet. It’s time to create another form of connectivity that doesn’t rely on national infrastructure. I have no idea what that is, but it’s the only way to ensure our freedom.
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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another form of connectivity that doesn’t rely on national infrastructure. I have no idea what that is
l can tell you.
It's the internet in its original form. A distributed network of independent nodes freely peering to each other over a decentralized infrastructure.
First to go was the decentralization.
Main knots like DE-CIX are now the central connection points and single point of failure (and intrusion).
Next went the independent distribution with hyperscalers taking over.
Currently the free peering is about to disappear.
E.g. my provider, a major one here in Germany, just announced to completely remove from free public peering and let a private company handle it for him instead.
This company then charges other peers based on bandwidth.
The problem of looming governmental restrictions is just the tip of the iceberg.
The internet is already rotten from the infrastructural core and there is no easy way around that...
Exactly this.
My humble approach to counter this development is self-hosting as much as I can for myself, my family and my friends. That includes everything useful from bookmark managers, media servers, file sharing, photo libraries and even a kiwix server for offline wikipedia etc.
That is great and I do the same (shoutout to my local NAS) and I also try to improve situation outside of my family by running a TOR server since things started to significantly deteriorate 20 years ago or so.
But that are just "waterdrops on hot stones" and have no impact on the 99% of people who don't have the means or expertise to do likewise.
Main focus must be to steer politics away from deciding such laws and to implement regulation against monopolies and closed infrastructure instead. I know that's tedious and probably neverending work, but the only viable long-term option I see.
The Internet can grow from its roots again. It started out with two nodes connecting to each other. Run a link to your friend. Wired or microwave link. In 75 years we might have a whole second internet going on. :D
We already have Internet2
“An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices”. “Meshtastic® is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!”
I tried to invent a similar concept before finding out that there are already several implementations 😅
It lacks the bandwidth for actual Internet use unfortunately.
The Internet used to lack the bandwidth for actual Internet use. Let's go back to html and small css files at most for private websites.
I used to do everything on a 2400 baud modem (though admittedly it sucked pretty hard until 28.8k).
Yeah I wasn’t gonna over explain but the intended use here is not live streaming. I’d go for a mesh trickle request and wait for it to download to your local node type of thinking.
Patience.
I suppose the use case would be for journalists, distributing banned books, and so on - pure text-based information. However, video footage is extremely useful in today's media environment - how many current events do we see first from some tiktok or twitter video, rather than nightly news?
Until that gets regulated, too.
I mean I'm all for it but I don't see how it can gain popularity yet remain out of the law's reach.
Meshnet decentralized platforms.
They can’t control everything if they don’t know who or where we are.
It's as if the USA and UK are locked in a perpetual "hold my beer" moment with their legislation.
Then again, Europe is also pushing some boundaries with it's chat snooping laws.
A bad time to be an internet user really...
A bad time to be alive really...
Better than being dead though.
I'm not so sure lately
I feel like a lot of my European (EU citizen) friends are commentating from some high horse but in reality I feel European lawmakers are just watching how this plays out before deciding to follow suit.
Thank God I'm not in the USA, but it gradually gets worse everywhere.
The moment the average Joe could access the net, was the begin of its downfall. And it hurts me to see one of the greatest inventions of all time to get more shitty day by day.
Also, VPNs might be outlawed, but that just means vpns for the masses. If you throw money at the problem, you'd still have a VPN. Doesn't even need to be much money, though that's relative.
If you throw money at the problem, you’d still have a VPN.
Heavily depends on what "outlawed" means.
I am certainly capable of implementing low cost workarounds to purely technical anti-VPN-measures, but certainly would not risk going to jail just for trying it.
Essentially boils down to the old saying:
"If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."
Fair point. Though using a PC you rent someplace foreign can't be outlawed. Not even in the US. I'd argue the ban would be the usual kind that just has a list of banned IPs which are "shared devices". Everything else would be death for all companies and whatnot. For me a reason to emigrate.
The moment billionaires coopted the internet was when it went downhill. They knew the threat it posed, the vision of the early cypherpunks, and made sure the internet wouldn't do that to their power.
Decentralization and accessibility are good things. Elitism and exclusionary practices do nothing good.
Wouldn't even pin the early problems on the billionaires. Every corpo smelled money in the net. Every scammer and similar dirtbag. That, in combination with the average joe being able to "surf" was a bad combo. Like everything else where a clueless mass meets greed.
The net is great, i love it. don't get me wrong. Decentralization was kinda a core of the net. Usenet, IRC...everything was great, simple, redundant and fool-proof (i mean, it's still there and kicking). Even google was great when they emerged.
I think we need some kind of limiting principle applied to restrict what individual jurisdictions can do to fuck up national or global systems.
Overzealous lawmakers in Michigan or Wisconsin shouldn't be able to force global companies to operate their websites differently.
California shouldn't be able to force Glock to discontinue and re-tool its entire product line, etc.
By the same logic social issues would be distributed to the states, civil rights. Which is what's happening now. The interstate commerce act is a stroke of brilliance tbh, it allows the states to work as a greater system without there being a patchwork of laws and regulations. I don't think dropping it would be wise just because we've reached this level of stupidity... time to suffer consequences.
Agree with you on network protocols. Your physical product example is bad.
Fucking idiots!
Lawmakers ~~Want to Ban VPNs—And They~~ Have No Idea What They're Doing
At least where I'm from. Can't imagine it being different elsewhere.
Yes, keep taking more and more away from people who have nothing to lose and nothing to live for.
I'm sure that will end well for them and their families.
I can‘t wait to get arrested for connecting to my PC via SSH because geriatric lawmakers are too far up their own ass and want to enslave everyone else. Yay!