It's time to build our own Internet

It's time to build our own Internet

Mirjana Čutura There are now more people addicted to Facebook than there are tobacco users worldwide - 1.2 billion daily active users of Facebook. Now, that number alone scares me, but it's when I'm in a bus or a train that I look around and I'm able to see it. It doesn't matter what city I'm in or what country, everywhere I go, I can see it.

I was born in the '80s, and when I was a kid, people would ask me, "André, what are you going to be when you grow up?" And I would think, "Uh, astronaut or how about bobsleigh racer?" Which is that winter Olympics car thing. I thought that would be awesome. But it never occurred to me - I couldn't even imagine that I would become a mobile app developer.

That's how fast technology moves.

A person can't even plan their own career. And you know, technology brings a lot of innovation and a lot of efficiency, but it's also bringing a lot of problems, and we're just starting to understand what those problems are. A person born in 2018 is born into a world of monitoring and control. A world without freedom. Even though it looks like we're free.

And it has all to do with the internet and the structures and the company involved in the internet. The internet is like a huge iceberg, and the visible part are these phones and laptops. We see them all the time. But underwater, there's a lot more going on. And if you want to understand the problems of the internet, we need to look underwater.

So, how does it work? If I send an email to a friend in another city, does my phone directly talk through radio waves to my friend's phone? No. First, your phone is communicating with the telecom tower nearby, and that tower is then plugged to internet cables in this region. Those cables are then connected to undersea cables that often go to another continent - in other words, America.

And in that continent, those cables are connected to a data center, which is a warehouse full of computers, servers owned by a company. Let's say Amazon or Google or Facebook or others. So, that's where your email is. And it zaps all the way back from those undersea cables back to your friend. So, this is the internet: a global structure of undersea cables and data centers.

And it's all happening all the time. They are going back and forth across the planet. And it's this structure which is creating a foundation for systems of control.

For instance, we have learned from the Snowden leaks of 2013 that surveillance and intelligence agencies are wiretapping those undersea cables so they know where each message is coming from or where it's going. Also sharks find those cables kind of tasty.

They like to bite them. And it, kind of, creates some problems sometimes, but it's not that serious. Governments have a button to shut down the internet in their country. Now, it's rarely used, but it has been used in Brazil, which is my country. WhatsApp is used by 100 million Brazilians daily to talk to friends and family but also for local business.

So, it's important for their economy. So, they do everything through WhatsApp. And one day, someone was using WhatsApp for criminal activity. And as part of the investigation, a judge ordered the app to be shut down in the whole country for three days. No one could use it for any purpose.

They have that power, and they use it. Not just governments but also companies have a similar type of power. We have learned how the social platforms can be abused for elections and politics.

But also on a more basic level, they could shut down your account. And I want you to imagine that, you know, they could shut your account down, okay, not someone else's.

Because this has happened to my sister. She had a normal Facebook page where she shared advice on personal financing: how to invest, how to save. Basic content, original content. One day, she woke up, and her page was banned. No apparent reason, so she read the terms of service to figure out what's going on.

It's still not clear, Why was she banned? And there's nothing that she can do to fix this. So, maybe it's time for us to create our own internet. But how are we going to do that? I mean, are we going to pass cables from one continent to another?

This is a huge infrastructure project. We can't just do it as people. But there's nice news here. The technology industry has accidentally, maybe not intentionally, invented all of the innovation and tools that we need for building our own internet. This is actually possible.

A couple of communities around the world are doing this kind of thing where they connect to each other. In New York, a 13-year-old started a community called NYC Mesh, where they set up antennas and routers on the rooftops of buildings, and they point those to other buildings, and they create one huge city WiFi. You could take this idea even further and connect cities to other cities to create a huge regional WiFi.

 

And that's what's going on now with Guifi.net in Catalonia in Spain.

Just connecting multiple cities across many kilometers. So, this is a possibility, but these regional WiFi networks, they are also connected to those undersea cables, which are then connected to the data centers. So, but here's a nice property: is that if the internet goes off or the companies do something and their systems go off, this network would still stay alive, and you could use it to talk with people within that network. Now, you wouldn't use a mainstream social network for that because, you know, that depends on the data centers on the other side of the world, but you could use custom software that is meant for that purpose inside that network. There are software now being built for this kind of things.

One of them is from a programmer in New Zealand called Dominic Tarr, who lives on a boat. Now, he lives on a boat, so he doesn't have stable internet. But he still wants to be connected to his friends, so he had an idea that, "OK, when I'm in the city and I have WiFi, what if I would download my friends latest comments and save them on my computer? So then, when I'm in a boat and I have peace, I can read those comments, and I could also write my own comments on my computer, as a file.

When I go back to the city, I can upload those comments and my friends can see them." It was an idea that worked out pretty well. He built it. It's an open-source and free social network, and a couple of thousand people around the world are using it today as a real social network. And it works for computers. So, I thought, you know, this is great.

I want to help somehow. I'm a mobile app developer, and I'm helping bring this for mobile.

And it's a normal social network, and it works. But now here's a catch: how are we going to compete with the mainstream social networks and the internet? Because, you know, honestly, we have internet connection all the time, and everybody's on these mainstream social networks.

But here's the thing: that's our case; that's not the case for everybody on the planet.

There's still four billion people that don't have internet connection. And one of these real cases is in the Amazon Rainforest, where indigenous communities there are facing threats from illegal activity from companies that are doing logging, mining and oil contamination. So, their situation's that their waters are being contaminated and their livelihood is at risk. So, they need to map all of those cases in their region where that is happening, and one of the solutions is with paper maps.

But they need to coordinate this, you know, between all those villages.

If they had stable internet, they could use something like Google Docs or Google Maps to collaborate with this. But they don't have that. But that's exactly what a non-profit from the United States called Digital Democracy is helping them. They're building software for collaborative mapping that works without the internet.

And this has worked well for them. They are collaborating also with local communities like the Alianza Ceibo in Ecuador and the Wapichana in Guyana. So, it works for them, and it works on computers.

They take these USB drives, and they walk around from one village to the other updating what was the latest changes to the maps. Now, you know, USB drives are old-fashioned, but as we speak, they are setting up wireless antennas on the treetops to create one huge regional WiFi.

And they're also writing software for phones so they can have a way of doing that through their phones. So, they're creating essentially their own internet there and their own software for collaborating. Now, this approach is useful not only in the Amazon Rainforest but also in Africa and South Asia, where still four billion people have no internet.

And companies like Google and Facebook are trying to bring internet to these people. But here's the thing: people don't need internet; people need interconnectivity, right?

People need to talk to each other. They don't need to be connected to the undersea cables and the data centers, right? So, and we know how to do that. With examples like Guifi.net from Catalonia in Spain, we know how to create huge regional networks.

And we know how to create software for these regional networks. So now, with our own infrastructure, we can be free from the control of governments. And with our own software, we can be free from the control of companies. People, this is actually possible. And it's happening right now.

Can you imagine that this movement would grow and come to every city in the world to create an internet made of freedom? In my view, it's going to be such a beautiful thing. Thank you.

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