How Blockchains Will Support the Next Era of Internet Free Speech

Have you noticed that powerful institutions have something of a love-hate relationship with mass communication technologies?

On the one hand, shared ideas are the key to these institutions’ power. As a result, these institutions promote and encourage these technologies as a way to share ideas they consider “right.”

But on the other, over time these technologies always wind up helping freedom of speech advocates to share other ideas the institutions consider “wrong.” Censorship attempts soon follow.

For any given technology, the struggle between free speech and censorship never really ends. With digital communications, for example, the modern authorities seem to have the upper hand for the time being, thanks to their virtually unlimited resources. Cost is not an issue — just look at the NSA Utah Data Center.

On the internet, however, free speech is set to take the upper hand in the coming years. To explain why, let’s take a quick look at an important chapter in the history of mass communications:

The printing press outgrew its regulatory oversight and support. The internet is now going through the same process.

The Gutenberg printing press, developed around 1439, enabled an unprecedented level of mass communication. The internet, whose early development began in the 1950s, continues to do the same today.

In both cases, the technologies were developed with the blessing and close oversight — if not outright regulation — of the powers of the day. In the case of the printing press, it was no accident that Gutenberg’s first publications were letters from the Pope and, famously, the Gutenberg Bible. The Church was the leading authority of the day, and Gutenberg needed to demonstrate that his priorities were in order or risk having the project fail. Similarly, the internet developed originally out of the ARPANET project originally funded by the US Department of Defense.

Three hundred years after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, the authorities were of course still interested in regulating what was printed. But the technology had spread all around Europe, and the regulatory efforts seem impractical, misguided, or just plain ridiculous to history fans today. There was a failed bill in the British House of Commons, for example, to prevent publishing improved editions of books — especially the famous Cyclopædia — because it would be unfair to purchasers of a previous edition. And then in France, the government revoked the privilège for the same book’s translation because of the secular-leaning articles therein. Therefore its editor, Denis Diderot, simply changed its location of copyright to a town across the border in Switzerland and continued to write and publish the work, which supposedly played a key role in promoting the ideas behind French Revolution.

With the internet, we have obviously come a long way over the last 60 years or so. To some extent it has taken on a life of its own. But not completely. If a modern government puts a web publisher in its crosshairs — like the French government did to Diderot in the 1750s — there is not an obvious way to avoid getting shut down. That’s because:

For the time being, ICANN DNS root name servers are the “ace in the hole” for would-be internet censors.

A internet Domain Name Server (DNS) system can be compared to an addressing system and postal network for data flowing between different locations around the network. That’s because:

1. “Real” locations on the web are all defined with so-called internet protocol (IP) numbers that no average person can realistically expect to remember. A DNS resolves IP addresses to domain names ending in .com, for example, that are more human-memorable.That’s kind of like how “real” locations in a city have GPS coordinates that are universally recognized by satellite systems — and that nobody uses in everyday, human-to-human interactions. Instead, people might use street names and numbers to describe the locations in ways other people can easily understand.
2. One DNS doesn’t necessarily have all information about a given web address. It just needs to know where to go next to get that information. Consider that when you send a letter to a friend in another city, your local post office will identify that the letter needs to go to another post office in that other city. It will let that other postal office worry about how to make the “last mile” delivery to your friend’s specific address.
3. A DNS root name server is like a Postmaster General. It oversees the entire operations and routes information in the right direction without necessarily handling the last-mile deliveries.

All that leaves the question of who, then, is responsible for overseeing DNS root name servers and by extension the entire DNS system. The answer — regarding the overwhelming majority of web domains with commonly recognizable suffixes like .com — is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is linked closely to world governments.

Therefore, if a government wants to shut down a certain website that has been named with the ICANN DNS, that government simply has to request / demand that the domain be delisted, i.e. removed from the ICANN DNS information routing system. No information could get to or from the site in that way.

Of course, ICANN does not set itself out to be a pro-censorship organization. And websites named via the ICANN DNS have made more information more freely available than at any point in known history. But if censors do want to shut down a website by unnaming it in this DNS, they have the possibility to do so.

If you would like you to publish information on a website that cannot be shut down this way, the straightforward but not-always-known solution is to name it with a so-called alternative DNS root.

An alternative DNS root allows you to register a domain that is “out of scope” of the ICANN DNS.

An alternative DNS root can be thought of as an alternative version of addressing system and postal network as outlined above.

Consider, for example, that Japan has an idiosyncratic addressing system that looks much different than that found in most Western countries. Let’s say that the Japanese system is like an alternative DNS root and the Western system is like the ICANN DNS root.

If you tried to send a letter to Japan using a Western address format complete with a street name, it just won’t work — mainly because the Japanese prefer to use plot numbers instead of street names. The whole idea doesn’t make sense because the the two systems are incompatible. That’s like if you try to access a .bit domain via the ICANN DNS. The data will not get through.

Now imagine if you named a location using the Japanese addressing system. It will be out of scope of the Western addressing system that expects to see a street name. There is no way to classify or recognize the location, much less control it. That is essentially what you are doing when you register a domain using an alternative DNS. That way, any potential internet censors cannot interfere with your web publishing via the ICANN DNS.

Therefore, alternative DNS roots create two key possibilities:

Possibility #1: With an alternative DNS you can open an additional universe of new domains co-existing alongside traditionally ICANN-only ones.

If you send a letter to the United States — with a Western format address with the street — from Japan it will probably work. That’s because the Japanese post office can recognize the country name and route the letter to the outgoing international mail box. The street address might not make sense in Japan but once it gets to the US they’ll know what to do with it. Just like an alternative DNS can “hand over” web traffic to the ICANN DNS.

This way, with the Japanese addressing system you can transmit information to locations in Japan and the United States. Likewise, you can use the alternative DNS to access locations named with both the alternative DNS and the ICANN DNS.

With the alternative DNS OpenNIC, for example, you can access a wide range of domains from peered alternative DNS’s with suffixes like .bit (from NameCoin) or .ko (for Kosovo, from New Nations) as well as traditionally ICANN-only suffixes like .com or .net.

But an alternative DNS root does not necessarily have to resolve to ICANN-named domains:

Possibility #2: With an alternative DNS root you can break the ICANN monopoly on any domain.

Let’s return to the example of sending a letter to the United States from Japan with a Western format address complete with the street.

But this time let’s imagine that the Japanese postal system did not just hand the letter off to the US postal system. Instead, it decided to send the letter somewhere according to their own independent set of rules. Likewise, an alternative DNS does not have to direct a .com or a .net domain address to the same place that the ICANN DNS does. It can direct web browsers somewhere else entirely.

In practical terms, that scenario might be confusing for anyone using the alternative DNS. In principle, though, it means that ICANN (or any other single organization) cannot shut down information flow to a given web address, regardless of its domain suffix.

If, for example, a web publisher with a well known .com website is at risk of being delisted from the ICANN DNS, that publisher may want to completely replicate or mirror — i.e. right down to the domain suffix — on another alternative DNS system.

That’s why alternative DNS roots matter. And why they will matter more as the threat of online censorship continues to grow into the future.

[Important note: accessing information published via an alternative DNS is not automatically private. Anonymous access to censorship-resistant information requires using a privacy service like hprox, a BlockStamp partner project, to open websites named with an alternative DNS.]

This threat of online censorship is also why the structure of the alternative DNS matters:

Centralized alternative DNS roots are censorship-resistant, but decentralized blockchain DNS roots are practically censorship-proof.

If it wants to badly enough, a powerful institution can take down an alternative DNS root server on one condition: there is a centralized target. Think about a town with only one post office. You can knock out its postal network by blowing up its post office. You will have all kinds of logistical, ethical, and legal complications, but if you’re powerful enough you can make it happen.

Centralized alternative DNS root servers — i.e. those with essentially the same architecture as ICANN DNS just on a smaller scale — offer this kind of centralized target for web censors. A web publisher might be able to stay one step ahead of censors by moving a website from one centralized alternative DNS root server to the next, but it will be just a question of time until a determined institution can compromise each of those DNS servers.

A decentralized DNS root server, on the other hand, cannot be taken down by attacking a single point. The addresses are stored in multiple places all across the network. Blockchains, which are essentially distributed data ledgers that no single party can alter, are a natural fit for the technical architecture of a decentralized DNS root server.

Looking ahead, we don’t have a crystal ball. But we can safely predict that powerful institutions will take an active interest in controlling the information circulating around the world. They always have and always will.

Therefore, alternative DNS roots will become more commonplace as the history of the internet unfolds. To avoid censorship of your website, you will simply switch your website over to a blockchain DNS root (which probably won’t even be considered “alternative” at that point). It will be the digital equivalent of changing the text on your copyright page to avoid censorship in the 18th century.

For the time being, switching to the other DNS requires some technical know-how. But in the coming years the process will probably just require a few clicks in your ftp client or content management system. And we’ll be amused looking back on the crude attempts to censor the internet via the ICANN DNS.

We are working hard to make this future a reality! An alternative DNS running on the BlockStamp blockchain is scheduled to go live in May 2019. Watch our progress here.

About BlockStamp:

BlockStamp is a multipurpose Bitcoin blockchain fork developed by the BlockStamp Foundation, a not-for-profit organization. Designed to promote liberty, transparency, and sovereignty in areas of the digital economy where these fundamental values are most at risk, BlockStamp hosts a radically fair gambling platform, a digital tool for transparently sealing data, and a censorship-proof internet Domain Naming System.