There is no Internet.
Just somebody else’s intranet
Contrary to popular belief: You do NOT have internet access!
Unless you accessed the internet back in the 90s, you likely don’t have internet access.
WHAT? What do you mean I have no access to the internet??? I’m reading this post right now on the internet right?
WRONG.
Most likely, you are reading this with a computer that is just leasing an internet connection from an ISP, and they just gave you an internal address that is only addressable on their own internal network. (its 192.168.x.x. or 10.x.x.x)
The analogy would be that you are just renting a room on the second floor of a brownstone, and the landlord who lives on the first floor is the one that has the keys to the mailbox. He collects the mail and then gives it to you. You have no ability to have mail delivered directly to your room without it going through the landlord, I mean, you could try to put the following on an envelope:
102 42nd Street, Verrazano Bridge, Brooklyn NY 10104 (2nd floor room to the left).
But the mailman would just think that was cute and still leave mail at the main mailbox of the house. It would still be up to the landlord to collect all the mail, and hand it to you at your room upstairs.
This is essentially the situation that most people have today with their internet access. They say they own a house, when in truth they are just renting a room. And like just being a renter, you cannot setup a business in your room, you cannot start selling apple pies, or have any sort of store front. Because you don’t actually own the address.
How did something originally envisioned as the peer to peer networking for the world end up just becoming a digital fiefdom where digital landlords ended up running the show?
Simple. We ran out of addresses with IPv4
With IPv4, there were only 4billion or so addresses to hand out, and while that may seem like a lot of addresses, it falls drastically short due to the inefficient way they were divided up and handed out (For instance there were only 126 class A networks, each of size 16.7million hosts, many of which are not being used by the select 126 companies they were given to — how many companies do you know have 16+million computers?), and also simply because when machines started needing their own IP addresses with the advent of IoT, there wasn’t enough global addresses for everyone AND their toasters, cars, phones, and TVs at the same time.
So we ended up moving to a model where your ISP is leasing you use of their public address, and they are simply forwarding your communications to you. As most people don’t run servers or web pages in their own home, this tradeoff didn’t seem like a problem at first…
When I was in University, the computers there had real internet access, meaning the internet address that my terminal had was addressable from the outside internet. I didn’t use it to run a server or anything, but the ability to telnet directly to other machines, connect to them, set the DISPLAY env to use the remote terminal, and then to change the background on their screens as a prank was glorious. I remember being able to directly address any computer at the whole campus as somewhat of a superpower. These days, many people because they have grown up in a world where the internet is simply “Netflix or YouTube or Instagram” access, they have never experienced what it meant to be truly P2P, and by that being able to run peer to peer communications and applications where you send data directly to the other side.
For those of you old enough to have owned 14.4k USRobotics modem, you will remember the times when you could literally call your friends modem (using their phone number) and then have the modems connect to each other, and then you could set your terminal to just send your keystrokes (with echo on) through to the COM port and you would see characters pop up on your screen as sent from the other side. I was like a digital walkie-talkie, complete with talking over each other being a problem. This was real time and the closest we have gotten to this is what Google did with GWave. This kind of communication allowed for true multi user real-time applications, and not since the early 2000s has this been explored outside of games.
We have a lost generation where people were trained to give up their solidarity and hide behind a companies servers and firewalls. We have stifled ideas and innovation behind a NAT (Network Address Translation) layer, giving a false sense of security while removing one of the main reasons why people wanted to get on the internet in the first place. Peer to Peer.
What does Peer-to-Peer mean actually?
Simply it means there is no set server/client relationship. A client can itself be a server, and vice versa. There doesn’t need to be ONE centralized Facebook server, because anyone can serve up their own personal profile to whoever on the internet asks for it. There is no need to have massive email databases and caches where Google or Apple hoard all your mail, and you just get access to it when you need — you could keep your own mail and data yourself.
There is no such thing as “the cloud” there is just somebody else’s datacenter — someone wise on the internets
In a sense the push towards the centralized cloud was driven by the fact that people could not host their own data (or didn’t want to manage it), but the tragedy for the people that did want to manage their own data they couldn’t because the fact that they could not advertise it while only using a private address on their ISPs intranet. Whether or NAT (ha!) this precipitated the move to cloud data centres and centralized compute as a commodity resource we will never know. But it certainly has resulted in cloud based companies like Amazon, Google, and Dropbox to make a lot of money and companies like Meta and twitter to be able to easily steal all your data. After all, if people couldn’t host their data themselves, then in steps a solution like Facebook to host it for you.
The world will never know what would have happened if IPv6 became available earlier along with the development of decentralized protocols and standards for sharing personal data. Perhaps we wouldn’t have the big data farming problem we have today.
One thing is for sure, until you get onto IPv6 and have your own address, you really can’t say you are on the internet, you are just on someone else’s INTRAnet.
