I think it's more likely that most people will forget that the internet was once wide open and will accept the locked down state as normal.

> I think many will stop seeing the darkweb as a place of CP and drug dealing, and more of an internet free from regulation.

You mean Tor, I presume. But Freenet is still around, although it's too risky to use it, except via Tor. And there are other overlay networks. Some basically just use VPN connections (such as tinc).

And they were always about being "free from regulation". It's just that hobbyists, activists and people into recreational drugs and CP were early adopters.

If you haven't read Vernor Vinge's True Names lately, I highly recommend it.

Hi, I'm a Freenet developer of the past ~ 10 years, so I'd like to clarify upon this :) (The project is still active, there was a release just this week!)

While there technically were indeed lawsuits in the US, the situation is not as black and white as "it's dangerous".

It is an anonymizing peer-to-peer network as well! What is dangerous under certain circumstances is only one of the three modes to use it: 1) Opennet, where Freenet uses random strangers as peers. 2) Darknet, where you only connect to peers you manually select, e.g. your friends. 3) Opennet with some Darknet peers in addition (I'll call it "mixed mode").

So Opennet allows law enforcement to connect to your Freenet potentially and thus analyze your traffic. Still, this does not mean that your Freenet will plainly tell its peers what you are downloading! Traffic is always redirected across a random number of peers, none of which tells the others who requested it - which provides plausible deniability. All traffic is encrypted, only the recipient can decrypt it. So you cannot just watch traffic and filter out illegal JPEGs or whatever.

What LEA did then is to come up some math and then claim to deduct from it that there is a certain probability that the illegal downloads were requested by the people they claim it came from. Their math is known and discussed by the Freenet core team, it may be addressed eventually - but from watching the discussion (not the math) I can say it should be taken with a grain of salt. It's not absolute proof that the claimed downloaders were in fact the downloaders. It's just a probabilistic assumption, which may possibly be wrong because the way Freenet works is rather complex (>200 000 LOC).

So as Freenet stores content encrypted on random user's machines (which is the advantage over Tor, Freenet is completely decentralized!), it is imaginable that law enforcement accusses people who did not willingly download it, but just happened to store it.

But: You can use Freenet in Darknet or mixed mode to be reasonably safe: The more of your peers are not controlled by attackers, the lower the probability that a statistical attack can be conducted.

Further, the said legal cases only happened in the US to my knowledge, and I'd argue that the legal system of that country seems a bit flawed. Outside of the US you can just run Opennet and probably be at the same risk as some random non-exit Tor node. You transport traffic which you cannot look into (because its encrypted) and store files which you cannot look into (because they are encrypted), so what's illegal about it anyway?

Further, it should be clarified that this is not a problem specific to Freenet:

ANY network which tries to be anonymous will suffer from the so-called "sybil" attack if it connects to random strangers:

If an attacker runs e.g. 100 000 machines on a network of only 1000 actual users then the probability that a single user only has connections to them is very high.

And anonymization must rely upon redirecting traffic across multiple peers - but it cannot if all peers belong to the attacker.

To my understanding Tor addresses this problem by heuristics, e.g. closely monitoring important, big machines in their network, trying to ensure they are in fact distinct entities - but that is really just guesswork, not hard mathematical security.

If Tor wanted to be truly secure it would have to add a darknet mode as well.

I should have been clear that I was talking about opennet mode. If you want to use Freenet in darknet mode, among people who know each other well, and trust each other, it's at least safer than (say) using a private torrent tracker. I mean, torrent traffic is also encrypted, these days.

It's true that you're relatively safe from adversaries, if you only use darknet mode. But there's always the possibility that one or more of your peers will get busted through some other exploit. And that they cooperate, and become informants.

But in darknet mode, you can only communicate with your peers, and can only access stuff that you and they have uploaded. If you want to communicate with the global opennet, and share stuff with it, at least one of your peers must have opennet peers. And that exposes them, at least, to adversaries.

If they get busted, and cooperate, others in the darknet are now at risk, because an adversary could use their client to probe its peers. They couldn't add other peers to the darknet, however, without some social engineering.

So anyway, it's whatever nodes that peer with the global opennet which are the main risk. And to do that safely, one can use anonymously leased throwaway VPS as gateways to the global opennet. You reach them via Tor. So if they go down, adversaries don't learn anything actionable about the darknet itself.

In recent years, investigators have been using customized clients to serve child porn, and track which peers receive it from them. For IPs in their jurisdiction, they get and execute search warrants.

Although there is arguably plausible deniability, most defendants lack the will and resources to fight. So they typically plea bargain.

Anyway, if you use Tor, they can't find you. But it's not as simple as that, really. Basically, you lease a VPS, working ~anonymously via Tor. You run a Freenet node on the VPS, and access the webGUI as a Tor onion service. They can take down the VPS, if they like, but won't know who was using it.

Traffic is not just obfuscated, it is encrypted. Sure, you see the IP of a peer which transfers stuff across your client - but you do not know what the stuff is as it is encrypted.

So the IP address is worthless unless you figure out a way to guess what the stuff is, and who requested is.

See my other reply in this thread for further details.

As far as "who requested" the stuff, as you say in your other reply, they have some statistical arguments. I agree with the Freenet Project that they're very likely bullshit.

However, if you're facing criminal charges, you'd better have resources for expert testimony to discredit their arguments. And if you don't, accepting a plea bargain may be the best option. Even if you are truly innocent.

But generally, I'd rather avoid having a warrant served, and my stuff impounded. So advertising my IP address as a Freenet node seems like a dumb move.

If the dark web becomes popular though, won't the same people try to regulate it?

They could make .onion link illegal for ISPs to load and kill it overnight.

"People who use the darknet usually are up to no good. This simple realization should be reflected in our legal system."

and

"I understand why the darknet can be useful in autocratic systems. But in a free and open democracy, in my opinion, there is no legitimate use."

It's super difficult to build a low latency mix-net that covertly works inside an adversarial network.

In addition to the current models over which onion/garlic routing are based upon you would (at least) need to add to the core of your software traffic obfuscation, a series of covert channels, NAT bypass, ...

Tor and other mix networks simplify the problem assuming that there's a portion of the Internet that is free and introducing censorship circumvention mechanisms.

Of course, the assumption is increasingly untrue.

In this case, it helps if the evil US military actually does use Tor :)

480 000 000 000 000 bits / 86400 sec = 5555.56 mbit/s

And you can send as many boxes as you like in parallel.

I fondly remember conversations on AmiNet - an Amiga - dedicated FTN network.

That was all done over PSTN with 9600 - 19200 bps modems. Latency was days. All this didn't preclude massive amounts of collaboration over it.

I'd rather question if lower latency delivers any benefit.

I imagine that in practice the postal service may start to decline your custom somewhere around the quintillion-box mark, or perhaps even before...

What if a billionaire launched a constellation of low earth satellites which provided Internet?

They're not, regardless of medium, the same cops and IP lawyers can get on it and track down people to arrest and sue according to whatever laws are on the books, good or bad.

What if this satellite Internet service is a multinational corporation, with the directly owning entities based in Russia and China? Or perhaps Sweden? Part of a conglomerate under the ultimate control of a corporation on Mars?

I think we'll definitely have crossed some threshold when we have our first extradition from a different gravity well.

Today, if people in Russia or China run the servers there isn't much the EU can do (see: scihub and the US, for a long time piratebay too). You don't need a massive indestructible satellite constellation for that.

I'd also add that a billionaire isn't the criteria you're looking for here even if it was a policy targeting the people running the wire. It's a foreign government with sufficient military power to deter the US from arresting you, and sufficient technological power to set up such a network. Maybe it's a Russian Billionaire who launches them in your hypothetical, but it's the Russian government who provides the security that allows him to do that.

I was imagining containerized server clusters in low earth orbit as well, with the ability to rapidly export the entire state of servers across super high bandwidth laser links. Everything would be done remotely, and the corporations running them would also be in Russia, China, Mars, etc.

(Containerized in the sense of hardware in a shipping container, not Docker, though that would play a role as well.)

The latency can be huge when we have less-that-optimal conditions.

Since the throughput is low and the latency high, it's not streaming-video capabl. A buddy downloads a load of movies to an ssd and drops that off every now and then.

For real-time news I use an actual radio. There are some good news and music stations in the area.

I have an offline copy of the spanish language wikipedia.

Sounds like the 21st century version of Samizdat :)