Since Ajit Pai deems our lovely internet to be nothing but a tool for making money and screwing the customer, and in support of free speech, I am wondering about how hard it would be to create our own, publicly setup, maintained, and run… internet/network. I’m thinking covering the entire country. This was inspired by a pringles can network vid I watched years ago. Would it be possible to enlist people across the country to setup hardware (costs minimal) and thereby enable networking for all? Since my networking skills are not great I’m asking here. If it looks even semi-reasonable I think I may try to start a kickstarter for it. Which would probably also be its own hype, both good and bad.
There are groups out there who are trying to achieve just that. Google freifunk wifi, nyc mesh and tomesh.
Basically what they do is setup point to point wifi routers.
There are some programs that are trying to achieve the encrypted peer to peer network: IPFS, onion, etc. I know IPFS have been used on the WIFI mesh.
thats nonsense
What is even public in this context? Government funded or “citizen” funded
The internet is vastly more complex than simply a mesh network across neighborhoods, you need back haul, you need trained technicians to maintain the network, nationwide is not a goal that can be achieved by hobbyists. This also requires everyone involved to be at least somewhat a hobbyist which is impractical at best.
The reason the internet is controlled by multi billion corporations is because they have the infrastructure and manpower to maintain it.
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Whilst it is technically possible to create an ‘alternet’ the main obstacle is lack of content. Sure, you can get a free wireless connection to Bob the Grocer down the street, or in the next town, but why would you want to?
For better or for worse, the Internet is primarily inhabited by mindless drones that seek free entertainment to fill the massive voids in their meaningless lives. It wasn’t that way before AOL, but it is that way now. Drones have no interest in producing content — they just want to consume content. They also don’t want to pay for it.
So, if you want an ‘alternet’ to succeed, it needs to be popular, which means it needs to offer something to drones. How do you cover the recurring infrastructure expenses of an ‘alternet’ — that is populated by mindless, freeloading drones — without inevitably turning to organisations with resources, a profit-motive, and a desire to milk your user-base out of every penny they’ve got?
A Kickstarter is a ‘one-and-done’ type of fund-raising affair. An ‘alternet’ has substantial monthly expenses that go on forever. You can’t fund the latter with the former.
If anyone ever manages to create an ‘alternet’ it will be because they have solved the drone problem. If you want to create an ‘alternet’, you need to solve the drone problem.
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This is really shitty. Don’t call people drones because their interests are different than yours.
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I actually defined the term ‘drone’. If you don’t agree with the definition, then you are free to argue in a different thread, or substitute your own politically-correct definition. Also, there’s no need to use foul language.
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Henlo 
Lets all relax here. To be honest when there is a dire need for something people will make things happen. People do proactively make networks for themselves. I am in fact part of a Internet over HAM BBS service.
http://www.arrl.org/internet-ham-radio
https://winlink.org/
Theres no youtube etc but what I will say is the people I speak to on there for the most part don’t slam on other people unless its healthy debate and for the most part its sharing of ideas etc.
Large scale kickstarter operation probably wont be feasible however if you want something bad enough you can get it done.
To be honest you could even write your own internet protocol over TCP/IP
with enough skill and time you could even write a sophisticated protocol wink wink that is your own “internet”
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You brought it up here, deal with it.
Funny, this is exactly why these forums don’t grow much.
Sorry to all who have a real interest in the topic, but this does not help.
The really amusing bit is that I would’ve agreed completely with the rest, but the dehumanizing aspect of the post just ruined everything else.
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Let’s all just calm down and turn this ship back around and back on topic. No need to go to verbal war against each other.
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Creating a protocol/layer on top of the existing Internet doesn’t solve the problem that, ultimately — as more and more people use it — increasing amounts of traffic will incur real costs to the folks that provide the underlying infrastructure. The owners of that infrastructure will then identify what/who is responsible, and those responsible will then be given the option to either start shouldering their share of the costs or shut down. Aaaaaand we’re back at square one.
Most ‘solutions’ that work (“can fly under the radar”) with a small number of participants, are unable to scale without being detected and held to account.
A 2012 Forbes article titled “How Much Does The Internet Cost To Run?” estimated the cost at $100–200 billion per year. Hundreds. Of. Billions. Per. Year.
A public, open-source Internet would cost a similar amount to maintain (not construct, just maintain).
Even if people ‘donated’ 99% of the infrastructure and labour, where are you going to get over $1,000,000,000 each and every year to cover the remaining 1% and keep the thing running?
According to Statista, the most successful Kickstarter ever (Pebble Time) raised $20.34 million. So, if you went the crowd-funding route, you would need to beat the most successful Kickstarter in history by a factor of ~50x each and every year just to keep the network running. I don’t see much chance of that happening.
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As soon as it’s public and useful it falls under some government interest.
uncesorable could maybe be a thing to strive for… use more tor.
So it would have to be completely private — owned and operated by the people that use it.
The only way to do that is via voluntary contract… so one would have to waive rights to common law (ahem) “protections” by signing a contract prior to joining the network. That would, by definition, mean that ‘minors’ could not use the network.
One way to make sure the network was financially viable would be to implement a pure user-pays system for billing. You would need to pay for every single byte of data that you transfer. That would prohibit freeloaders from abusing the system and exploiting the good will of others. “Unlimited” accounts would not (could not) exist.
“Bill Shock” would be a common occurrence unless/until folks got used to the idea of carefully monitoring their usage.
Interestingly, a user-pays funding system would discourage users from (re-)visiting bloated, media-rich websites, which would encourage their publishers to develop more lightweight websites. That would not only improve performance, but it would also improve accessibility for mobile nodes of the network. That would be A Good Thing™ as far as I’m concerned, and a refreshing change from current trends.
As others have mentioned, on a small scale this is kind of feasable.
@oxbird mentioned alternate protocols, independent mesh networks. Also municipal ISPs can work on a bigger scale.
However, there is no good way to guarantee that such an alternate internet stays independend and has enough funding to work long term and on a large scale.
If I may, let me propose an alternate solution:
Warning: slightly off topic and political
Get a large number of people interested and lobby for an open Internet. Yes, big money interests are influencing politics and will argue the opposite case. But by design, the people have the power in a Democracy. I’m not saying it’s easy, however building a new internet from scratch isn’t easy either.
(I hope this isn’t too far off topic, I’ll remove the post if someone thinks it does not belong here.)
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Wouldn’t the solution be to start your own ISP, rather than trying to get the municipality to do so?
Maybe making it non-profit would help attract subscribers who are skeptical of just-another-company?
Unless you are big enough (Tier 1), you still end up paying someone like Cogent/Level3 for peering, but isn’t that better than dealing with Comcast/Spectrum?
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Sure, if it works. The problem might be getting all the permits though because you will need your own infrastructure in the long run. A municipality has it way easier with the permits.
if 5g doesnt give us all cancer, we might have a chance
TL;DR Your source isn’t determining cost to run the internet, just costs that we pay for other companies to do it.
If you are looking at revenues for the big ISPs and other major players in the space, Yes, we pay upwards of $200B/year to fund these big companies, 2017 showed Comcast as having revenues for High Speed Internet at just 14 Billion.
Charter Communications (owns Spectrum Internet) boasts an Internet revenue of 3.3 billion, (https://newsroom.charter.com/press-releases/charter-announces-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2017-results/)
This covers the majority of US Broadband internet Subscribers.
This doesn’t cover everything, but so far the majority of the internet costs are less than $20 Billion/year. Now, if you take into consideration these companies are also using the revenue for TV and in some cases Voice connectivity to fund their businesses. We can add those numbers in and we still get far less than $100 Billion /year.
The Net income of both of these companies jumped significantly in 2017 due to some tax cuts dropping the tax rate from 35% to 21%.
Now, I’m not saying all this to encourage the possibility of creating this Public Open Source Internet.
I’m merely pointing out the costs to run these businesses is far less than that article you referenced would have one believe.
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Which is why I pre-emptively dealt with that whole issue by saying “Even if people ‘donated’ 99% of the infrastructure and labour, where are you going to get over $1,000,000,000 each and every year to cover the remaining 1% and keep the thing running?”
Point being: The numbers are so massive, that even if you ‘wave a magic wand’ and make nearly all of them disappear, you’re still talking billions of dollars per year for maintenance. If you can’t cover $1bn/yr then it makes no difference whatsoever if the ‘actual’ cost is $200bn, $100bn, $50bn, $20bn, $10bn, $5bn, $2bn, or even $1,234,567,890.42. Pedantry doesn’t change anything.
An ‘alternet’ is just not financially viable without tapping into some very, very deep pockets — and the owner of those pockets would expect something in return. That would lead us, essentially, to the same situation we’re already in (and which the OP is unhappy with).
The only way I can think of to avoid ‘unwanted’ commercial influence is to implement a pure user-pays model for financing the whole thing.
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Where do you think all that revenue comes from currently?
There are local utility co-ops all over the USA. They operate quite well.
Open Source doesn’t mean it’s “Free as in free beer”
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