Alternet.md

# Goal

Censorship on the Internet is on the rise. From Article 13 in the EU,  to
Australian ISPs banning websites, advertisers and payment processors banning or
"unpersoning" certain people due to political activity, etc. So, should we sit
in silence and watch in horror as the beautiful thing that we know as the
Internet is slowly taken away until you are only allowed to say what governments
and advertisers and big tech companies want you to say? Shouldn't we be able to
be critical of issues like  immigration, income, human rights and discrimination
without being persecuted  by the police for doing so (often under the cover of
"preventing hate speech")?

The current model of the Internet is not built to resist these actors. In order
to run a website and get your information out, you need someone willing to host
your content, you need to make money as your site gets more popular. Therefore,
you need money to host your site and therefore, advertisers have a huge say in
what content your website is allowed to publish - if you don't say the right
things, they might pull out.

However, the Internet has two fundamental benefits that are not exploited
enough: First, it is very cheap and fast to transfer data from one computer to
another and second, there are a lot of people  connected to it and information
can spread and be copied quickly. So let's presume we'd want to  capitalize on
those properties - would it be possible to build an alternative Internet - an
"Alternet"?

# Idea

The Alternet must be developed with a special type of browser. Each client
machine (later referred to as "node") **must** "pay" for accessing the Alternet
by giving a certain amount of disk space and processing power, let's say 10MB of
disk space. In these 10MB, the browser stores incoming data from other nodes,
similar to a torrenting system. Since the growth of the Alternet also increases
the amount of (collective) disk space (since everyone is forced to give up a
certain amount of  disk space for collective use), this solves the problem of
web hosting.

Some of this stored material might be illegal. This means that everyone who uses
the browser could technically a criminal - however, that is where the power of
the  Alternet comes into play. If only a few thousand users use the browser, it
will be impossible to arrest people for using the browser, simply because police
resources will be stretched too thin - you cannot arrest hundreds of thousands
of people, the bureaucracy of the police is not there. The only way to resist
censorship is to act as a collective force - if everyone is a criminal, then
nobody is.

Second, in the hypothetical implementation of such a browser, the information
will get passed on from node to node after a few minutes, similar to a P2P or
torrenting system. Third, the data is distributed as packets - there might be a
law agains distributing  "certain images and video", but there is no law that
can prohibit distributing only parts of an image or parts of a video (or single
data packets) - unless the entire  Internet gets shut down, which will very
likely not happen.

Fourth, the browser will have absolute security - so even if the police bust
down ones door, there will be (a) no evidence, as closing the browser
immediately zeroes and deletes the  10MB of disk space securely, so that even
forensic agencies can't get what data was actually stored on the device. By the
time the police arrives at your door, the data is already copied onto 25 other
nodes and deleted from your machine, so what are they gonna do? And (b), the
data gets submitted in fragments, not whole packages. For example the text of a
website can come from a different node than an image. So the goal is not to
never break the law, the goal is just to not get caught by being faster than the
police can even process that you've done anything illegal.

The 10MB of disk space essentially act like viruses or worms used to: Copy the
content onto as many computers as possible, then delete the oldest content and
wait for new data, similar to a ring buffer, pushing out the oldest entry to
make place for the newer content.

# Creating websites on the Alternet

For the price you pay to get on the Alternet (the 10MB of disk space), you get
something in return as a creator: The ability to get your own webspace and URL
for free, without having to pay anything. Each creator gets 10MB in return and a
simple HTML editor built into the browser. Creators can register their domains
on a blockchain-like system in a first-come-first-serve system (see below), then
they get a public and a private key (necessary to verify in a distributed P2P
internet that they are actually the owner of said domain).

The browser then asks for the private key and allows the user to edit his site.
The goal is not to have anything fancy with cool styling, but just a system to
get news, updates and data out in a way that cannot be censored by big tech or
governments. Then, the browser signs these changes and sends them out to
connected nodes.

When a browser wants to access a URL, it asks all connected nodes whether they
know the public key of said URL, once that key is found it will ask all nodes
for the data fragments (such as text, images, etc.) that belong to that public
key. Part of the 10MB of collective disk space will be used as a "distributed
DNS", in order to look up the IP adresses of connected nodes. Each node only
know about the nodes that are directly connected to it, similar to the Tor
network, except that there is no clear "exit node", since every client is both
an routing node and an exit node (i.e. storing actual content).

# Drawbacks

The main drawback of this browser is data integrity, data retention and
performance (due to a high number of network requests). Second, the webspace for
each creator is limited and it should be limited how many times per day updates
are possible - plus each domain needs to be locked to a physical machine, in
order to prevent spam or a bot taking away all URLs. Each user gets at most one
URL, one bit of webspace.

Data retention can be solved by "bookmarking" - i.e. a user can indicate that he
wants to permanently save a piece of content to his hard drive. There is a
possibility that things on the Alternet get lost - however, the concept is that
"if at least one person has a copy of the data, then it is not deleted". By
bookmarking or permanently saving sites, important information can be saved and
archived in an instant.

Performance is certainly a problem, but can be solved by (a) restricting the
browser to only text, images, audio and video, not allowing any JavaScript or
similar technologies that are also very error-prone to implement and (b) by
using the P2P system as essentially a distributed CDN -  people which have
access to higher bandwidth get prioritized in URL queries.

Last but not least, there is likely no way for such a system to make money
(since that would  need the help of payment processors and therefore advertisers
that would influence the balance of the system). However, making money is not
the goal of such a browser, that sort of thing can be kept on the Clearnet. The
goal is to provide a baseline messaging system for people to  get content out,
not to be particularly pretty or attractive for business users.