The Next Internet War

Yeah, it's gonna be glorious.

While the European Commission was voting to pass the “ChatControl” initiative, I was here trying to figure out why my new cjdns-over-websocket code was not working correctly. I did get it working, more on that later.

I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on the details of ChatControl, the KIDS act, the Online Safety Act and other initiatives being adopted throughout the NATO-Washington Empire, except to point out that this is all trans-nationally coordinated. You’re not voting your way out of this - because the level where this policy direction was decided doesn’t even officially exist.

This sudden push to regulate the internet, eliminate anonymity, and undermine privacy is almost certainly because the administrative class has realized that The Deal which defined the internet - free speech in exchange for mass surveillance - has not worked out the way they had hoped. So now they’re trying to renege on their end of it.

There are three possible ways this could play out. Perhaps they’ll realize that what they’re trying to do is infeasible - but if they were that self-aware then they wouldn’t where they are now. Perhaps at the other extreme, they might actually go for broke and try to shut down the internet - save for their surveillance system. But such a plan is not only risky, but unpredictably risky, in that there’s no way to know a priori what the biggest risks will be. Since the administrative class has shown themselves to be nothing if not risk-averse, it’s highly unlikely they’ll pursue this avenue either.

The most likely scenario will be a tepid middle ground where enforcement is spotty and unpredictable, and the only websites to eagerly comply will be those large centralized sites that were carrying water for the regime already. Centralized social media will hemorrhage users who either can’t or won’t present ID, niche communities will ignore the regulation or shut down, and decentralized networks will experience a golden age unlike anything we’ve seen since The P2P War.

What about China

Every western think-tankie is undoubtedly looking at China as a model for internet censorship. In China, international social media is largely blocked, and domestic social media is required to collect real names - something they do using login-by-phone.

This works for two reasons, firstly that’s the way the internet was introduced there so most Chinese people never knew anything different. But second and more importantly, China is roughly an ethnostate so most ethnic Chinese have the opinion that the Chinese government exists more or less for their benefit.

Western countries by contrast, are roughly the opposite of ethnostates, with governments continuously stirring the pot of ethnic tensions, air-dropping new ethnic groups into communities, and changing the rules in their caste system of protected minority groups. While this may have prevented any nativist power bloc from emerging to challenge them, it certainly didn’t help their popularity. All across the political spectrum, the one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that the government is hell-bent on fucking over them and their group specifically.

As a result, we can expect that willing compliance will be effectively zero, and popular reactions will range from casual resistance to performative civil disobedience and protest. It’s important to recognize here that China’s firewall is not air-tight so it depends significantly on the consent of the people to work. In fact no air-tight national firewall has ever been deployed in any country. Even North Korea - the poster-child of information authoritarianism - did not do this, they just forwent digitization entirely.

The P2P War

Around 25 years ago Napster released the first popular P2P file sharing service. Though the bulk of the data was transmitted peer-to-peer the service still relied on centralized coordination, and as a result it was almost immediately forced to shut down by lawsuits from the recording industry. But no sooner had it shut down than it was being replaced by the likes of Gnutella, eDonkey, and Bittorrent, none of which had such a single point of failure.

The recording industry was at a loss for solutions. Music which they had previously been able to sell for $16 an album was now being traded online. There were no central authorities to sue, and the software authors were well protected by free speech law. So the industry took the only action that was immediately available to them, they began suing the downloaders.

The recording industry lawsuits were based on The Copyright Act, a law which harkens back to an era when piracy was a matter of clandestine record pressing factories. The Copyright Act proscribed an absurd $160,000 in damages per infringement. The recording industry imagined that with seven figure lawsuits, they might scare the population into giving up P2P forever. This couldn’t have backfired more spectacularly.

In one particularly egregious case, the recording industry sued a single mother for millions of dollars because one of her kids had supposedly downloaded nine mp3 files. The recording industry became a pariah. Musicians were pressured to take a position on the matter, and those who stood with the industry lost fans as a result. Boycotting of CDs became a political statement, and the wealthy lifestyles of successful musicians became increasingly associated with greed and inhumanity.

Outside of the US, courts were unwilling to allow such massive lawsuits against individuals who obviously had no ability to pay, so the recording industry instead began lobbying to enact laws that would ban people from the internet if they were caught file sharing. Various initiatives were taken in France, the UK, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan, but for everyone outside of the industry itself, these laws were nothing more than a threat and a nuisance. Enforcement was so unenthusiastic as to be practically nonexistent, and the laws were mostly stripped of enforcement power the moment the lobbying money dried up.

In Sweden, a law was passed forcing ISPs to unmask the identities of their customers on request - and the pushback from this was immense. Major ISPs stopped collecting the information, and in one case - forced all customer traffic through a VPN, making it impossible for them to comply.

After about 15 years of struggle, the battered industry finally gave in. Today the penalty for copying music and movies, while still theoretically quite severe, is practically nonexistent. But out of this era came an astonishing array of decentralized network technology including Namecoin, cjdns, Yggdrasil, ZeroNet, and too many others to name. But not only that, this era launched into existence the VPN ecosystem. Despite its vague marketing, the original raison d’être for VPNs was absolutely for file sharing.

Ending the Decade of Malaise

Since the end of the P2P war in around 2015, there have been essentially no limits on internet freedom. Enthusiasm in decentralized networks more or less dried up because there was no longer much of anything that couldn’t be hosted on a normal website. To this day we’re still hanging on to a relatively broken DNS / HTTP / x509 architecture, despite having much better ideas, simply because there’s no incentive to switch.

But if the western internationalist power structure continues with their plans, this era of complacency may soon come to an end, and it’s gonna be glorious.

There are three main drivers which will tend to push people into decentralized, private, and truly censorship resistant networking. They are Intolerant Minorities, Community Cohesion, and Epistemic Pull.

Intolerant Minorities

The greatest driving force moving conversations toward freer (less moderated) spaces is not those who are unable to express themselves civilly, but rather those who can, but want to be trusted to use discretion.

In every online space, each member is either adding to it or taking from it. Those who take are generally self-promoting, representing a brand, or promoting a strongly held belief that they think people need to hear. For them, speech restrictions are the price they pay for access to eyeballs. Those who add value are not seeking eyeballs but rather meaningful conversations - for them, smaller spaces are often better because there are fewer takers, and speech restrictions are an unwelcome outside infringement into their conversations.

Furthermore, those who add value prefer a sense of shared ownership over the spaces in which they participate. But what’s most important is that because they’re not really extracting value, their motivation to participate in any given space is very low - and likewise their tolerance to interference in their conversations.

Community Cohesion

While many centralized social media platforms such as Twitter are flat ecosystems, much of internet discourse takes place in some kind of community spaces where people more-or-less know one another. These include forums, chatrooms, and private or federated social media servers. Administrators of such communities are rarely compensated, and generally do it for what they believe in. So in the face of changing regulatory restrictions, the general feeling from small scale admins is either “this doesn’t apply to us”, or else “I’m shutting it down because I didn’t sign up for this”.

Facing the resignation of a server admin, tight-knit communities will tend to become very upset, and usually re-organize on a new platform - one that is invariably more decentralized, private, and censorship resistant than the last.

Epistemic Pull

People seek intelligent discourse. This fact is under-appreciated because a lot of online communities have evolved a culture of mixing infantile toilet-humor into the discourse, creating the appearance of Beavis-and-Butthead level intellectual deserts. This is effective because it acts as camouflage, protecting communities from pseudointellectuals who sound smarter than they are, think they’re smarter than they are, and do untold damage to the quality of discourse in their quest to prove that they’re smarter than they are.

Despite how they might appear, the spaces with the highest intelligence make the best memes, which spread the farthest, creating a network-wide pull in the direction of those spaces. A significant amount of those spaces are relatively cohesive communities of intolerant minorities. So it won’t take that much to push them into the darknet, and when that happens, the entire internet will re-align itself in that direction.

Next Generation Internet

As you probably know I’m the original author of cjdns, and I’d like to think it will play some role in the future of the internet - but I suspect that what will be most important will be federation protocols such as Nostr, ActivityPub, or DeltaChat. Still, networks like cjdns, Yggdrasil, Tor, and I2P will continue to offer different ways of accessing said networks.

As we look at evolving the internet, we should really be trying to get free of the TLS Certificate Trap. Ten years ago https was only really used by e-commerce and banks. Then in 2015 LetsEncrypt launched free certificates for everyone. At the time, NSA spying was a topic on everybody’s minds and this was pitched as a way to stop the NSA from watching everyone’s web browsing. In retrospect it sounds a little bit silly, and it’s hard to believe that everybody willingly agreed to be locked in to requesting 3-month-renewable website permits. But at the time, https was considered cool and if there was ever a problem you could always revert back to http. But then when nobody was looking, browser makers released html5 and made the new features https-only, effectively closing the door back to http.

While we’re fixing centralized internet authorities, we might as well deal with DNS. Almost every “decentralized network” thinks that they need globally unique human readable naming, and almost all of them then go on to adopt the ICANN DNS system rather than something like Namecoin, ENS, PKT DNS, etc. An example of a protocol which is fully dependent on DNS is email. Every mail server needs to talk to every other mail server, and every mail server needs to be able to look up the name of the counterparty in order to talk to it - so the naming system of email literally piggybacks on top of DNS. An example of a protocol that uses but does not depend on DNS is Bittorrent. Bittorrent uses DNS for finding the trackers, but they are numerous and not strictly necessary for the protocol to function. An example of a protocol which makes (almost) no use of DNS at all is Bitcoin. Technically Bitcoin uses DNS to find an initial set of peers, but peers can introduce other peers, and the Bitcoin network is capable of operating even if not all nodes can reach all other nodes.

Federated protocols of the future should consider designing themselves so that even if they use DNS, it is not the foundation of their own identity system so they are not hopelessly bound to it. Federated networks which have message relaying capability such as Bitcoin or BGP can also span across different networks such as cjdns, Yggdrasil, I2P and of course the outside internet.

Hardware freedom is another challenge, though far less urgent than protocols. Historically, Android OS has represented itself as a more open alternative to Apple IOS, however they have recently decided to forbid the installation of apps that are not approved by Google. Nevertheless, popular open source communication apps such as browsers, mail clients, and chat clients are able to get app-store approval now, and it’s most likely that excluding them would be a political impossibility. It is probably unrealistic to imagine any commercial operating system not spying on its user, but it is most likely that they will have a hard time significantly degrading the freedom of the user.

An important piece of the puzzle is most likely going to be the private web service. These services will sit out on the public web so that they are compatible with generic client devices, but they will provide a portal to dark and decentralized networks in the same way webmail provides a portal to the email network. They will avoid regulatory attention by being “private / invite only” and they will be able to remain relatively small because the service they provide is access to a wider network.

Cjdns over WebSocket

Recently I have updated cjdns to add WebSockets as a peering interface. Until this patch, cjdns worked only over either UDP or raw ethernet. However, long lived high volume UDP sessions have the appearance of VPN traffic, which is becoming increasingly controversial amongst the anti-freedom coalition and I recently wrote about how VPNs could theoretically be blocked. WebSockets on the other hand are typically intermingled with classical https sessions, making them look like the majority of traffic on the web. This feature is now available in a branch called wsinterface-july8-2026, and if you want to test it, you can use the following peering credential to connect to a WebSocket enabled cjdns node:

"wss://5.135.140.105/cjdns-ws":{"login":"default-login","password":"81sx357g22urvyytc94f1q48f21ty1j","publicKey":"m9g2ltp4v8wty379vxj7uzn2l0sr937l5lz7c6hzkygtwng7vf20.k","peerName":"vinny4"}

Note that this credential must be placed in the WsInterface block of the cjdroute.conf, not the UDPInterface block which you’re probably used to - run cjdroute --genconf to make a new config which will have the WsInterface block that you need.

The place where cjdns can fit in this stack is as a tool for increasing the flexibility of networks. For example if you have fiber optic internet, you can host a lot at home - but ISP restrictions, lack of IP addresses, and Carrier-Grade NAT often make this impossible. With cjdns, you can have as many IP addresses as you need for your services, and everything is tunneled through the overlay network.

Conclusion

As with any “war”, chaos and uncertainty is guaranteed. Some unfortunate people will probably suffer as they did at the hands of the recording industry, but the global outcome is almost certain to be a significant win for freedom, decentralization, and privacy.