Call For Action
Internet with all of its promises is in danger.
We as a research community as well as an industry have failed to protect the free spirit of information.
The founding principles of uniting human civilization through unrestricted access to all information have been traded for totalitarian control and short term profit of a few.
Trending development of Internet censorship, blockades, control and mass surveillance are rapidly emerging all around the world.
What once used to be a promise of human advancement and unification through unlimited information is being used as a battlefield for ideologies and power.
Internet as it was designed is in danger of slowly fragmenting to set of closed networks that are subject to geographic regulation and control.
Central entities governing the Internet standards are under increasing pressure from totalitarianism with the goal of eradicating the principles of openness.
Development of the central Internet protocols is increasingly being dictated by the short term business interest of the industry, instead of the long term mission to serve the advancement of mankind.
The direction of current development must be changed.
Responsibility for the the future of the Internet lies on the shoulders of every Internet engineer around the world, be that in academia or in the industry.
This is a call for action to every academic, industry member, working group member, as well as every individual Internet engineer around the world:
- Users cannot be tasked with the responsibility of circumventing control and censorship by the use of external tooling that can be ruled illegal.
- Central Internet protocols must be updated for resistance to censorship, control and blockades. The Internet protocol suite should reflect openness and unrestricted access by design.
- No absolute hierarchical structures should exist, be it technical or governance. Neither the network itself, nor its protocol development track, nor its address space administration should expose a central point of failure or control.
- Complete control over access to information must be made so expensive that it becomes practically infeasible.
- New hardware and low-level protocols are needed to remove absolute reliance on local Internet exchanges.
- New routing protocols are needed to better adapt to deliberate network outages and censorship.
- New high-level protocols are needed that support mesh networking by design.
- New cryptographic standards are needed to better support cryptographic interoperability as well as the ease of development and usage.
These characteristics should be built deep into the fabric of the Internet.
15-08-2019