Comment by thisiswrong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thisiswrong | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>Right now, connections to the web look like a tree, where a whole bunch of connections get funneled through an ISP

This is very true. More so if you look at countries like the UK where ISPs have recently been consolidated into MAFIAA-complying monopolies that censor just about anything that Hollywood and the government ask them to. It's scary how close ISPs are to the 'governements' of the UK and USA. Obamas' recent NSA 'reform' proposal even suggested that ISPs be in charge of surveillance & storage of Metadata instead of the NSA! WTF? Fascism.

Mesh networks have a big role to play in decentralizing the the post-NSA internet. Micropayments through bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will encourage individual nodes to provide bandwidth to users [1]. Smartphone apps like OpenGarden [2] and systems like the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) [3] are the frontrunners of the new internet.

[1] https://crypto.cs.virginia.edu/courses/14s-pet/2014/01/30/aw... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Garden [3] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/mesh-internet-pr...

I'd think content providers in general would be willing to provide bandwidth under a mesh network. They'd also be the ones most likely to pipe the mesh into the existing infrastructure. Who else besides the likes of Google / Netflix / Facebook would front heavier duty APs city-wide. Every ounce of traffic would have to be encrypted though. The main barriers for mesh networking when I look at it are:

First and foremost: Antennas and hardware in general. It's one thing to maintain a multi-channel 500mbps connection within 10-20 feet, let alone doing it with multiple devices simultaneously connected to other multiple devices. Even if you scale the speed down, the consumer grade hardware out there isn't targeting this use case.

Second: Protocols. If we had the hardware, the whole mesh has to be trustless while being affected as little as possible by connectivity and pathing overhead. Plus backwards compatible with existing infrastructure (which is less hard I guess).

Third: Gatekeepers. If you get them on board, creating the mesh as a natural extension of the internet becomes easy. Since they invariably won't be on board, it'll be that much harder.

You have some valuable points.

Naturally the internet is not a mesh network because nobody will take this role of gatekeeper without benefit. If somebody does, it becomes ISP again.

However, although the current web is messy, we should be able to organize it using distributed network solutions in a peer-to-peer manner, as proposed in the blog here: http://bit.ly/1e8vrLL. It serves an additional layer on top of the nature internet. It has the protocols built-in and the "Gatekeepers" sitting in between the distributed nodes and a feasible business model to support its execution, rather than the ideal Semantic Web solution requiring DRM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com