But beyond a statement about the internet infrastructure, this is also about figuring out a solution to avoid losing the internet. So to help it, we need to define a way to build the atomic components that will help it become resilient to any attack, whether they are from repressive dictators or over-reaching corporations.

Fortunately, the internet happens to be at a key point in terms of its evolution, with the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 being upon us. With one major effort to upgrade large part of the infrastructure, it seems that new efforts could help us increase the overall resilience of the net.

A few years ago, I put together some basic requirements for a tool that I would like to see, something I had called a “Personal Relationship Manager.” A few years later, there are several of those so I’m thinking that I can start planting similar ideas into the ground for possible implementations by people who understand protocols much better than I do. The following are imperfect thoughts based on my understanding of core internet protocols and discussions I’ve had around them with several people over the last couple of years.

A lot of this, of course, has substantial precedence. For example, the idea of completely rewiring connectivity is not really a new one. Here’s Doc Searls, about 3 years ago:

Connectivity-as-infrastructure is soft in several senses. One is that you don’t need a big utility company to provide it. Another is that data and its protocols are soft. They have no physical substance, yet they have supportive qualities that are substantive in the extreme. That’s because the Net is a way of connecting. It is not the wires and waves that do the connecting.

.. and there has been a lot of work put into making the internet protocols faster and more reliable but few have taken the radical approach of making the net completely self-reliant.

So without further ado, here are some basic requirements:

• Open
• Light
• Easy to use
• End-less

I will now go into the thinking behind each of these points.

Open

Wikipedia defines a protocol as:

a set of guidelines or rules.

The challenge then becomes who is responsible for setting those guidelines or rules. Ownership of the responsibility for setting the guidelines or rules should be diffused around the community of interest on the internet. In that sense, the particle protocol should be a protocol without a head group. Decisions around what to include and exclude in its core should come from the community as a whole, with no central office, no central committee, no central individual, ultimately responsible for it.

Open is the way of the net, where ideas are given dominance based on their individual value and not based on the value of the individuals that brought them forth.

Because it is headless, open is uncontrollable. One could argue that peer-to-peer networks are the closest thing we have to open networks as every node in the network serves and routes things for every other node and the disappearance of an individual node does not impact the network as a whole for very long.

A corollary to open then seems to be that the network will be peer-to-peer, making it impossible to shutdown the network altogether. Peer to peer networks have been the bane of the music and movie industry for a decade because they cannot be shut down and it seems that if we are to build a network that cannot be shut down, we can learn from that model.

Open also means unencumbered from any pre-existing patent. The particle protocol should be something that is owned by absolutely everyone and by no one in particular. The reason for this is that lack of ownership means that the owners cannot be leaned on by any organization or government. With that point of friction removed, the ability to create backdoors or shut down such a protocol would be more limited and require substantial efforts on the part of the people trying to do the shutting down.

Open also means that the particle protocol should be sitting at the lowest level of the infrastructure stack with little or nothing below it. Once again, this is to ensure its resilience as the closer it is to the foundation, the harder it is to remove.

Last but not least, is that open is not about money.  That is because the core portions of the particle protocol should be free in a monetary sense too. However, beyond the core, innovation should be allowed so anyone can build (and make money) by providing extra components for the particle protocol. However, the people doing so must realize that any changes they decide to make to the core are dictated by the underlying principles regarding the protocol and must be redistributed in the same open fashion.

Light

The particle protocol should have the lightest CPU and memory footprint possible. Some may feel it is too much of a constraint but the particle protocol should be so light that it can run on most devices. For its initial version, I think that the ability to run, without impacting their pre-existing operations, on mobile phones, computers, and devices with as low a footprint as a 400Mhz CPU and 128Mb of RAM (Apple watchers may recognize this as the original specification behind the first iPhone: it is no accident as I believe the particle protocol should run on any smartphone in the future).

Light, in my view, also means unattached, which means that the particle protocol would be wireless by default. Sure, devices could be created to connect some points of the network to some wired network (and this could turn into a whole new sector for the telecom infrastructure industry).

Finally, light also means unencumbered of extras. The problem to be solved here is resilience (ie. it can’t be shutdown). Anything beyond that is extra. So the particle protocol should allow for TCP/IP to run on top of it but things like extra security, guarantee of services, and so on, should not be part of its core. However, I’d like to see some kind of a plug-in approach that could allow that protocol to be extended with such features by anyone who wants to.

Easy to Use

The first dotcom boom taught me an important lesson about technology: if it is not easy to use, people won’t use it. The internet was around for a long time prior to 1995 but it wasn’t until then that people adopted it. Why was that? I think it was due to two factors: first, Microsoft built a TCP/IP stack into their operating system, making internet access a question of configuration and AOL started splattering the world with their disks, making access to the online world just a question of setting up a username and password and handing out your credit card information to them. The rest was automated.

In order for the particle protocol to succeed, it should be easy to install and easy to use. By easy to install, I mean that it should be a question of downloading it and, if needed, clicking on an icon to install it but that would be it. The software would install itself, look for ways to connect to its peers, identify any peers nearby, and automatically connect, becoming another node in the network.

By easy to use, I mean that there ought to be no actual work to use it once installed. The first thing the protocol installer would look for is all the ways in which it can connect to other devices (wired: eg. via a modem or ethernet / wireless: eg. WiFi, Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, 4G, etc…) and attach itself to all the available modes without disturbing the other software attached to those. There should be, embedded in the protocol itself, a logic as to how it would prioritize its connectivity, based on how many nodes are available in a particular connectivity mode and how reliant other nodes are on its connectivity to more than one connection (eg. tying 3G communication to WiFi links).

By being completely invisible, the protocol would become something that can exist without being acknowledged and can be installed without much notice after installation. So, if you were to take Libya as an example again, hacktivist could work to install the particle protocol on every communication devices the government owns, and protesters would leverage those installation for their own communication.

The only way to stop such a protocol would be to completely shutdown every electronic device available in an area/country. While it is not impossible that some strongmen could go down that route (I’m thinking of places like North Korea, maybe), the impact would be that the only way to shut things down is to shut down your own communications line. While it is theoretically possible, such a shutdown could create a race as to who is bringing their own network back up in order to communicate. If we were to take into account network theory, this is basically creating resilience by ensuring that the information assymetry created by a network shutdown forces ALL the players to rush back to restoring it, thus restoring nodes for all sides at the same time. In a perverse way, it leverages the assymetry to get rid of it.

End-less

Many years ago, my good friends Doc Searls and David Weinberger argued that the internet was a World of Ends. The principles were sound but unfortunately, by creating a view based on ends, they opened the possibility for creating points of controls.

If the internet has ends, it can be closed down.

But what if it didn’t have end-point. What if it had addresses that changed on a more random basis. Then exerting control over one point would not necessarily work. What if the addressing were to change on a time and location basis as well as some other factors based on sudden changes in traffic (spikes or drops) with violent drops in traffic resulting in a complete re-assignement of the addressing space along with a drastic change in how long devices would attach to that space before changing address again.

Without those ends, and by creating a network protocol that would carry traffic while seeing radical changes in its addressing space could create a situation where an attack against a portion of the network would be seen as an attack against the network as a whole and solutions would be handled on a global basis.

So whether that network is shutdown because a political strongman decides to do or an earthquake damages a region, the network as a whole would have some form of self-healing capacity to start rearranging the damaged parts quickly and without any involvement from the users in the affected areas (network management should be the least of people’s problems in a time of crisis).

Beyond the principles: Addressing

Since this would be a relatively new protocol, I would throw some backward compatibility away. As protocol development takes place, I can only assume that it won’t be until 2012 that we would see the first implementations of this. As a result, I would go as far as to venture that the particle protocol should not have to worry about IPv4 addressing and should focus on working with IPv6 instead. The reason behind such an approach is that IPv6 will increasingly be the new standard for addressing beginning in 2012. IPv4 support, as a result, would be great to support legacy systems but this is about fixing problems in the future so let’s support the systems that are future proof.

Beyond the principles: Implementations

Ultimately, protocols live and die by their implementation. The first step towards implementation would be a lightweight version of the particle protocol that could work on linux, android and iOS devices.

Why those first?

First, linux. Linux is available in a variety of forms, including as an embedded OS for devices. In the future, I think we could see the particle protocol as something that would be available over embedded devices (particle boxes) that could be assembled cheaply and connected to power sources and network sources. Such boxes should be relatively inexpensive to produce (in discussion with people, I’ve been using the price of $25 in parts as a stake in the ground) and all schematics should be open-sourced.

However, the challenge with the hardware only solution is that linux is not something the general population uses on a regular basis. So creating a mostly linux-based solution would attract the attention of people who want to disconnect things to those devices and get the to disconnect them.

More difficult to disconnect, however, is an overall telecom infrastructure and here are I am making some technical bets: that iOS and Android will be the major operating systems powering mobile phones in the future. Taking that approach, a version of the particle protocol working on those devices could turn every smartphone with those OSes on them into a network point. I’m sure that this might make some people unhappy (Apple would probably not approve) but I suspect that it could allow for quick deployment of devices in regions needing them.

Any other implementations would be welcome, of course.

Conclusion

Protocols are agreements and this set of concepts is only a proposed set. I’d like to see discusion around the concepts in the technical community but, at the core, the problem is simple: we need an communication network that works based on network effects, making the network much stronger with every node that joins it. Recent events, both geopolitical (Egypt, Libya) and environmental (earthquakes and tsunami in Japan) have shown that our networks are still brittle.

The particle protocol is the beginning of a discussion to strengthen the network at one of its lowest layers and ensure that disruption in one physical location can be healed by its proximity to other locations.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Particle Protocol. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

As access to the Internet increasingly moves away from the PC and to mobile devices, it appears that the new model of interaction with devices can now provide multiple points of lockdowns when it comes to the Internet.

Let me illustrate:

Access Lines

This is the area people have been most worried about. In this scenario, cable or phone companies can impose certain levels of control over what traffic is and isn’t allowed to access devices that are connected to those lines. For example, a couple years ago, Comcast discriminated against bitorrent traffic without its users. The FCC later ruled such discrimination to be illegal.

The telecom and cable industry usually argue about the necessity of such discrimination as a mean of ensuring that all their users are being serviced properly. Opponents of such approaches, myself included, argue that the internet was created as an open medium and ought to be kept as such.

Device Lockdown

Traditionally, mobile devices have been largely locked down by the carriers, who controlled the experience from end to end, dictating what could and couldn’t go on the phone and how it could be used. In the United States, the lockdown even goes as far as tying mobile phones to particular networks. It is customary for mobile devices to be locked to the mobile provider servicing it (even in the case of GSM, the devices are locked to particular carriers).

For a brief period, Apple seemed to wrestle control away from the operators: with the introduction of the iPhone, Apple created an opportunity to wrestle away control of “the deck”, meaning the set of applications installed on a phone. With the success of its devices, the rest of the industry followed and it is now pretty commonplace for any modern smartphone vendor to have the opportunity to let device users decide what software is installed on their phones.

At least, at first sight. The truth is that, while carriers have lost control of the deck, the control has not been given to the users. Users are given the impression of control as, it is true, they have the ability to install more on their phones than at any other times. But the truth is that their choice is limited at a different gateway point:

The Application Store(s)

Application stores are the newest point of control for access to a lot of Internet functionality. In the case of Apple, that control manifests itself through the method the company applies to deciding what is acceptable or not, when it comes to the app store. The reason I’ve been writing a lot about Apple’s point of control is that, if history serves, what Apple does generally has a wider impact as its competitors seem to follow what it does. As a thought leader, the company thus has a different level of responsibility to its industry (in a way, Apple is in a position not dissimilar to Microsoft in the late 90s (with Windows), Google in the last decade (with its search engine), and probably Facebook in the future (with its social graph)).

On one hand, application store owners may argue that they are filtering content to ensure that their user community get the best experience possible. The argument may hold some water but, unfortunately, it is not dissimilar from the idea cable and telco operators presented when they started to discriminate traffic on their networks. On the other hand, completely open stores more closely resemble the internet, a place where the creation of individuals sits next to that of corporations, and where some pages may offend while others enlighten.

What to do?

In such an environment, the fight to keep censorship off the internet becomes more diffuse and more difficult to manage.

If we are to build (and I still believe that we are in the early days of the internet) a new medium that remains as the most democratic delivery method for all of human’s expression, we need to be fight back when anyone tries to lock the net down. Over a decade ago, the US Supreme Court ensured that the US government could not censor what is on the Internet: it is now OUR responsibility to ensure that other parties are not given that control.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Internet Lockdown. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Kindle Incident

For readers who may not know this, Amazon unveiled an interesting electronic reader called the Kindle, allowing people who bought it to legally purchase electronic copies of books. Along the way, Amazon also opened up a program allowing small publishers to publish books directly into their marketplace.

However, it appears that Amazon’s own quality control seemed to fail when it came to establishing ownership of the intellectual property uploaded to its site when two titles by George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm, were uploaded and sold by a rogue bookaneer.

Subsequently discovering that it had sold e-books for which the publisher did not have rights, Amazon issued refunds to its customers and removed the books from the user’s device. Where it gets a little gray in terms of what they did is that, along with the removal of the books, they also removed any annotation users already had made, thus erasing content that was created ON the device if not FOR the device. The New York Times story on the deletion listed the following:

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.

Beyond the irony of Amazon throwing a book like Nineteen Eighty Four down the memory hole (a large incinerator in that book), Amazon’s action raise troubling questions as to the ability of online providers to remove content they have not created. I leave it to legal scholar to assess whether Amazon could actually be considered to have infringed on the intellectual property rights of people whose annotations were removed along with the books.

Amazon was justified in protecting the copyright holders for the infringing books but where it went wrong is when it over-reached by deleting content that was created by its customers. In that particular case, one could argue that Amazon was responsible for censorship. The company will need to change its systems and policies to ensure that it does not impede the customer’s experience. While it currently has only removed a couple of titles along with annotations, the company should ensure that it keep annotations separate so that any further title removal does not destroy user generated content. An extra nice move would be if the company were to replace the titles with their legal equivalent. The common should also be a lot more thorough in verifying intellectual property claims before offering titles, especially since they control every piece of the delivery chain from the intellectual property holder to the reader.

AT&T and 4chan.org

In a somewhat related incident, AT&T had a recent run-in with one of the most influential (and that does not necessarily mean good) entity on the internet: the 4chan.org community. 4chan is primarily and image and discussion board and word started to spread that AT&T customers had lost accesses to its images over the weekend. After a substantial amount of noise in several online forums, AT&T claimed that it had blocked the site because it was suffering from a denial of service attack from it.

What is interesting here is that AT&T acted without prior notice and blocked a site without providing any information upfront as to the reason for blocking the site. While AT&T stopped blocking the site as the result of a concerted effort by its fans, the founder of 4chan hit the nail on the head when he said (emphasis is mine):

In the end, this wasn’t a sinister act of censorship, but rather a bit of a mistake and a poorly executed, disproportionate response on AT&T’s part. Whoever pulled the trigger on blackholing the site probably didn’t anticipate [nor intend] the consequences of doing so. We’re glad to see this short-lived debacle has prompted renewed interest and debate over net neutrality and internet censorship—two very important issues that don’t get nearly enough attention—so perhaps this was all just a blessing in disguise.

Net Neutrality is the basic idea that any broadband provider should offer access to the internet without any limitations as to what kind of content can be accessed and here we have an example of an ISP selectively blocking a site. While the AT&T example is only the most recent one to come to light, it appears that this is a phenomenon that could become more common as internet service providers decide what kind of content takes too much bandwidth or for other reasons.

In the past, such censorship would have meant that a provider censoring access were to be considered as a publisher. In 1995, with Stratton Oakmont vs. Prodigy, the supreme court of the United States held that online services which were removing content from their online forums could be considered as publishers and therefore held liable for any content they gave users access to. Since then, Lobbyists in the telecom industry have ensured that such decision would no longer be applicable by getting the US Congress to amend the US code and reverse the Supreme Court decision.

The Urge to kill(switch)

About a year ago, a storm arose around rumors that Apple’s iPhone devices were sporting code that could disable applications running on them. The existence of such code, also known as a kill switch, was later confirmed by Steve Jobs:

Jobs confirmed that iPhones routinely check an Apple Web site that could, in theory, trigger the removal of the undesirable software from the devices.

He told the paper that Apple needed the capability in case it inadvertently allowed a malicious program to be distributed to iPhones through the App Store.

Once again, we see here a company with the best of intentions (protecting people from malicious programs) with its finger on a button that could be very scary if misuse. It is worth noting that Apple is not uniquely in this position as Google fessed up to having similar code embedded in Android-based phones:

Google may discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement … in such an instance, Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your device at its sole discretion

And while one may think that such devices are limited to high end cell phones catering to a limited community, it appears that such devices are now becoming more common in children computers, cheap laptops, and even cars. And while many will claim that the solution to this is to open up source code, the Mozilla foundation itself has admitted to the appearance of such kill switch in the popular Firefox browser.

So kill switches are there for the best of intentions but how does one define those?

Apple and the App Store

The same kind of issue arises out of the treatment of applications to enter the Apple Application Store. A month doesn’t seem to pass by without another example of a developer seeing Apple remove his/her programs from their store.

The latest example is that of a developer who apparently committed the crime of offering an application that allowed iPhone users to use Google Voice, a Voice over IP program. And apparently, similar applications were subsequently removed from the Apple App Store.

While no official word has been given as to whether the fact that application were potentially representing a threat to the business model of Apple’s exclusive partners in the telecom industry, it doesn’t seem to be too much of a stretch to think so.

Can such intention be considered in the best interest of the end user? or in the best interest of the device manufacturer? And can such intention be changed retroactively, leveraging the presence of an existing kill switch?

Questions about the future?

In a previous entry, I’ve argued that we were moving to an economy where goods tended to be rented rather than bought. Embedded in what I was trying to communicate there was the question around what ownership actually means.

If an external party can control when or how you can use a device or decide on what you can or cannot see, or select what programs you can install on it, are you still owning it?

And while today’s corporate interventions are based on the best of intentions, what about tomorrow’s? or the next day’s? Will those intentions still sync up with yours?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title A Dark Cloud. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.