The Internet is a wonderful invention, and we are now entering a
time where the Internet is becoming nearly ubiquitous in our
lives and quickly supplanting traditional forms of media.
However, today the Internet is often censored and tracked by
Internet Services Providers (ISPs) and companies like Google and
Facebook, as well as governments around the world. (I’ve
outlined some of the easiest ways to stop eavesdroppers and
increase your security in this article on Reactual). Basically,
we’ve become accustomed to the Internet being a free and
unregulated space, but this is really not the case. But the
Internet we have today was not designed to ensure private,
democratic access for everyone. As the Free Network Foundation
puts it, we need “a communications infrastructure that is owned
and operated cooperatively, by the whole of humanity, rather
than by corporations and states”. The good news is that it is
entirely possible to build decentralized networks that are
controlled by individuals rather than by corpora