On Net Neutrality and the Rise of the Deep Web Research Project

A neutral network is one that has no content filtering, surveillance, or censorship and encourages transparency, free speech, and data equality. Our internet is not like this today. Citizens do not feel like their data is private from the government and their Internet Service Providers. Content on the internet is being blocked, filtered, and censored by ISPs. A popular way of censoring and filtering content is deep packet inspection, which inspects the packet of data at a certain point in it's route and decides whether or not it can continue through the protocol depending on how much the content complies to the specific policies of the provider. For example, Comcast allegedly prevented its users from accessing BitTorrent, a popular torrent file sharing transfer protocol in this way. Access to the internet has not been open to all and data has not been treated equally because ISP's are providing faster network speeds to companies and throttling bandwidth network speeds for the general public. The Federal Communications Commission has proposed several policies since 2010 but has had trouble actually policing the internet to ensure openness. In the face of these problems, citizens have resorted to using the “Deep Web” and the “Darknet.” The Dark Web consists of sites that cannot be indexed by a search engine and makes up most of the web. The deep web consists of around 96% of world wide web content and only around 4% of WWW content can be accessed through a surface engine. The darknet consists of either a file sharing or privacy network that can only be accessed through specific software. One popular way to access the darknet is to use free software called Tor to establish an anonymity network. Tor routes traffic through a worldwide network of more than seven thousand random relays to conceal user location and usage data. It also encrypts the destination IP addresses many times to make the user very difficult to find. Each layer decrypts and peels back a layer of encryption until the packet of data reaches the final relay, fully decrypted. The final relay sends the IP packet to the destination without even knowing it's IP address. All this encryption makes Tor much slower to use but citizens are willing to sacrifice latency for privacy. Darknets allow the user to be private and access all content with no filtering or government surveillance. Although complete government detachment and neutrality allows citizens to feel free, it has made room for several illegal activities such as child pornography, malware distribution, human trafficking, and large drug markets. Guns and drugs are sold through bitcoin to ensure secure, anonymous transactions. I believe that it is very important for every user to be aware of the advantages of Darknets and Tor. However, I also believe that Tor must be cleaned of all the illegal activities that make it impossible for the network to achieve the free communication it strives for. Support from major tech companies like Google could greatly improve Tor by making it safer and easier to use for the general public.


Sources and Further Reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

https://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/06/21/how-the-deepweb-helped-and-hindered-net-neutrality-and-online-privacy

 http://www.pcworld.com/article/2046227/meet-darknet-the-hidden-anonymous-underbelly-of-the-searchable-web.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKrODPtVinw