Wired reports that we're about to lose net neutrality, and "the Internet as we know it":

[...] Today, that freedom won’t survive much longer if a federal court — the second most powerful court in the nation behind the Supreme Court, the DC Circuit — is set to strike down the nation’s net neutrality law, a rule adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2010. Some will claim the new solution "splits the baby" in a way that somehow doesn’t kill net neutrality and so we should be grateful. But make no mistake: Despite eight years of public and political activism by multitudes fighting for freedom on the internet, a court decision may soon take it away.

Couple this with the persistent attacks on our privacy and freedom of communication that have come to light over the last year, and we need to ask ourselves if the Internet is still the networking platform that we need.

I don't think it's as crazy a question as it sounds.

When we talk about the Internet, usually we're referring to the protocols and services that run on top of it: the web, DNS, email, and services that sit on top of them, like Wikipedia, Facebook and Google. The Internet is the foundation on which each of these things sits - but it's certainly possible for similar kinds of experiences to be built on different kinds of networks.

This has already been attempted, of course: Internet2 is a network run for academic and research purposes, using many of the same protocols as the Internet, but on different infrastructure. Some 60,000 institutions are connected.

When the Internet was initially designed, many of the things we take for granted were not incorporated into its architecture - most notably, ecommerce, the web, and the widespread communications we now use every day, across browsers, apps and devices. A lot of these services and technologies are able to exist because of hacks and shims. That's a fantastic testament to the resilience of the network, but perhaps it's time to learn from those attempts and build a v2.

Additionally, the current design clearly allows governments and other entities to easily monitor communications, jeopardizing the business and private communication that it's simultaneously revolutionizing. Just as any business that solely bases its products on Facebook, say, is constantly under threat from that company choosing to change its API, algorithms or interfaces, any business that bases its products on the Internet is now under threat from surveillance activity.

What if we could then choose to modernize our global communications by inventing a new Internet, designed to be used by commerce and protect independent communications? I don't think it's enough to bake encryption into its core (although that should happen) - revelations about, eg, companies like RSA using backdoored encryption methods suggest that we should look at algorithms and methodologies that are inherently more secure even when data is not encrypted. Neutrality should be inherent; ownership and governance decentralized.

If creating a new global network sounds daunting, that's because it's undeniably a mammoth task. Nonetheless, I think there's value in looking at the Internet as a proof of concept, as a thought experiment: what could we change to protect ourselves, protect each other, and continue to change the world without interference from surveillance or corporate misdeeds?