Escaping black holes on the Internet

For all the good it does, Twitter is a black hole, because it’s centralized. Fortunately the Internet, by design, is not.

On March 14, 2014, Turkey shut down Twitter. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced, “We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” (Hurriyet Daily News) He also said Turkey would “rip out the roots” of Twitter. (Washington Post)

Yes, and when I was in Istanbul last week, Twitter worked fine.

That’s because Twitter’s roots are in the Internet. Even if Turkey rips the roots out of the phone and cable systems that provide access to the Net, they can’t rip out the Net itself, because the Net is not centralized. It is distributed: a heterarchy rather than a hierarchy. At the most basic level, the Net’s existence relies on protocols rather than on how any .com, .org, .edu or .gov puts those protocols to use.

The Net’s protocols are not servers, clouds, wires, routers or code bases. They are agreements about how data flows to and from any one end point and any other. This makes the Internet a world of ends rather than a world of governments, companies and .whatevers: a giant zero between everybody and everything on it. It cannot be reduced to any of those things, any more than time can be reduced to a clock. The Net is as oblivious to usage as are language and mathematics — and just as supportive of every use to which it is put. And, because of this oblivity, The Net supports all without favor to any.

By design, anyway. Implementation is another matter, because access is provided in most cases by institutions, which are all by nature centralized. They think in centralized ways and with centralized interests. Like the lines, triangles and squares in Flatland, they have trouble making sense of a sphere in their midst. But they need to. We all do. The Internet’s giant zero is exactly that sphere. And it’s still new, having come into being on 30 April 1995, when the last transit route within the Internet that forbade one kind of data cargo (in that case, commercial activity), stood down. After that, all forms of data traffic were allowed, and supported, by the Net’s base protocol and therefore the Net itself.

It helps to go back to first principles. Paul Baran laid those out in the early 1960s when he contrasted centralized systems (such as governments), decentralized ones (such as Twitter+Facebook+Google, etc.) and distributed ones, using this drawing:

Design C was put to use for the Internet. One difference: The lines don’t need to be there, and any one of them can connect with any other one, through a middle that’s as oblivious to what it does for everything on it as the core of the Earth is to what happens on its surface. In this landmark paper, David Isenberg called the Internet “stupid.” Like gravity, there’s nothing smart about it.

Baran’s design appealed to military folks because the “attack surfaces” of a distributed system are no larger than a single node or a single connection, so it’s much harder to bring the whole thing down. This is why John Gillmore says “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This happened in Turkey two years ago, just as it happens today in China and other countries that use their privileged and centralized controls to sphincter services on the Net that they don’t like.

And countries aren’t the only culprits. These days it seems almost impossible to be social or do business on the Net without dwelling, at least some of the time, in the deep gravity wells of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Instagram and the rest. But getting around them is still do-able by design. That design is not about hard and fixed administrated lines, but about the voluntary connections supported by the Net’s protocols in the first place.

For example, despite its size, Twitter is no more than one dot in the star-shaped designs of Baran’s A and B. That dot becomes a true black hole when powerful actors like the Turkish and Chinese governments “eradicate” it. When that happens, no light escapes. The biggest gravity wells have the biggest attack surfaces.

We need to bear this in mind when we design and use centralized systems — and even decentralized ones. Only distributed systems, each no larger than one node, are fully respectful of the Net’s distributed nature.

And no, designing for that is not impossible. Everything on Earth is also distributed in its own use of gravity. You aren’t pulled toward the ground because some company provides you a gravity service.

To design for full Net compliance, you need to follow Steve Jobs’ think different role models.

Before I give my examples, I’d like to hear yours. (Just being distributed here.)

An ancestor of this post is Escaping the black holes of centralization, posted 14 April 2014 on my blog.