Owner-less infrastructures

Use the services of Facebook, Twitter, Skype without being subjected to censorship part; browse the Internet without the ISP ruling what can circulate in the network; use your PC or your phone as you want without any but technical restrictions; enjoy a computer technology that is developed according to the possibilities of human skill, without the mediation of the logic of profit.

Here, the term "open source" can be declined in all this and more, and that is why there are spreading infrastructure and services which, besides being "open community driven" by using non-proprietary technologies, are based on the concept of "ownerless", i.e. they work without an owner or operator that can centralize governance, rules, operation, development, terms of use.

I will make some examples of that.

Social networking: Facebook and Twitter but also G+, under the pressure of a "politically incorrect" (mis)use to which these services are subject in the very last years, are introducing so-called standards of conduct, policies, aside of the usual collection of personal information. They does not earn anything from that behaviour (which indeed has a cost) but they are forced to do that by the urgency to protect their advertisers (as usual). With a metaphor, one could say that their freedom ends where begins the wallet of whoever is driving stellar profits into their operations.

Personally I believe that these services do not give any assurance in term of respect of freedom of communication; in fact the business owners must spend a lot of money to maintain an army of censors who, applying their rules, selectively puts his hand (as periodically report users and the press) to published content, when they go against the interest of some church, ethics of a given country, or the interests of a given government.

Is there an alternative? Yes sir, and it is called Diaspora, an open source project that has created a service which fuses the paradigms of use of twitter and facebook, but is based on a federation of servers (pod), hosted by people who will to do so; in other words, the whole social network isn't owned by anyone in particular; registering you must-not sign any Conditions of Use; the roadmap of the features that are gradually added is not driven by the needs of selling advertising space; the software of course does not include a license fee. Shutting down a server is not, in any way, going to limit the functionality and communication capabilities of the users registered with the remaining servers.

Skype, the service was born as an independent project and now has millions of registered users (30M online simultaneously around the world), was owned by a company that was recently purchased by Microsoft. Microsoft is not evil, but certainly isn't a champion in the adoption of open standards; this is a perfectly legal strategy to protect their business. In fact, the protocol used by skype for voice communication is closed-source and therefore the availability of its software on different terminals depends on the company's interests.

Even here there is an alternative and it is the combination of SIP and XMPP: they are open and documented protocols to set-up, interact and tear-down communication and audio / video chat, so they are used by anybody who want to provide solutions for client units and switches, again hosted on independent servers, available on a voluntary basis (no advertising from which to make money). Shutting down a server, again, affects only those registered within that PABX. And no one is preventing me from registering in twenty different switchboards of my choice. There are software packages that implement the switchboard at will (eg Jabber) and an equal number of solution to interact with the switch (eg Jitsi).

Which brings us to the mother of all services, the connectivity: without that there cannot be Diaspora, SIP and XMPP; simply stated, they stay out of reach.

Internet was born to be a decentralized network: its TCP/IP protocol (the language that enables computers to communicate with each other) was conceived in the 80 and, by requirement, should allow the nodes to communicate (if interconnected by a phisical transmission grid, technology independent) even if one or more of them was turned off; by chance this came out from a military necessity, in the era of the Cold War.

In recent years the protocol has not changed; however, the growing tendency to use Internet also to transport counter-information news has generated some concern: and now we have seen that you can turn off the Internet, in a single country, on behalf of the example set by the Egyptian government in early 2011: it is sufficient to notice to a dozen large ISP (from which all others depend) to close their BGP gateways with foreign countries and you're done.

But even without going that far, all countries (including Italy) apply filters on traffic, preventing the reach of certain foreign sites, certainly not choosen on a democratic basis (at least I have not been asked) and then prevaricating people's rights of free communication.

Here, the alternative is not easily achieved, as in the previous cases, because we now speak of an infrastructure and not of software services. The technology however helps, so we now see the birth of wireless communities, which are springing up spontaneously in the world (Ninux is one of them) and that are paving the way: this movement is a return to the original Internet shape, where independent nodes are individually owned by individual citizen, purchased for a few euros, often running a non-proprietary software (such as openwrt) and installed on your terrace, to build a network of reliable and pervasive data transmission. Reliability we have right now, while the pervasiveness (which is the vaccine for the network, more nodes means more effort to shut down the communications) there still to do. But the pattern is traced and the time plays for us.

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