May 3rd marks this year's 'World Press Freedom Day', and in dedication, I have committed to outlining the start of an escape path from the public and private sector hegemony that operates a press entirely contrary to their supposed aims.
Any instance of a delegation of a role away from oneself creates the opportunity for the new authority to use their power without concern for the original individual, or group, or project, or institution.
Physical, 1-on-1 interpersonal conversation is the most reductive example of an act of communication without this outsourcing of responsibility.
In the case of the USA, the application of the law (1A) to this context is pretty clear-cut - the moderation of the discussion is entirely in the hands of those involved, and in the absence of any criminal conspiracy, will not (effectively) be impeded by state / corporate forces.
Of course, the need to spread products, information, and resources requires a huge abstraction from this ideal, where the number of those responsible for this transmission grows exponentially. Shops are one example of this. So are record companies. And the Internet even more so.
As this chain grows, it's overall transparency, accountability and efficiency are drastically reduced. On the Internet, traffic may need to traverse a dozen different systems to successfully propagate. A backbone, registries and persistive hosting are necessary for most access.
At least, this holds true for the TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP-dominated web, and everything that depends on it. DHT technologies disturb this 'balance' especially, which is why decades of effort from the copyright industry to suppress BitTorrent has not yielded them any significant ground.
In the effort to evade the Silicon Valley speech crackdowns, people have taken to emulating their businesses, down to the infrastructure, with the conception that the pitfalls of the old guard will never befall them. Unsurprisingly, the reality soon hits them.
Web and / or company administrators are never safe from potential legal conflict and other pressures (political or otherwise), and where a totality of control over content exists, so too does the responsibility of managing that content.
Nor are they safe from personal or collective abuses of power, including from within their own organisation. This has manifested in 'alt-tech' social media in the form of arbitrary banning of content, ie, content that is legal within the US, where many of these sites are hosted.
BitTorrent has proven it's resilience in keeping the ability of content to propagate, despite outside influence. However, as most of the user-end is organised through HTTP-based websites, their indexes of content are still beholden to the same weaknesses as the rest of the web.
It follows that the solution to this is to promote a system of user indexing - wherein the management of content metadata may be handled on the whims of individual users, rather than the legal owners of a distribution platform. DHTs provide the ideal foundation for such systems.
Bitcoin is perhaps the ideal application of this logic within the sphere of commerce. Without a majority control of the network's nodes, arbitrary regulation of the network is not possible. In the field of computing resources, one may look to grid computing for an equivalent.
IPFS is a protocol utilising DHTs that I have favoured because of it's beautiful wealth of features. It's content-addressable storage ensures that the link to a piece of data will never grow obsolete, so long as the swarm is alive, and the address is known to those seeking it.
@DtubeTweets has stepped the furthest into this ring, as far as I know. They give an easy avenue to adding to the IPFS network, but they still hold what may as well be an autocratic control over their indexes. They may strangle information access at any time that they wish.
But they provide a hosting platform, and that's half of the battle. Despite the possibility of censorship at a later date, their nodes provide an initial high-bandwidth point from which the rest of the swarm can carry out the task of re-hosting. What is left then, is the indexes.
IPFS's pubsub is a multicast system that one can subscribe to in the same way as a YouTube channel or an RSS feed. We can use this to transmit the metadata of content we wish to keep alive.
Specifically, in this case, the titles, thumbnails, descriptions, comments sections, and other metadata (such as upload times and channel names) from videos on DTube, YouTube, BitChute, etc.
An IPFS Companion-style addon would interface with a local IPFS node to scrape individual videos of this data, and add the video itself to IPFS if an address hasn't already been established - say, if it was a DTube rip. This data would then be stored locally, in JSON for example.
Where necessary, personal files can be indexed and distributed via public gateways or dedicated hosting services like @IPFSPinata to kickstart the swarm. These indexes are published and synchronised via certain pubsub topics, and one may publish to an unlimited amount of them.
E.g. the 'dtube' pubsub group may purely contain video data scraped from DTube, and '@laurenroseultra', only videos created by Lauren Rose. For verification of scraped data, BTC-style peer consensus may be utilised. For self-published data, your IPFS node address can be included.
When visiting supported websites from which to scrape data, the process may be as simple as a single click on the page / in the toolbar. Cached indexes can be loaded via GUI in the style of a regular tube site, complete with channels, custom playlists and other pubsub topics.
When an IPFS address is up, and while there are nodes that are willing to host it, a piece of data will never become unreachable. And the benefits to this are numerous.
For one, algorithmic manipulation is completely bypassed. Content will probably be returned based on search term relevancy weighted against the distance of each node processing the search. Unilateral removal of a distributed index is also effectively impossible. So no more 1984.
As there is no central server required for any of the index searches, there will also be no main point of data harvesting, so this will either greatly diminish or totally disappear. So no more having your search history sent to the NSA.
Asymmetric encryption for all traffic will also be a given, growing the level of privacy and lowering the likelihood of being intercepted. @Enea_Qosmos cannot even classify encrypted torrent traffic with full certainty, so even packet inspection will be difficult.
The actual hosting of these indexes are extremely lightweight. Whereas you may never be able to host all 1bn+ of YouTube's videos, 95% of the video traffic can be held in an index of roughly 15 GiB in size. For 100% of the traffic, you'd be looking at roughly 20x that much.
Data redundancy is also important in the event of any unplanned closure. If one of the above tube sites were to disappear tomorrow, it's videos would not vanish from existence, but when there is no established index for them, reaching them all again would take some time.
This scenario has appeared in the torrent tracker world at least hundreds of times. No matter how quickly an archive can be rebuilt, eliminating these setbacks entirely would enable them to grow ceaselessly.
If you are acting under the hope or assumption that a lucky piece of legislation, benevolent politician or a CEO with a 'dedication' to protecting your speech will come along, you had better be prepared to wait.
In the mean time, we can begin to approach censorship as a practical issue rather than one of politics. When it is technologically infeasible to repress an idea, society will be forced to deal with it. Europe went through a similar process about 500 years ago.
@CFR_org may be content with trying to stifle competition in a game that has always been stacked against them, but when the real press freedom arrives, we needn't worry about their senescence and inevitable death.
What will a world in which the deep web is brought to the surface begin to look like?
