As reported by Freedomhouse.org, global internet freedom has declined for its 11th consecutive year. This is the result of many worldwide governments clamping down on big tech. This effort has not only eroded the rights and privacy of internet consumers but has led to censorship and surveillance practices around the world. This kind of government and big tech intervention in the digital world has triggered concerns relating to freedom of speech and privacy rights.
At its origin, the internet began as an open, decentralized space for the exchange of communication and information. As infrastructure requirements expanded, internet service providers (ISPs) became gatekeepers to internet access. With the evolution of access, people have looked to ISPs to make connectivity easy. However, with simplicity has also come an increasing financial and societal cost. Additionally, as the value of customer data has increased, ISPs began using data for marketing purposes, as well as to gain a great understanding of consumer behaviors. These practices have eroded customer privacy and even exposed customers to devastating hacks and other vulnerabilities. The value of consumer data has also gained government attention. This has led to widespread censorship by oppressive regimes like China, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar, Belarus, and Uganda, as well as new laws, regulations and even government surveillance across western countries.
New technologies are becoming increasingly popular in the pursuit of restoring consumer privacy, freedom of speech and the decentralized foundation of the internet. These technologies include decentralized blockchains, Virtual Private Networks (VPN), end-to-end encryption, and mesh networks to name a few. PKT is an open-source project that incorporates all of these new technologies in an effort to decentralize internet access and protect data from censorship. PKT is an autonomous blockchain that economically incentivizes people around the world to connect bandwidth to the PKT Network. This in turn builds a decentralized edge network powered by the people, which also enables new ways for people to get access to the internet, including mesh networking. PKT leverages cjdns technology, which is a mesh networking protocol, invented by Caleb James DeLisle in 2011, that enables anyone to get an IP address without requiring a central issuer. An IP address is required in order to get on the internet and traditionally IP addresses are issued by ISPs. Cjdns also uses end-to-end encryption and a new routing protocol called Compact Source Routing to facilitate efficient data transmission. PKT and cjdns are growing in popularity, and offer a potential solution to protect internet communication, the privacy of data and evolve freedom of internet access.
I reached out to Caleb James DeLisle, creator of cjdns and the Lead Dev of PKT to discuss some of his most pressing concerns in the realm of internet privacy and his work on PKT and cjdns. I also wanted to learn about how PKT, as the world’s first layer-1 blockchain for bandwidth, can help combat monopolistic ISPs and offer a solution towards restoring the decentralization of the internet.
Hello, nice to meet you. Please share your motive for creating PKT? What was the driving force behind building a blockchain for bandwidth?
So the objective from the beginning was to facilitate an internet without centralized control. When you have an internet where everybody owns their own piece of it, a lot of the choke-points of power kind of go away. Not only that, but people can extend the network much more efficiently and fluidly than monopolistic telecoms who will only upgrade their networks when they pretty much have no other option. Cjdns was all about developing the technology to be able to actually do decentralized networking. Before that there was really no option that would be the least bit secure in case of an adversarial node in the network. But solving the protocol problem isn’t enough, you also need to manage the payments, and that’s where PKT comes in.
How does PKT address the problems with centralization of internet access? Does the PKT Network have the potential to help restore internet freedom?
This is definitely the objective. One of the real problems with internet access today is what’s known as oversubscription. You might have an ISP selling the same internet connection to hundreds of people, just betting that not everyone will be using all of the bandwidth at the same time. And this is a problem because the bigger an ISP becomes, the more they can oversubscribe connections and the lower they can cut their prices. So you end up with monopolies which are vastly over-charging the customer, but it’s still impossible for a startup to compete with them on price. Kind of our super-weapon is PacketCrypt, the world’s first bandwidth-hard proof of work. So instead of just mining with electricity, you mine using bandwidth. Making it so that everybody is using bandwidth all of the time changes the game and makes monopolistic telecoms start to price their offers fairly, it’s a huge deal for leveling the playing field.
How does the PKT Network relate to the conventional internet? Will PKT Network scale to handle a comparable network capacity to the current internet?
There isn’t any reason why it shouldn’t. In fact, compact source routing is more efficient than the prefix match routing which is mostly used today so we should be able to move more data through less costly equipment and use less energy to do it. Also because routes are pre-planned, cjdns has a lot of flexibility to do smart routing. You don’t need to upgrade the hardware, just improve the software. In the networking world, people call this Software Defined Networking (SDN) but with compact source routing, we’re able to really maximize the power of SDN. It’s important though to remember that the reason we’re doing compact source routing is not just for the efficiency and flexibility, the key benefit is that it allows dozens or even hundreds of different network operators to share the same hardware. Traditional networks require so much policy and rules inside of each router that you can’t really afford to duplicate that for one router to be used by multiple ISPs. Getting the decision making out of the router is a game changer.
For the public who is not particularly well-versed in technology, how would you explain the PKT Network?
The vision of the PKT project is to decouple the administrative and technical aspects of network operation from the infrastructure itself, so that individuals, small businesses, and community groups can own and operate their own pieces of internet infrastructure with minimal technical knowledge.
How does your work on cjdns relate to PKT and PKT Network? How important is cjdns to fulfilling the goal of combating monopolistic ISPs?
Like I touched on earlier, you can’t effectively separate the owner of the infrastructure from the manager of the network until you can have multiple virtual networks running over the same physical infrastructure. Current day internet routers have so much policy information in them which reflects what the network operator wants them to do, that it’s pretty much impossible for the hardware to store enough information to have more than one network operator using a router at a time. Cjdns and compact source routing changes the game because most of the decision making happens before the data is even sent into the network. I think this issue is the key reason why this type of thing hasn’t happened yet.
What is cjdns and how did you come to build this technology?
Well, cjdns is basically two ideas: cryptographically generated IP addresses and compact source routing. Cryptographically generated IP addresses are a really nice idea because then you don’t need a central issuer to provide your addresses, networks can just emerge autonomously. Also, they have nice properties because when you’re encrypting your data, you can check that it comes from the node that it says it comes from. The problem with cryptographically generated IP addresses is that each one is totally unique with no relation to any other. Prefix matching routers, the type that are used on the internet today, have limited memory, so they can’t just keep a record for every device connected to the internet. Centrally issued IP addresses solve this because they’re issued in big blocks where each ISP is responsible for a few blocks and the routers only need to keep track of the blocks. Kind of like the area codes in the telephone system. Cryptographically generated IP addresses break that whole idea, but by using compact source routing, the decision-making is moved out of the routing device entirely.
I am intrigued with cjdns’ ability to issue IP addresses from the fc00 keyspace without the approval of a central issuer, such as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Can you explain how this works?
Networks work because everyone using the network agrees on it. The internet uses centrally issued IP addresses so everyone delegates to the IANA and ultimately ICANN, to decide who gets to use what address, but if a network is not actually interoperating with the internet then you can use any addressing scheme that you like.
I see that a project called the Router Server has been built for use in the PKT ecosystem. What is that technology and its importance to the PKT roadmap?
I’ve mentioned how we’re splitting the administrative and technical from the physical, well the Route Server is the component that does this computation. It’s a little bit like a name server, the type of server that resolves a name like pkt.cash into an IP address like 188.165.200.79, except instead of just resolving to an IP address, it resolves the actual path through the network that the data should take.
What is next for the PKT and cjdns roadmap?
The cjdns node and the Route Server are functioning technologies already, but to take the next step, we’re looking to make a VPN service that anyone can become a provider, and then offer an internet sharing technology so people can share access with their neighbor but all of the data is always tunneled through the VPN. Then we can move forward into actually leasing the bandwidth and trading those leases in decentralized bandwidth marketplaces.
Finally, if you were sitting here 10 years in the future, what would you want to look back and see that you had accomplished?
The whole objective is to create an internet that can’t be turned off and get the next 1 billion people connected to it. But you know the tragic events with Ukraine in recent weeks have really given cause for contemplation. Having friends and colleagues who are close to the action, it’s reminded me that really at the end of the day, what we’re here to do is make the world a better place, whatever that might look like.
