Defining a Free Internet

This project explores what a "free internet" means. There are countries where sharing your thoughts will get you killed and treated inhumanely (like in China, read more here). But there also are people on the internet with the pure goal to harm others or spread misinformation. The goal is to find the perfect technical specification to guarantee security to every person. I will go over some of my approaches to guarantee this.

Currently Problems

The network should not be controlled by a monopoly. This will cause abuse by the authority. We can see this in reality, with the ICAAN controlling the domains and the governments being able to take down websites on the clear web. While some of those are justified (scams, c&c for viruses) others are just purely political. In summary, no single person should be able to command a takedown of a site.

Decentralized Content Monitoring

To avoid a monopoly, the network needs to be controlled by a good mixture of algorithms (to detect repeated bad content). Content can be hashed and tagged if it's flagged, and later on new content can be scanned for matches with other hashes. This way a malicious piece of content is detected but the content itself is kept private. This is how a flow could look like:

1. A user tries to post a new interaction (post, comment) from their profile.
2. The post is hashed with SHA256 (as base64) and sent through a database to see if it contains dangerous material (i.e. an image of an execution). If there is a match, it gets flagged and blocked. The post data itself is not stored and nobody can trace back which person tried to post it.
3. Using vector analysis, each word is embedded and checked against a vector database. It can get flagged as inappropriate or offending.
4. Users with a low-tolerance setting will not see flagged posts, and people with repetitive flagged posts will get warned or kicked. The kicks are not like bans on most social media platforms and can get appealed.

Implementation of this Network

This approach is super-simplified. But how do we implement this on a high level POV? There's a few main components in the internet we need to define and recreate:

1. Database to hash and store images, videos and other files that are violent anti-TOS files.
2. The vector store and function to validate the text content in multiple dimensions.
3. A content queue to keep track of upcoming interactions to approve (or decline) and flag them.
4. Blockchain to keep track of all existing and improved posts. This integrates in #2. Individuals who contribute are rewarded for verifying and storing the content.
5. A list of controllers to keep track of all nodes of #3. Blockchains lose their value if a large portion of the nodes are controlled by a single entity, which would cause the network to break, as it then would be controlled by a monopoly. See the equivalent in the TOR network here.

Funding + Bounty

I am more than happy to fund such projects with up to $10,000 in checks. The only requirement is an active working demo (+ good if you have users already). It also needs to be open-source but monetized. Email me for more.