Tribune. The initial purpose of the Internet was to decentralize exchanges by sharing information. It was part of a breakthrough project, which promised to increase individual freedoms and promote autonomy. It is in this place of all possibilities that we found new inspiration after the explosion of the Internet bubble, at the turn of the century, and the exhaustion of the service society. The Internet promised to be the new engine of economic growth. And since users weren’t willing to pay to consume these new services, companies offered them to them for free, in exchange for using their data for advertising. This new economy is in the process of tipping us into an algorithmic services company whose abuses are called addiction, non-respect for privacy, surveillance or even behavioral influence.
In this context where the Internet now conditions the profitability of our economies, is it realistic to rebuild it to find its original intention? There are many initiatives that attempt to achieve this. For example, to change the situation in terms of data confidentiality and make exchanges more transparent, the association for the defense of citizens’ rights and freedoms on the Internet La Quadrature du Net promotes the generalization of the use of free software (open source ), as well as decentralized services, such as those of the blockchain. Others, such as Panoptykon, a Polish association for the defense of individual freedoms and human rights which campaigns against the development of surveillance technologies, suggests no longer giving companies the possibility of guessing who we are, but of their provide this information directly on a voluntary basis.
But we can just as easily use the dark net. On these alternative networks, it is difficult to collect personal data and identify users. There are dozens of them, including Tor, the most famous of them, with 2 million users per day. France is the sixth user in the world behind Germany, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Ukraine, according to the Tor Metrics.
Scapegoat
The dark Net was invented in the 1970s by the US Navy, which sought to anonymize its connections. The military thus created isolated networks of Arpanet (the ancestor of the Internet), capable of exchanging data in a non-traceable manner. Tor is today maintained by a non-profit organization, the Tor Project, to which many patrons contribute, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The network is still 90% funded by the US government for the fight against terrorism, censorship and electronic surveillance in some countries, such as China or Iran. However, the American administration does not hesitate to denounce it elsewhere.
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