The Role of ISPs in the Modern Internet

August 9, 2021

Hi and welcome back to another episode of “George rants about things.” If you missed my inaugural rant, make sure to check in and get up to speed about all of the OPSEC risks you ignore every time you open up the web .

Today’s subject is one that sometimes keeps me up at night, because I’m not sure there’s a solution. As we work to build a new decentralized, permissionless financial system, in the back of my mind is always the irony that we build it on an infrastructure - the internet - that is controlled by very few, very large parties, and that it’s only possible to build on it because they allow us to.

In today’s edition, we talk about ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and the role they play in our daily lives. Proceed at your own risk, because you likely won’t be pleased. The role of ISPs is hands down the most overlooked piece of the puzzle that is internet infrastructure.

There are countless arguments supporting individual rights on the internet, whether they’re fighting for you to protect your privacy, take back your freedom, or whatever else. Here’s the truth: your ISP is your overlord. However, because a network of ISPs together enable devices to connect to and exchange data with one another, there is some element of decentralization to cling on to.

But as we are devoted to privacy, we can’t afford to overlook anything, right? Let’s take a deep-dive into the wonderful world of ISPs.

First things first, what is the internet, anyway? This digital network which people often refer to as if it were a sentient entity all unto itself is an instrument that has democratized large parts of our society while bringing conventional institutions to their knees. It is a fair network where you can have your own space, voice, and opinions; but it’s also a place where you can get silenced and sentenced to a life of obscurity, depending on how invested you are in your internet presence, of course.

Additionally, you have to pay to access the internet, and you may even have to deal with limited bandwidth at times. You have to pay the internet provider, who may thereby limit your access, and who will likely require you to purchase and use specific hardware to join the network. As such, you might mistakenly be led to believe that your internet provider in fact owns the internet - or at least some right to it - just as you might own any other good.

So then, what is the internet and who owns it?

Unfortunately, the answers are complex and far from intuitive; in short, the ownership of the internet is far from being described merely as a boolean condition. If you want to visualize the internet, think about LAN (Local Area Network) parties (if you are a boomer, you used to organize those at your friends’ homes or at public places where you’d meet to play video games together in person). The internet can be visualized as a big-ass LAN/WLAN composed of all active devices - including yours! Servers that store websites, phones, laptops, and any smart devices together form what we know to be the internet. This concept may feel familiar to many of us because it is relatively similar to the manner in which nodes function together in a blockchain network.

Let’s follow the flow to understand how data carriers operate: If you remember, at some point in time ISPs used to offer free, unlimited traffic to their customers that were connecting to each other, but required payment from their customers that sought to connect to users from other ISPs. Here’s why (hint: it has to do with cables):

Your ISP owns physical cables that carry traffic. Essentially, each ISP owns a big LAN in which they can move certain packets of data from one end of a network to another, free of charge. As a customer, you are buying bandwidth from your ISP, which owns the final cables that enter your house and provide you with internet access. Your personal cables converge in a single, larger cable outside, continue and converge with cables from other houses into ever-larger cables, and so on. Some ISPs own their entire capacity of cables, whereas some rent out part of their cable capacity from bigger carriers, and some still decide to barter their cable capacities with others in a sort of “I’ll-let-your-data-transit-on-my-cables-if-you-let-my-data-transit-on-yours" makeshift agreement.

At some point though, all those cables have to lead somewhere - specifically, to a place where ISPs can exchange traffic between them. These places are called “Internet Exchange Buildings” and, as the name suggests, are physical buildings where various ISPs connect to each other in order to exchange data. From one carrier to another, you end up with a handful of huge carriers that collectively own a Local Area Network as large as the world, in other words, the entire internet.

Don’t believe it? If you need more convincing, have a look at the interconnected cables lining our ocean’s floors .

So, however users may fight for their privacy in efforts to shield themselves and their lives from the usual suspects, ISPs will not only continue to control and route user data on demand, but will share it between and amongst one another as well.

And as much as I and others dedicate time, energy, and experience to the prerogative of privacy, it’s daunting to think about ISPs and how their control of data exchanged between devices - that is, the internet - rests solely under their collective thumb.

Think about it: that VPN you want to install, the surveillance-resistant OS you want to download, the blog you read that challenges the elites, virtual machines, the cryptographically secure messaging apps you use, online privacy guides, and even the deep web itself - all depend entirely on the mercy of ISPs and the hope that they will continue to allow it and mind their own business for the time being.

The bottom line: true, comprehensive privacy is a far-reaching goal, and one which requires solutions on a number of different levels - software, hardware, and network engineering included. It’s still early, and a number of solutions remains feasible, but if we are going to successfully hold onto our individual rights into the digital age, we are going to need all hands on deck. Offshift’s PriFi ecosystem represents a major piece to the puzzle, and we invite any and all minds in the privacy community to join us in pioneering privacy-focused technologies that protect individual rights in the virtual domain.

Passionate about privacy? Follow us on Twitter for our next PriFi AMA announcement, where we’ll be taking your questions around different privacy topics. This month’s will be around Surveillance Capitalism and hosted on Twitter Spaces!

About Offshift

Offshift is leading private decentralized finance (PriFi) with the world’s first Private Derivatives Platform. It leverages zero-knowledge (zk) proofs and sources reliable, real-time price feeds from Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network to enable users to mint zkAssets, an unprecedented line of fully private synthetics. Offshift’s mostly anonymous team has developed a trusted reputation for their thorough privacy research, development and execution.

To learn more and get involved, visit the links below: