I am glad people smarter than me are thinking about it. I seriously suck at networking so I don't trust my thoughts on potential solutions. Maybe the issue is that we are trying to solve it as a technical problem, while the problem is we don't know who is really human, which seems a little closer to meatspace.
Part of an issue for me is it feels like pissing into the wind - some of my ideas cant even be implemented on current gen ios, because of all the “smart” ai features that try to gobble up everything I do on it. I know better now than to give that stuff out, most people have some sense, because it’s like, most apps work a lot better when that’s turned on, but completely break when it’s off, so aren’t they kind of being coercive there? Windows is becoming more like this too. I don’t use androids much if I can help it because being tied into google system is often incredibly annoying. so what is left? no one can just recreate a sane and semi comfortable less invasive internet from scratch. But if I can’t even trust my own tech not to tattle on me for crimes as “egregious” as the accelerometer in my phone reporting i braked a little too hard, welp, congrats, now my policy went up even though I didn’t do anything wrong and likely even avoided accident. That’s my main gripe with this tech, like just let me do what I want without trying to subtly influence or manipulate me and get me off of these invasive applications.
Oddly, this is why Russia's tests[1] and China's firewall[2] may end up being the unfortunate end state of splinternet. I am on android and played with some of the alternatives. Sadly, you are right.. it is genuinely hard to get away from the convenience.. and I care. It would be impossible to get someone, who doesn't care to make that jump.
I don't want to start my rant on cars, because even now I am debating buying an old clunker just to avoid some of the technology in modern cars ( not that it would stop cell snooping on me.. ).
There have probably been things written about it in more technical detail, but the chinese firewall became an issue in world of warcraft, when players discovered the packet sniffing and used addons to take out chinese players and guilds by dropping malicious keywords into packets (wow addons also have the additional problem of having way too much machine access). Honestly, I take no political position here at all, because I think most countries are engaging in some sort of form of this behavior - but in the case of WoW, it basically forced chinese players who were becoming quite competitive out of the game entirely. I felt really bad for them. How do you even mitigate issues like that in a global internet? I have no clue. I’m sure scrapers of all sorts of countries are tripping up over all sorts of censorship stuff, which is why, I think a tightly protocoled isolated section of the web would likely be a good thing to have as a safety raft.
