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Can A Decentralized Internet Fix Net Neutrality?
Net neutrality has been a hotbed political topic for at least a decade, but the roots of it go way back in Internet history. The idea is that all data will be treated equally by the Internet’s gate keepers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
In the 1970s, long before the commercial Internet as we know it, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) researchers began testing for the next phase of the defense department’s information network, ARPANET, which officially went online in 1969. The result of this research is the TCP/IP communications protocol that currently underlies the Internet structure of today.
On January 1, 1983, known as flag day, NCP was officially rendered obsolete when the ARPANET changed its core networking protocols from NCP to the more flexible and powerful TCP/IP protocol suite, marking the start of the modern Internet. (Source)
The idea behind TCP/IP was to create an end-to-end communications protocol for all computers on the network, and all networks that connected to it as well, in order to ensure that no intermediary nodes, such as routers and modems, could discriminate between the types of data being…
