This was the first line on the website of a friend of the K-Landnews more than ten years ago.
It was meant to be a joke but there really is more internet out there than you can normally see. We do not mean the projects that make your use more private, like TOR.
More domains, like .pirate or .free.
But none of your search engines will find websites in these domains.
The reason for this is that the "internet you know" is based on the structure of ICANN, and they don't like that other people run their own equivalent to the "address books" that allow you to run around the web. We use the words web and internet as meaning the same thing. Good enough for everyday purposes.
While ICANN not long ago ran a media blitz about "new top level domains" in order to sell some for huge amounts of money, such domains have been out there for a decade or more.
And virtually nobody - we had to get in a "virtually" somewhere - in the media has reported on any of these other internet areas.
The internet we all know, love and hate does have some information about the "other internet", for example, at the site of OpenNIC.
The site illustrates one difficulty: if you, as most users, do not understand what a DNS provider is, you will be tempted to simply move on, waste time on facebook or twitter, tumblr or myspace.
Some of the things these alternatives can do may surprise you. For instance, we get swamped by big media announcements about some takedown of a bad, bad piracy site, and then we go have a look and see the cute logo of some government agency.
Hardly anybody talks about what happens when a site is "taken down". There are two fundamental ways to do it.
Impound the physical hardware
Some government suits or a swat team walk into a big room, grab the machines, and do away with the site. Like the repo man coming for your car. An easily understood time-tested process. And that is what we assume happens, that is what the government wants you to believe happens.
It does happen but not as much as you think.
Change the address to make a site disappear
Since the "old" internet has a hierarchical address lookup structure, it is a lot easier to change the address than find and remove servers in a bunch of different countries and a bunch of different bunkers. Imagine ICANN as the post office that holds the official record of the address of your house. The government goes there and changes your address to a government dead letter office.
Everybody thinks you or your house are gone.
But just as in this image, the site is still there, and there are a few people out there who know how to pick up the letter from your friend and divert it away from the dead letter office to your house.
Those who want to keep the internet neatly fenced in and make you use
the gate with the wrought iron slogan "money will set you free" have their funds and our inertia on their side.
Still, the next time you hit the web, spend just a few seconds to think about the other, the free internet out there.
If you do this often enough, you may overcome the hesitation and start looking around.
And if you take the leap, you will find friends waiting on the other side of the internet.
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