'Why the alt-right can’t build an alt-internet: Building an internet for Nazis is hard'
After the August 12th hate rally in Charlottesville, online platforms that have long tolerated or ignored white supremacists are very publicly kicking them off. The crackdown spans a broad range of sites and apps, some of which are household names, like Uber, Facebook, and Spotify. But some of the most notable companies to purge their ranks are those we don’t often consider: the web hosts, domain registrars, and other services that you need to put a website on the internet. Over the past week, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, and Google — to name a few — have been playing hot potato with the major neo-Nazi news site Daily Stormer, taking it offline several times as it’s moved around the internet.
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A site could use an alternative domain name system like Namecoin, for instance. It could advertise a numerical IP address rather than a link. The Daily Stormer set up shop on the free and decentralized Tor network, operating on the so-called dark web. But at that point, you’re not just independent, you’re effectively walled off from the normal internet. There are plenty of technological ways to run a shadow net, says Nathan Freitas, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and leader of the open-source Guardian Project. “The question is, how willing is the audience to get to it? And is the point to allow their community to get to it, or the whole internet?”
Far-right sites and services want to be real alternatives to their mainstream counterparts, not just enclaves for true believers. After the Daily Stormer went down, founder Andrew Anglin gloated over the “massive amount of publicity” it had gotten. But that popularity is worth much more if it translates to people seeking out the Daily Stormer — and that can’t happen if they can’t find it. While supporters of the parallel economy predict that restrictive policies will drive people into the arms of “free speech”-friendly services, convenience is a powerful force.
Since Squarespace and other hosting services have started banning white supremacist sites, it’s also possible that we’ll see parallel companies running their own alternatives. And starting a web hosting service could certainly insulate sites from the kind of public pressure that’s taken the Daily Stormer offline.
But if the goal is immunity from all regulation, it’s very difficult to truly operate outside the law. The offshore data center HavenCo, for example, fell apart after technical problems and disputes with its hosts on the micronation of Sealand. And American copyright cops routinely police platforms located across the world, thanks to agreements with local governments.
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“At this point, it is now really difficult to be off on your own online,” says Molly Sauter, a Berkman Klein Center affiliate and author of The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet. That’s good news for the people pressuring web companies to crack down on hate content. But for anyone who worries about internet monopolies and walled gardens, it could be a canary in a coal mine. “It's hard for quote-unquote true social deviants, people who are really way out on the fringe, to maintain a solid presence. But it's also really easy for a handful of large corporate hosting companies to sort of dictate what is happening.”
The EFF also expressed its own concerns about the Daily Stormer ban last week. In a piece titled “Fighting neo-Nazis and the future of free expression,” members warned that opening the door to regulating speech with the domain name system could create a new tool for oppressive regimes to take websites offline. It called for registrars to take a hard line against suspending site domains, and for other services to follow the Manila Principles, a framework of safeguards and transparency rules for web platforms.
Adopting these measures would make it easier for all groups, not just the alt-right, to secure a place within existing web infrastructure. It wouldn’t, however, make it easier to step outside that infrastructure — which may be why Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin recently called for the US government to regulate ICANN, saying that frankly, he did not have the option to create his own internet. “It's very hard to roll your own stuff online,” says Sauter.
In an ideal world, Sauter would like to see a mechanism that would bring more real democracy — not just anarchy or corporate dominance — to the online world. For now, there’s really only one internet. In order to operate there, you’ve got to play by its rules. But after last week, those rules aren’t as clear as they once seemed.