I live in an area “served” by a large telecom provider. It has no Internet service that fits my budget. Its representatives have offered me plans that actually exceed my usual annual income, which has been devastated by Federal Reserve interest rate tampering.
I have to ride a bus several miles to use a local public library Internet service.
And even at a mere $20/month that the more fortunate ISP subscribers pay, that’s $240/year and $2,400 over a decade. Over four decades that $20/month Internet costs $9,600.
I would like to propose a scheme for no monthly consumer charge Internet service that would be suitable for a very large percentage of Americans, but not all. Perhaps it should be called the FREENET or FREEDOM (free domain) protocol.
It would be based on router connectivity and would require router software changes by router makers.
Routers often have about 100 megabits per second speed. I had five routers listed by Windows as available to me at my suburban home in Florida as I was first writing this. I used to get by with 56K dial-up and a very modest percentage of 500 megabits per second would generally suit me well.
I propose some new tags for HTML to help my protocol function by allowing whole or parts of web pages to be passed on and/or partially or completely stored with the positive permission of the copyright holders:
PASSON, CACHEPAGE, CACHEIMAGES
The PASSON tag would allow the page to be freely passed on through the router network.
The CACHEPAGE would allow a local copyright authorized viewer to store the page and yield it up to other copyright holder authorized users.
The CACHEIMAGES would allow a local copyright authorized viewer to store the images on the page and yield them up to other copyright holder authorized users.
The existing IMG SRC tag might also be given passon, privatecache and publiccache modifiers.
There are a number of different types of sites accessed. These vary between:
1. commonly accessed (www.nytimes.com)
2. rarely accessed (most web pages)
3. generally fixed (old news stories)
4. often changing (blogs)
5. secure (https:)
6. non-secure (http:)
7. pages providers may wish others to share
8. pages providers don’t wish to be shared freely
I typically use Internet Explorer as my browser. Internet Explorer 11 listed by default after typing in http://h in the address bar the following sites: http://www.hotmail.com, http://www.huffingtonpost.com, http://www.healthgrades.com, http://www.homes.com, http://www.homedepot.com
Internet Explorer knows the most common websites and could with some effort on Microsoft’s part know what information should be passed on at the highest priority if authorized by the PASSON tag. This might be the main page itself or pages with just one additional address level (consisting only of a word in the language [plus a common file extension]) or the first web page accessed from the main page (if no form was filled in).
Internet Explorer also maintains a history of websites visited.
For commonly accessed pages, a number of local users might allow their computer to cache large amounts of a website if authorized by the web page provider and to pass web page content/link information on other users via a local router network, both due to specific requests and to build up other local access sites.
Those computers normally connected all the time might pass new web page content on to say three other computers and links to say a chain that continues on up to 100 times (or until it is impossible to connect to a uninformed router).
Those computers normally connected say a majority of the time between 6am and 11pm might pass new web page content on to say two other computers and links to say a chain that continues on up to 20 times (or until it is impossible to connect to a uninformed cache computer).
Those computers normally on for less than two hours a day might pass new web page content from only less visited websites on to say five other computers and links to say a chain that continues on up to 100 times (or until the webpage is stored on a normally on computer which passes it on to another normally on computer which doesn’t have [the latest version of] it).
In the case of a blog or other rapidly updated page, updates as well as the original story or diary would be passed around according to a similar basis.
The biggest problem involves security. One wouldn’t want many e-mails or any financial information widely spread.
For e-mails, the sender might be willing to send e-mails via a local router network which might involve say 100 routers in a ten-mile long chain. A picture of their cat or dog couldn’t cause a problem if sent over an insecure network.
To have even modest security, E-mail providers might have to have sending points in thousands of towns and metropolitan zip codes so the router network chain could stay under say 100. This would be mainly the e-mail provider’s problem in much of the US.
Security for e-mails could be enhanced by message splitting by character and character bits. Eight-bit e-mail text characters might be split into 4-bit pieces and bit-split e-mail texts sent over two different router chains for better security. Alternate characters might be sent by geographically alternate servers, say odd characters (1, 3, 5, etc.) from the south side of town and even characters (2, 4, 6, etc.) from the north side of town.
If one’s e-mail address was singlevoter1@openyahoo.com then banks and others needing truly high security would send the message instead to an associated secure address, say singlevoter1@yahoo.com and the user would not be able to access the message through the protocol, only through a secure system such as at their employer.
For messages with medium security needs, the massage might be encoded and the encryption key sent to the user as a text message to their mobile phone. Almost all American adults have a mobile phone, often free of charge thanks to Uncle Sam. If one gets a message at say 3:05 pm and the header says ENCRYPTED then one would need to check their phone for a text message sent about the same time to get the encryption key for the message.
It might also be possible to pass most mobile phone encryption key text messages on from say a Bluetooth mobile phone to say an associated Bluetooth Internet computer to save the user some work. The text message might have a ‘pass-on’ (via Bluetooth) or ‘no-pass’ text in the header. It might also have a ‘check first’ code to see if only the desired Bluetooth computer is thought to be accessible or a ‘don’t check’ code. The codes used would vary by the level of security desired. The easy to use pass-on system would require some work from mobile phone makers.
Other problems involve rare pages such as say ones listing real estate in distant places and the https protocol.
Google uses the https protocol. Google also gets a lot of advertising revenue from web pages. So it has the incentive to build a modest national scale network to make rarely accessed web pages (containing its advertising) available as well as to use say a 'httpls' (low security) protocol. Amazon offers many books for sale and would benefit by contributing to a rarely loaded page network for most of its titles.
I’m not sure how to completely deal with Internet users sending sensitive information such as credit card information to make a purchase. Sending a text message with some information via cell phone and some over a low security 'httpls' protocol would work for cases where a phone number can be securely provided to a purchaser via a print ad or better, the bank card itself. Using the bank card number would require sending your bank the amount of the purchase plus a Merchant ID number assigned by the credit card company. Merchant ID numbers might very trusted for low ID numbers [0001 to say 9999]. Only highly reputable companies could get money using these. This might be automated by a Bluetooth consumer phone/computer data interchange system at the purchaser’s end.
As for pay-to-watch downloadable movies, they might be sent encrypted. The movie renter might allow a browser maker to send an encrypted movie in say one of a large number of encryption keys already on a local computer to someone who paid to rent the movie. The provider would provide the decryption key via the mobile phone text message system. This method would require browser makers and content licensors to work together.
A similar method might be used for subscription websites.
My scheme is not the answer for every American, but it would work well for tens of millions of Internet lovers and cable cutters.
TV programs for Internet transmission could divided up and coded with program segments to be cached on local consumer end machines and tailored advertising segments to be fetched from local servers operated by say Google or cached on consumer end machines.
My scheme is very capable of crashing the demand for pay Internet service and therefore the price of pay Internet service (for those who would not be satisfied by using my scheme).
Mobile web phone makers might want to make cell phones (or add-ons) that can use my router network scheme. Local and regional phone service probably could be reliably provided through a router network.
Fairly decent long distance voice service could eventually be provided via vehicles on busy interstate highways during most of the day, especially if special bandwidth was set aside under federal law and vehicles and specialized cell phones carried routers.
This all might seem too technical for the average blog reader, but we have many smart bloggers among us and hopefully at least one works for a large personal device maker and can help move technology forward.
People in many countries can’t spend what tens of millions of Americans spend for Internet service, so a system like mine is bound to see the light of day. Companies like Google and Apple can’t risk being left behind by Indian start-ups.