Joseph Bonicioli mostly uses the same internet you and I do. He pays a service provider a monthly fee to get him online. But to talk to his friends and neighbors in Athens, Greece, he’s also got something much weirder and more interesting: a private, parallel internet. […]
Their new digital spaces are autonomous and relatively safe from outside meddling. In an era when governments and corporations are increasingly tracking our online movements, the user-controlled networks are emerging as an almost subversive concept. « When you run your own network, » Bonicioli explains, « nobody can shut it down. » […]
The last-mile problem, it turns out, isn’t just technical or economic: It’s political and even cultural. To repurpose the famous A.J. Liebling statement, internet freedom is guaranteed only to those who own a connection. « And right now, you and me don’t own the internet—we just rent the capacity to access it from the companies that do own it, » Wilder says. […]