A few years ago the hype-word on the internet was P2P. Everything that was realised in a one-server-many-clients fashion before, suddenly started to introduce new protocols and applications to distribute the heavy load at the bottlenecks of the internet. So what we have now is distributed downloads and streaming techniques, but most of them still rely on certain servers distributing the basic information to get things going. So what has been distributed with P2P is not the access to the content, but the large data amounts of the content itself and the transmission capacities. But all the ISPs out there are still working in the old one-server-many-clients fashion.

On the other hand we have a major change of the infrastructure of the internet-users, because of the many broadband connections in the households, the mobility of the users and the new technologies of wireless network access. Instead of switching to IPv6, there is a whole new revolution in the very structure of the internet coming up. I am talking about the slow but steady decline of ISPs, and the raise of a true internet, where everybody can join in for free, if he has the technical devices. With whole cities starting to be covered with WLAN-Access, a whole new opportunity arises. Instead of sending all traffic to the ISP, who then uses the internet backbone to serve the users wishes, the city could create a local parcel of the internet. So that while still being a part of the internet, it is not dependent on the ISP or the backbone anymore, because communication happens P2P, within the cables and the air connecting the citizens of the city.

For this to happen P2P offered big solutions to us, and have been implemented with distributed web hosting solutions and Direct Connect and the like. The key players in this game are the ones that brought the internet to the masses in the first place - the universities. Most universities have an excellent LAN with all the buildings connected, with dial-up lines for scientists who work at home, with student dormitories networks included in cooperations, and with further cooperations with local government networks. The most expensive part of data transmission is getting long distance data. To reduce the ratio of long distance vs. short distance data, it is important to help build local parcels of the internet, where traffic is much "cheaper". OpenFON is dreaming of a wireless LAN-network, but they still rely on broadband-access to ISPs. The main reason for this is, that ISPs have no interest in providing any help for their downfall. Most of the implementations of a distributed Internet are fighted or ignored or critized. With every new version of WLAN Protocols the ISPs power is vanishing more and more, and will crumble to a nothing once the density of WLAN-Device has surpassed a critical level, and the internet protocols and the software have adapted to the idea of an internet that actually maps onto the real world.

If you talk to scientists on the futures of car traffic, they will all tell you that it will be controlled by a Wireless P2P-network. What the ants and other insects and animals have teached us, can now be put to actual use, by creating distributed internet, the mightiest communication network out there. Only then will the internet actually be invincible to attacks. Only then our devices can become a part of the internet, and not only a input/output station. And only then can the hierarchy of the internet be broken up, and the problems of IPv4 be solved.

By all the money we pay to the ISPs to let us take part in it, we gave them a lot of power, without restrictions on how to use it. Now they start tracking their users, handing over information to legal prosecution, and they still have policies where they can cut you off the net because they do not like what you do with it. On the other hand they did not take over responsibilities, they do not care about the content as long as it is legal, they do not take action in developing the internet with all its protocols and standards, they do not care about spam and computer fraud and identity theft and so on. ISPs as they exist now, as mindless money-making machines for technical services will not exist in the time to come. They will have to focus on either quality services by offering their customers high-speed or even realtime access to services on the internet, or on security by offering a safe zone, wherein content and legality is highly controlled.

My vision seems to be a bit strange, because it is not easily understood where the advantages lie. I think the biggest advantage is, that getting access to the internet will be a lot cheaper than it is now. By not paying monthly or annual fees, but only paying once for the device, is a huge change, and certainly a future for the extremely large cities in the poorer countries of the world. Second of all locality is supported, enhanced and put into focus. This will not only reduce redundant traffic a lot, thus saving energy and infrastructure, but also let local communities grow, which is very important in the globalization age. And furthermore new P2P projects in this world, like traffic control and media-broadcasting and personal communication will have a ground to grow on, and thus be relieved from the power of service providers. After the downfall of the ISPs maybe we will have a downfall of the telcos, tv-broadcasters, radio-transmitter-stations, publishers, schools, and so on. We will see...

first picture by Jose San Juan