Browser Offers Easy Way to Hop on to Censorship-Free Internet

With governments around the world exhibiting new levels of “digital authoritarianism,” according to a recent report, combined with the surge in internet use caused by the coronavirus lockdown, protecting online civil liberties suddenly takes on a new level of urgency. Starting April 1, the popular, free web browser Opera is making it easier to access an internet protocol known as the InterPlanetary File System, a peer-to-peer network that circumvents centralized servers—meaning that governments will have a far more difficult time censoring the system or shutting it down, according to a report by the site Decrypt. Opera has also added support for .crypto domain names. Unlike .com, .net, .org and other, more familiar internet domain names, .cyrpto sites are not administered by ICANN, the centralized, worldwide nonprofit firm that maintains internet addresses. Web hosting services such as GoDaddy purchase those domain names and maintain them for customers. But as anyone who has been slightly late with a hosting bill has learned, those hosting companies also have the power to shut down any domain name, taking it off the internet registry and leaving the site associated with that name inaccessible. Not so for .crypto sites, which are hosted on a public blockchain, and may be accessed or altered only by the owner of the name, who holds a private key. “Blockchain domains are to domain names as cryptocurrencies are to regular currencies,” Brad Kam, the co-founder of San Francisco’s Unstoppable Domains, told Decrypt. “The main difference is that you no longer have a custodian.” The .crypto sites change the “power balance” on the internet, allowing political activists, hackers, and anyone who needs to be free of government or corporate censorship an open path to the ’net. Opera becomes the first web browser to offer built-in access to the IPFS and .crypto sites, without use of a cumbersome plugin—a major step toward what Kam predicts will become a “splintered” internet. “Everybody is plugging into this one version of the internet,” he told Decrypt. “That's not how it's gonna work in the future.” As more browsers add IPFS and .crypto access, users will be able to choose between varying versions of the internet, escaping censorship and other forms of authoritarian control. “That's a huge amount of user control power that does not exist today,” Kam told Decrypt. Photo by Opera / Anti / Wikimedia Commons