The dark net is synonymous with the secretive world of whistleblower sites, illegal pornography and the Silk Road drugs marketplace. Things that, for reasons good and bad, people have chosen to keep hidden. This network – technically called Tor Hidden Services – is an encrypted part of the internet, where URLs are a string of meaningless numbers and letters that end in ".onion", accessed using a browser called Tor. The software was built by the US Navy but is now open source. It allows people to browse the net without giving away their location, by encrypting the IP address and routing it through computers around the world that use the software. Tor can be used on the normal net but is also the route into this dark net of uncensored sites.
But the dark net won't stay dark for long. Because of a demand for secure internet access and user privacy, soon enough big businesses, newspapers, internet companies – and then all of us – will join the dark net. Within five years, you'll be able to choose to access your favourite brands on either the dark or the normal net.
The dark net also has another scarce business premium: creativity. Take the Silk Road online market, the most infamous site on the dark net, which was almost universally misunderstood by those who reported it. Yes, all and any drugs were available to buy and sell before the site was closed down in October 2013 – and that's not a good thing. But it was also a dazzling, phenomenal achievement.
In the world of business, its founder Ross Ulbricht would be feted as a "guru", because he created a competitive, functioning market in the most hostile conditions imaginable: buyers and sellers were anonymous and never met; and law enforcement was constantly trying to shut it down. But using clever encryption, good design and imagination, the Silk Road tilted the balance towards the buyer. Dealers were polite, attentive and consumer-centric. There were loyalty systems, special offers and mystery shoppers. Product quality was kept high and prices low thanks to consumer power. It wasn't perfect, but more than a million successful transactions went through the site over an 18-month period.
These online markets – there are many more now than when the Silk Road was busted – are relentlessly innovative. People pay with the bitcoin cryptocurrency, which can be exchanged easily enough for real-world currency, and offers its users a high degree of anonymity. When a flaw was spotted in the payment system (site admins held on to buyers' money until transactions were complete, but were running off with it) the community developed a secure payment method, called "multi-sig escrow", whereby money is transferred only if two of the three parties sign off with a digital signature. To help keep buyers anonymous, developers created "tumbling" services, which are a sort of micro-laundering system that obscures who is sending bitcoins to whom.
That combination of security, freedom and creativity is one reason use of the Tor browser is increasing – especially since the revelations of Edward Snowden. Aphex Twin announced his 2014 album, Syro, simultaneously on the normal net and on the Tor network. Facebook released a Tor Hidden Service version. According to Alec Muffett – a software engineer at Facebook who helped to set it up – it lessens the risk its users are subject to certain hacks (such as a "man in the middle" attack) or accidentally end up on a Facebook-lookalike phishing site. That's because it provides end-to-end communication from your browser to the Facebook data centre.
Its underground darkness is also exciting. Restless marketers and advertisers are always looking for ways to be heard above the online noise. I've been approached by several marketing companies asking advice about setting up dark-net sites. Soon enough a major business will run a daring ad campaign on the dark net, and set up a site there, with the promise of security. News outlets and social-media networks will also jump in, as users demand more privacy. Then Metcalfe's law kicks in: the more people on a network, the more interesting it becomes to others, making it more interesting – until everyone has joined. And when everyone's on the dark net, it stops being dark. It's just the net.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
