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When the whole Internet blocks you, where do you turn?

What a strange time for the Internet.

Trump tried to take on Twitter. Then Twitter took down Trump, as did almost every other social media platform.

It’s an ongoing tug of war between corporations and governments over who gets to control and moderate the free flow of information, ideas and speech online.

But who made these guys the boss of the web?

Most of us experience censorship in some form or another. Sometimes we just call it geoblocking (thanks for nothing, Netflix…) But this is more of an inconvenience, rather than a violation of our human rights.

In some parts of the world, like in Uganda, governments can authorize a complete internet shutdown to aid their own political agendas. Imagine living without the internet for a whole day. How about months?

Whether it’s big tech or ruling dictators, there should be no way for someone to just flip a switch and deny you access to the web.

Time to break the internet

Many people (including Twitter’s own CEO) believe that corporate censorship sets a dangerous precedent. Hate speech and inciting violence is inexcusable and intolerable, we can all agree. Yet normalising the behaviour of businesses to set the social standards for freedom of expression is a slippery slope.

Traditionally, companies such as Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare treat the web as a privately owned commodity, when in fact, the internet is public infrastructure.

The internet belongs to everyone. And just as with public utility companies like electricity and water, there are ways to turn the internet into a publicly managed and powered space.

We know a lot about the Web 3.0 here at Hacker Noon. This new kind of decentralized web means we can shift governance processes to people, rather than businesses. Then we all become gatekeepers. This new ownership model for internet infrastructure would drastically change the way we not only run it - more accessible, secure and free - but the ways we prevent things like dangerous hate speech.

We need to protect the internet. It’s the home of free information and expression. It’s also the home of cat videos, memes, Wikipedia, and of course, Hacker Noon.

This is why Hacker Noon has struck up a strategic partnership with Mysterium Network - a Web 3.0 project making the internet censorship-resistant and more secure. They have a nifty decentralized VPN app, powered by a residential node network, that unblocks the web wherever you are and lets you browse truly anonymously. So you can stream global Netflix and power the decentralized web at the same time. Because not all heroes wear capes.

Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be:

putting their claims to the test,
figuring out how easy is it to use the dVPN and/or set up one’s own nodes,
how secure is it,
how it prevents data-leakages,
how it compares to the vanilla centralized VPN services,
and above all, how it can help democratize the web once and for all

On the same note, join us to thank today’s newsletter sponsor - Mysterium Network. They keep your network powered at fast speed, protect your connections, and allow you to surf global Netflix (if that’s not cool, we don’t know what is). Check them out using this link here and get 5 FREE MYST tokens to try-before-you buy.