Redesigning the Internet for the 21st Century Our vision is to fundamentally redesign the way how data is routed, transmitted and handled on the Internet in order to provide private, confidential and censorship-resistant means of communication for billions of users. This project, supported by Wau Holland Foundation, was born out of our dissatisfaction with the technological status quo of the Internet. It is time to get rid of legacy technologies with fundamental design flaws that enable the widespread exploitation of sensitive data for purposes of mass surveillance, cyber crime and economic espionage. We are an international, interdisciplinary group of experts with years of experience in fields such as distributed systems and cryptography. Together, we aim at realizing a new Internet architecture that enables informational self-determination and truly serves the needs of free and democratic societies. _Design Principles_ Data security is at the core of our technical approach. It is not sufficient to only secure the contents of communications. We also want to prevent the systematic collection of commmunication profiles (metadata), as the analysis of the social graph of a population poses a particular threat to democracy. Our concept for a new Internet is based on the following design principles: * ubiquitous end-to-end encryption, removing the necessity to trust any third parties that might access our data while it is being transmitted or stored * obfuscation of transmission patterns, preventing the analysis of social relations, behavior patterns and topical interests of the participants in a network * decentralized authentication mechanisms, removing the necessity to trust centralized certification authorities that can be compromised * multicast technology, because we need to interconnect billions of users without the need for centralized server farms * distributed data flow and storage, making bulk collection of data economically unattractive * consistent use of free and open software, putting the system under permanent public scrutiny and giving users control over their computation Beyond the application of cutting-edge security standards, our concept emphasizes scalability and usability. We want to establish an attractive technological platform for applications and commercial services that can be used by large user bases worldwide. Using a modular approach, we are integrating existing best practices and results from the scientific community to build a coherent system. _Development Plan_ Our aim is to provide alternatives to unsafe technologies for all relevant modes of communication that are popular with Internet users today. To this end we came up with the following roadmap, which is a scenario based on our current knowledge of activities. This list is definitely not cast in stone and we are eager to hear your comments and suggestions: _Phase 1 (within 2 years)_ * Secure business transactions by means of decentralized authentication for web services as an alternative to TLS/SSL (HTTPS), X.509 (certification system) * Server-based confidential one-to-one and group telephony as an alternative to Skype, Flash telephony, telephone, VoIP * Instant one-to-one and group messaging as an alternative to Facebook chat, Whatsapp, IRC, XMPP/Jabber * Anonymized distributed data storage as an alternative to Cloud based apps, unencrypted servers * Integration of anonymous browsing as an alternative to Tor, I2P _Phase 2 (within 5 years)_ * Asynchronous one-to-one messaging with attachments as an alternative to Facebook mail, simple e-mail functions * Asynchronous mailing lists for group collaboration with distributed storage as an alternative to advanced e-mail functions, Facebook groups, message boards, Dropbox * Distributed web, multimedia and streaming services as an alternative to Websites, Podcasting, Youtube, Content Delivery Networks (CDN) * Distributed social networking platform as an alternative to Facebook, Google Plus, Diaspora * Audio and video group communication as an alternative to Google Hangouts, Skype conferencing, telephone and VoIP conferencing * Decentralized news distribution as an alternative to Reddit, Google news * Anonymous, taxable payments as an alternative to Visa, Paypal, Bitcoin _Phase 3 (long-term)_ * Decentralized, censorship resistant search engine as an alternative to Google search, Yahoo search, Microsoft Bing * Migration to public key based routing as an alternative to BGP, OSPF * Free and open hardware as an alternative to proprietary processors and peripherals (Intel, AMD) address@hidden _This vision is shared by_ wauland.de, GNUnet.org, secushare.org