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If SOPA comes to pass, is this a technological way to get around the censorship?

Asked by HungryGuy (16044points) January 20th, 2012

Okay, I admit that I don’t know how feasible or practical this is, but I have an idea…

Suppose some company manufactures a wireless router (nothing new there). The LAN side of the router (the hard-wired, and wireless-G and wireless-N that all our personal devices connect to) continues to work exactly as it does now. The WAN side of the router (the connector that you plug the cable from your cable or Fios modem into) is also replaced with a wireless repeater that uses a whole new internet protocol (ideally open-source so that other companies could sell compatible routers). When two or more such routers are in range of each other, they establish a wireless internet backbone among themselves. As more such routers come in range, this wireless backbone expands to encompass every router in the network. At first, local communities will have isolated sub-internets (not subnets which are something different). Then each large city will become an internet unto itself. But gradually, the entire nation is covered by a gazillion such wireless routers restoring the internet across the nation. Perhaps even repeaters could exist to connect countries across the Big Blue Wet Thing, to re-establish the world-wide internet. Of course, ping would be terrible and web sites would be maddeningly slow to reply. But the only way that the government could censor such an internet would be for it to send out a gazillion FCC trucks to broadcast jamming signals across the country. While this won’t stop the government from buying their own such routers and sniffing packets to find out who is using what sites, such an internet would be practically un-censorable.

Practical? Or not? If not, what other ideas can you offer?

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