Shopping sites offering drugs and hired killers, hardcore pornography, illegal manuals for making explosives from domestic materials, classified information from government bodies and armies, human trafficking and entire terrorist organisations are the dark side of the world wide web.
One can think of the internet as islands connected by wires. Google, for example, is a type of central island from which threads go to many other sites, and these sites contain links (threads) to other sites – some are available on Google, and some are not.
In reality, the term “closed doors” exists in the network but is not common. The Internet is known as the public domain. If you have uploaded something to the Internet, whether to Facebook, a forum, your blog, and more, the information now belongs to everyone, and a simple search will find it. Google has become synonymous with the Internet, and we search for everything. Still, everything, and the premise is that except for private messages between another person and us on sites like Facebook or services like Google Talk and Messenger, everything is connected to everything and everything is known, public information, and we live in a pink world without secrets. But is that so?
The networks that don’t appear on the map and the anonymous network.
The basic premise is that the network is exemplary so that most of it is available to anyone seeking through search, and a maximum of a few clicks on a few links. The truth is that the internet we know and use every day is just the tip of the iceberg of the vast information network. The internet has two additional layers that most of us do not recognise exist, and they are larger than the familiar network and much scarier.
The huge and unfamiliar part of the internet is the uncharted area, a huge collection of information, sites and files that are not registered for a particular domain (so there is no simple word like youtube.com that can be written in the address bar to reach the site), and is only available to anyone who knows how to connect. For example, you can enter a specific IP address and reach one site or another, which is not available in any other way, and if you do not know what the IP address is, you will never know about the existence or content of the site. The unmapped network contains slightly more dubious information than the regular network, but nothing breathtaking. Starting with results that Google has blocked for various reasons, through a lot of porn, some legal and some unclear, FTP servers and a variety of blogs and private sites that people have opened and not bothered to register for any address or domain service more. This is where most of the web is given access and links and can be accessed from any browser.
Beneath the unmapped network, where the bottom layer is the anonymous network, you will not find it if you do not search. A network that requires a secure and anonymous connection through several servers, stored by anonymous parties and can only be visited when browsing anonymously – a completely anonymous network.
In this network, anonymity is the game’s name, and it is challenging to monitor who is surfing, where, and who in general stores and owns sites. This layer is the dark side of the internet. Between shopping sites offering drugs and hired killers, through child pornography, illegal explosives manuals from domestic materials, classified information from government bodies and armies, human trafficking to entire terrorist organisations: the unmanaged network contains everything from everything, and no one seems to be able to interfere with it.
The anonymous network has many names: Deep-Web (the deep network), Darknet (the dark network), the invisible Internet, and the hidden network, and it is not an urban legend.
But is Darknet a positive phenomenon, or should it be eradicated from the world (if it can be destroyed)? This is probably a philosophical question based on a more fundamental question – can information be illegal? In other words, it is clear that criminals who photograph materials that harm children, decapitate soldiers, and steal information from organisations – should all be punished one hour earlier. But once the information is available, can people be blamed for reading and being exposed to it? About its distribution? We have not yet been able to answer these questions, and it is doubtful that there is an unequivocal answer.
Because here, the discussion shifts to deeper questions dealing with the effectiveness and morality of censorship in democracies, freedom of expression versus national security, access to private information for huge corporations versus hiding it, and the immortal question: Will we agree to give up our privacy when we have nothing to hide? Do we not always have something to hide?
