Building and running an ISP is not that difficult. It's hard to say how many people are connected to the Internet by such weird structures, but we know that they are more and more each day. What is at stake is taking back the control of the Internet infrastructure and showing that a neutral Internet access is natural.
Y U NO ISP Providing access to the Internet seems complicated but it's actually quite simple. You have to roll up your sleeves, dig a lot into legal, commercial and administrative stuff. Surprisingly, the technical part is usually not a problem. Despite what you could think, there is no need for a big infrastructure, a lot of money, or that sort of thing. Benjamin Bayart is at the head of the non-profit organization FDN the oldest ISP still in activity in France. In 2010, he called for the swarming of the concepts behind FDN. The idea was to copy locally what FDN was doing at a country scale and spread the word about self-hosting, Net neutrality and the stakes for society. The call was followed by the creation of several non-profit organizations, quickly federated in a meta-structure called FFDN, for Federation FDN. 2 years later, FFDN is much bigger. From 7 orgs, there are now 21, counting around 1 400 members. A human network above the machine's one. From the beginning, we knew that we were not alone and in the meantime we met with similar organizations around the world, like the Free Network Fundation in the USA or Guifi in Spain. We launched an international mailing list to spread the recipes for building open and neutral access to the Internet in many situations. During OHM, this talk helped federating energies around a belgium project and we hope 30C3 will be the occasion to spread the word even more, maybe to give some ideas and plant some seeds for building a better Internet. After all, Y U NO TRY ?
Speakers: taziden