Eli5: Why we can’t access all “levels” of internet with a normal browser?
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I assume you mean Tor and I2P (or more commonly known as the “dark web”), for those it’s simply because there are different protocols in place than are used for the normal internet (aka “clear web”). So you need a piece of software that understands those different protocols in the middle.
Normal browser looks up the IP address based on the URL, sends an HTTP(S) request to that IP address and gets a response.
If you want to buy drugs this doesn’t work. If your browser knows the server’s IP address, so do the feds. The feds know where every IP address is, so they go to that house and arrest the drug seller.
So these extra systems are invented to hide your IP address
Alright, so: the internet is really just a whole lot of computers all connected together in a big network, kind of like a map of your country is a lot of towns and cities all connected together by roads. Web sites work because people got together and said, “If we want to talk to each other on the internet, here’s how we’ll do it, and these rules apply to everyone so everyone can know how to use them.” Browsers are built to know and use those rules, so they can show you any web site that also follows those rules!
There are lots of ways to look at the internet and divide it up but one of those ways is to ask: “How easy is it to find and see this stuff on the internet?”
The *surface web* is the parts of the internet you probably use the most. It’s the stuff that you can find with search engines – if you can go to Google or Bing or whatever and find a web page, that’s the surface web. Everyone can get to it, everyone can use it.
The *deep web* is the parts of the internet that *aren’t* in search engines. This isn’t as evil as it sounds; any site you have to log in to use, like your email? Any forum where you can’t read anybody’s posts without logging in? That’s the deep web too! It’s still there, on the internet, but it’s a little harder to find or get into. There are extra steps, and they’re simple steps, but search engines couldn’t do those steps automatically so the sites aren’t in search engines.
Part of the deep web, though, is the *dark web*. There are people who want to use the internet to talk or share files or do business, but want to do it in secret; they don’t want anybody to find them by accident, they don’t want anybody to know who they are or where they are (which the normal internet rules allow, sometimes, sort of), and they don’t want anybody listening in.
(Often this is because they are doing things that are illegal.)
So they set stuff up on the internet that requires extra software, or secret tools, to even find and use. The whole *goal* is to make it so that a normal person with a normal browser can’t access their sites or files or chats, so they’ve thrown out normal internet rules and set up their own nonsense to keep you and me out and to keep themselves hidden and anonymous.
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