Why can’t we just make our own internets, or separate ones that no one can access?
In: Technology
You can. Buy a couple good professional routers from Mikrotik, some switches, lots of cable/fiber and maybe a few microwave point-to-point or point-to-multipoint links (Ubiquiti ones are neat!). Then you can team up with your neighborhood or village and have your very own private local/municipal area network!
We could. The issue is that you can’t afford putting a new network of wires to every house.
If you want just a network that can’t be accessed by anyone but selected people you definitely can do that on the existing hardware. You can create websites and just restrict who can access them through the normal Internet.
Or what do you mean?
We can and constantly do. Any time you have a local area network, like your wifi router, that is essentially a “private internet.” You can have a computer on your private home network that serves up webpages in the same way as a website, and unless you tell your router to allow the outside world to connect, that website will be a private one that only people on your home network can access.
This is very frequently done in business and research contexts; if you run a website which allows remote control and monitoring of your power plant, you are most definitely going to keep that on a private network and not expose it to the internet. Many research institutions will have a private network so their computers and equipment can talk to each other, but no connection to the general internet at all, to keep that private network more secure (this is called being “airgapped”).
Going bigger, North Korea has their own “private internet” called Kwangmyong, which has around 5,000 websites and is the only internet almost anyone in DPRK can access.
The internet is really just a bunch of wires connecting a bunch of computers to each other. So, you can certainly just get a bunch of computers and connect them with wires and turn it into its own network, sure.
But the internet is a useful tool because of how widespread it is. You wouldn’t be able to access anything that you didn’t put on there yourself, for example. Finding a use case for making something like that on a large scale would be hard.
That said, businesses and even some tech savvy families routinely create local networks for things like private, secure file sharing. I remember in middle school we used to access our class files by going to the right folder in the “F: drive”. That was an “internet,” of sorts.
they are very common. You probably dont know about them because……….you can’t access them.
you can, it’s called a LAN. You likely have one running in your house already and you probably call it Wi-Fi not realizing what it actually is.
You can
The easiest way is to unplug your router from the wan side and then you have your home network disconnected from the internet
Set one machine to provide dns to the others and you can host websites on any pc on your network and access them from any other without being connected to the internet
You can also plug the wan on your router to the wan on your neighbor’s and with a bit of tweaking they can access your websites too
Then you can just add as many people as you want
you certainly can, it might cost a trillion dollars to make anything half competitive with the internet tho.
We do and have been for a few decades: they’re called “Local Area Networks”
When you realize “internet” stands for “network of interconnect networks”, it may suddenly make sense.
you can absolutely do that if you want to but what would be the utility for you to have your own “internet” that nobody except you is connected to?
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