Introducing InternetWide / ARPA2
================================

>   *This is an introduction to the ideology that underpins the InternetWide
>   foundation and its handywork in the form of ARPA2 projects.*

The big idea behind ARPA2 is to create an environment where you are in control.
Old-school hosting providers pioneered the idea by letting their users host
their own websites, email addresses and such, all under their own domain name.
This led to the so-called “LAMP stack”, an acronym of the underlying
technologies Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP.

Since the introduction of this scheme, the Internet has seen a tremendous amount
of innovation.  But, as a result of cut-throat competition on the pricing of the
relatively standard LAMP stack, most hosting providers have had a hard time
keeping up.  In their place, we now see specialised services based on
centralised service hosting, much to the disadvantage of the privacy of
individual users.

With ARPA2, we hope to regain the level of individual control that we had in the
days of the LAMP stack, but without the limitations of just having web and
email.  This is not so strange in itself — chat and (video) telephony have long
been standardised and can be run anywhere, anytime.  All you need is an Internet
connection — *in principle*.

Many advanced computer users actually run these services for themselves, and are
successful at evading the centralised control from the few large silos that
reign todays Internet (and the privacy of its users).  Their level of
understanding however, is not available to anyone.  This is where hosting
providers used to step in.

The competition between hosting providers however, makes it difficult for them
to keep up with new developments.  They might have picked up on some
technologies, but there is no integratal adoption of things like chat and
telephony — technologies that are pretty vital in the protection of individual
freedom.  To step in, we are developing

-   An architecture for the Internet, based on loosely connected domains, either
    hosted privately or with a hosting provider.  We coined the name
    [InternetWide
    Architecture](http://internetwide.org/blog/2016/06/24/iwo-phases.html) for
    this, and you will read a lot about it in this handbook.

-   An open source software distribution that supports both the technical-savvy
    individual or company, and the hosting provider who simply wants to run a
    modern software stack that integrates with other hosting providers’ domains,
    among others because they follow the same architecture.  We coined the name
    [ARPA2](http://arpa2.net) as the umbrella project name for our individual
    development projects building towards the InternetWide Architecture.

The purpose is to achieve a lot of functionality, available to all, with choice
of service provider and always supportive of do-it-yourself.  A lot of excellent
software is already available in the open source community; the trick is to
identify and build any extensions that these components may need in order to fit
into the architecture.  In almost all cases, this comes down to adding a plugin
to which the applications are already pretty open, but for which nobody has
identified the need yet.  Our approach from an integral architecture helps us to
find precisely the itches that need to be scratched if we are to get all these
sublime components to work together as the concerted whole that leads to the
perfect end-user experience.  This is why we opted for the (admittedly grand)
name “InternetWide Architecture” for this design — it simply describes best what
we are aiming for.

The architecture is designed by a cryptographer, with serious attention for
matters of security and privacy.  The entire architecture is complex, because it
touches upon many matters, but as we worked on it, a rather clear image has
formed, fulfilling most or all of our hopes and dreams of getting to a mature,
decentralised Internet, where individuals and companies regain their
individuality with the security and privacy that they so much deserve to have.

As the project matures, we should see increasing numbers of users who feel less
obliged to “do what everyone does” and accept the gradual tightening grip of
silos on individual privacy.  We are not here to put those silos out of business
or disconnect them from users of the ARPA2 software distributio — we are only
here to offer users a choice between a silo or individual responsibility for
their online presence.