You're right that a flat mesh is not the best topology for long-distance communication, especially with current routing protocols, which require things like global lists of all routeable prefixes. On the protocol front, I suggest that the IETF develop routing protocols that can work well in a flat mesh topology. Parallelizing traffic streams over many available routes, so it all doesn't try to take the shortest path, would appear to be a particularly important feature, as would preventing all of a node's links from being swamped by through traffic that other nodes want it to route. The problem with long-distance traffic over flat mesh networks is less with throughput (if everything isn't taking the shortest path) than with the latencies involved in sending traffic over a very large number of hops. I think the solution there is to send traffic that's leaving your local area over the existing (tapable) long-distance infrastructure. The idea is to make tapping expensive, not impossible. There's also the point to be made that current traffic patterns depend to a significant extent on current Internet architectural decisions. If everyone had a gigabit connection to their neighbors, but only a 10 megabit uplink to route long-distance traffic over, they might find a use for all that extra local bandwidth. On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > One way to frustrate this sort of dragnet surveillance would be to > > reduce centralization in the Internet's architecture. > > ... > > [If] The IETF focused on developing protocols (and reserving the > > necessary network numbers) to facilitate direct network peering between > > private individuals, it could make it much more expensive to mount > > large-scale traffic interception attacks. > > I'm not sure this is viable (although it's an interesting concept). > > With our current routing tools, switching to a flat mesh, as opposed to the > current fairly-structured system, would require enormous amounts of > configuration/etc work on the part of smaller entities. > > Also, traffic patterns being what they are (e.g. most of my traffic goes > quite a distance, and hardly any to things close by), everyone would wind up > handling a lot of 'through' traffic - orders of magnitude more than their > current traffic load. > > Noel