The internet is amazing. Or at least, the promise of the internet is amazing: anyone, anywhere, can publish anything and reach the world. No gatekeepers. No borders. Just packets flowing freely between peers.
But that's not the internet we have.
What we have is geoblocking, deplatforming, and censorship. Closed systems masquerading as open ones. Infrastructure that was originally built for resilience is now optimized for control.
In February 2025, LaLiga ordered Spanish ISPs to block Cloudflare IP addresses to stop pirate streams of football matches. GitHub went dark. So did ChatGPT, Instagram, Bluesky, X, and some 3,300 other websites. Millions of Spanish users couldn't reach half the internet because one court order hit one infrastructure provider.
They were trying to stop football streams. They accidentally broke the internet. This is just one example of many.
Cloudflare went down again on 5th December - third major outage in three months, affecting 28% of Cloudflare's traffic. X, Zoom, Canva, banks, and many others went down. One company sits in front of 20% of the web, and when it hiccups, the internet chokes.
We need a better internet, and that's exactly what we are exploring in the upcoming SEC-07 cohort. We want to spend the better part of April exploring how we could re-imagine the network stack to be more robust, more resilient, and more resistant to control.
As of today, the internet's architecture is a series of permission layers. DNS translates names into addresses, but ICANN controls the root, and your domain can be seized with a court order. IP addresses route your traffic, but they can be blocked, tracked, and geolocated by any ISP in the chain. Certificate Authorities vouch for encrypted connections, but a handful of companies decide who's "trusted," and they can revoke it overnight.
This isn’t a theoretical threat, as various headlines of the last couple of months clearly show: The UK's Online Safety Act requires age verification to access social media. Australia banned under-16s from platforms entirely, no parental consent exceptions. The EU's proposed Chat Control would mandate scanning all encrypted messages - Signal, Threema, and Proton said they'd leave Europe rather than comply. Brazil blocked X nationwide for two months and fined users $9,000/day for using VPNs to bypass it. The US Supreme Court unanimously upheld the TikTok ban, affecting 170 million users. India had 84 internet shutdowns in 2024, second only to Myanmar's military junta. Kashmir went 552 days without internet. In Myanmar, you can get six months' jail for having a VPN installed.
The question of who controls internet speech isn't new. John Joink drew this cartoon in 2011, during the SOPA/PIPA debates. The mechanisms of control were already in place. What's changed is the scale and the brazenness - governments across the political spectrum, from democracies to dictatorships, now exercise this control openly and in lockstep.
We now have the tools to fix this, and SEC-07 is dedicated to exploring them - routing discovery through pubkeys instead of registrars, building connectivity without exposing addresses, establishing trust through cryptographic proof instead of corporate authority.
The goal is to explore questions such as: How can we make ICANN and IANA irrelevant, DNS optional, and Certificate Authorities unnecessary?
We're joined by the Tollgate team for SEC-07. Tollgate is one of the projects that came out of Sovereign Engineering - alongside noDNS, FIPs, Paygress, and others built during SEC-05. They've been deep in the network stack. They know where the bodies are buried.
SEC-07 runs March 30 - April 17, 2026. Three weeks. Focused work. In Madeira. See all upcoming cohorts.
SEC-07 applications are now open.
If you're building the plumbing for the self-sovereign internet, we want to hear from you. Greybeards and veterans of the network stack, those who watched the open internet's promise fade, we especially want to hear from you, your expertise is needed. If you know someone like that, send them our way.
Great weather. Ocean as far as the eye can see. No shortage of hard problems to solve.
