If you imagine the Internet as an ocean, then the darknet will be its third, deepest layer. A place under the sun will be taken by the “visible Internet”, which includes ordinary public sites. A layer below is the deep web, or “deep Internet”, the content of which is not available to search engines. These are private cloud storages, corporate networks and closed databases.
And at the very bottom, where users of Chrome, Safari and Edge never penetrate, an experienced diver will discover a darknet, or a collection of anonymous computer networks. Their architecture is designed to make surveillance and control over the dissemination of information impossible. This makes the darknet both a way to overcome censorship, and a secure channel of communication, and a tool for cybercriminals.
The history of the dark web
Strange as it may sound, the appearance of the darknet owes much to… the American government. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Even before Tim Berners-Lee became the father of the World Wide Web and developed the well-known HTTP, HTML and URL technologies, the ARPANET existed in the USA. This is an abbreviation for the words Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, which means “Advanced Research Agency Network”.
The ARPANET project was financed by the military, it received technical implementation in 1969 and became the prototype of the modern Internet. Later, similar network projects appeared in Britain, France and a number of other countries. But not all of their users wanted to cooperate with the government. Therefore, sometimes they took for themselves addresses that were not displayed in the lists of networks and did not respond to requests from outside.
And I must say, not without reason. For example, American journalist John Markoff describes a funny incident. According to him, it was within the network between students at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that the first illegal online sale of marijuana occurred. These were the first sprouts of the shadow internet.
In the 1980s, the standardization of Internet protocols (data transmission rules) made the problem of storing confidential or illegal data even more serious. At first, it was solved by “data havens” – servers physically located in countries with soft laws. And then the US federal government again gave a new impetus to the development of the darknet.
In 1998, the US Navy patented Onion, a technology for providing anonymous communication over a computer network. Four years later, The Onion Routing, or TOR for short, was created on its basis. It made it possible to hide the location and IP addresses of users in order to ensure secure communication between US intelligence officers. However, civilians were also interested: radical supporters of free speech, hackers, underground businessmen and other inhabitants of the darknet.
In 2008, the Tor browser appeared, which provided ordinary users with a high level of anonymity on the network. Coincidentally, in the same year, a person under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a description of bitcoin, an untraceable cryptocurrency.
All this spurred the development of digital black markets and increased the volume of transactions. And in 2011, Ross Ulbricht made a real revolution in the shadow web: he created an illegal Silk Road marketplace with a total transaction volume of more than $1.2 billion.
How the darknet works
It would be a mistake to consider the darknet as something homogeneous. As we already wrote, the shadow web consists of parallel networks that provide anonymity by various means. The most common of these is “onion routing”, or Onion Routing. It is thanks to her that the Tor browser works.