On October 17, 2011, the Anonymous group launched a “darknet operation”, revealing the existence of some forty pedophile sites hosted on the Tor network¹. The accounts of 1,626 users of these sites were put online and the operation led to the closure of the targeted sites, but the authorities were concerned about the ability of groups such as Anonymous to seriously interfere with ongoing police operations in this type of case. The case also helped to accredit and popularize the idea that there would be a “deep Internet”, providing safe haven for activities under the guise of a vast virtual lawless zone. A year and a half later in August 2013, the FBI’s dismantling of a vast network of child pornography on the Tor network, followed by the arrest of Ross Ulbricht in October of the same year, accused of administering Silk Road, an online drug dealing site, helped fuel the dark legend. The darknet has therefore crossed the threshold of confidentiality and moved from a rumor to a social phenomenon, to the point of capturing French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve’s attention, who in March 2016, did not hesitate to assert in a political context, marked by a wave of murderous attacks and a state of emergency: “Those who hit us use the darknet and encrypted messaging”, he said. A phenomenon known very little of until then, the existence of hidden networks such as Tor, the “onion router”², reached a little media fame at the time.

In 2016, Sir David Omand, former director of GCHQ³, noted in the pages of the World Policy Journal [OMA 16] that: “The so-called darknet is where most of the online criminal activity takes place, largely beyond the reach of law enforcement. On the darknet, anonymity is the rule, and the identity and location of the participants can be concealed from even the most persistent gaze of police and intelligence agencies”. While using the singular term, David Omand nevertheless took care to restore the term darknet to its multiple singularity, which refers to a disparate aggregate of virtual places, since there are actually as many darknets as there are encrypted and private networks. “The darknet is a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content”, explained Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado and Bryan Willman in 2003, typically considered to be the first individuals to use the term in an article published in 2003. The darknet is not a physically separate network, but applications and a layer of protocols superimposed on existing networks. The four authors included P2P networks, key-protected exchange systems and even electronic messaging, private forums and newsgroups⁴ in the denomination of darknets, the term already pluralized. As early as 2003, the four researchers predicted the irremediable expansion of this phenomenon [BID 03]: “We expect that the effectiveness of the darknet as a distribution mechanism will run into some obstacles in the short term, but ultimately, the genius of the darknet will be indelible”.

In 2003, Biddle, England, Peinado and Willman combined the idea of the darknet exclusively with illegal distribution networks for licensed content. The problem that arose at that time, synthesized in the study of the four engineers, was still limited to illegal downloading and the threat posed by this growing phenomenon to the cultural industry. But if the origin of the darknet concept can be linked to the development of illegal download networks, the term also refers to a specific culture linked to technological developments marking the turn of the 20th and 21st century. On February 8, 1996, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, accompanied by the Communications Decency Act. This initiative represented a historic step in the process of liberalizing telecommunications and online services such as the Internet. The Telecommunications Act replaced the old Communications Act of 1934, attempting to take into account the radical changes in American society during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The main idea of the legislation was to foster the development of competition in the telecommunications sector and to facilitate the entry of large private groups into a sector originally dominated by the American Telephone & Telegraph Corporation. Initially intended to promote the opening up of the telecommunications market to multiple groups, the Telecommunications Act actually led to the creation of new telecommunication giants and the disappearance of a large number of minor operators in this sector. Many observers accused the Telecommunications Act of having paved the way for the complete domination of the mass media. In this case, the new legislation allowed a few major operators to take over the market of internet access providers, such as UUNet (now Verizon), Sprint Corporation, Level 3 Communication (acquired on October 31, 2016 by Centurylink), Comcast and AT&T. In the aftermath of Bill Clinton’s announcement that he had signed the Telecommunications Act, John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation⁵, drafted a “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”⁶, in which he stated that no government, corporation or institution should impose its authority or claim on any property rights over the Internet. In particular, the declaration, which was addressed to governments and leaders of major economic consortia, proclaimed: “You are not welcome here. You have no sovereignty where we meet. We form our own social contract”. The “cyber-revolutionary” rhetoric, such as that of John Perry Barlow, may seem quite fanciful today. However, it still applies today, through multiple small groups, individual operators, sites and discussion forums, fervently defending the idea of a “Freenet” instead of a darknet, in order to reintroduce the name given to the social network created in 2010: an anonymous and free Internet 3.0, on which the user always remains “in control”.

However, 20 years after the publication of the “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”, times have changed, as has the Internet. According to figures from the Data Observatory⁷, the global volume of online databases has reached 4.4 zettabytes⁸. The International Data Center⁹ predicts that this global volume will increase 10-fold by 2020 to 44 zettabytes¹⁰. The exponential rate of development of the Internet today makes any calculation partially obsolete: some authors state a trillion pages have been created, that is to say a thousand billion, etc. [PIS 08, p. 188]. This exponential growth interests public and private companies, anxious to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by the “deep web” and “Big Data”. It also opens up new opportunities for all those who intend to benefit from the growth of the global network, which increasingly calls into question the ability of state structures to effectively monitor the multiple networks that make up the Internet today. This desire to escape the control of institutions responds to economic and ideological motivations and is in line with the promises, sometimes illusory, of a globalized system that makes all forms of borders, barriers and regulations obsolete.

The recent development of darknets, which are no longer just networks of exchange, but real layers of alternative networks superimposed on the global network, contains all the questions raised by the exponential growth of intangible flows, the modification of digital usage and the questioning of the regulatory status of States. The latter, as well as the security and intelligence agencies that depend on them, are now becoming aware of the danger attached to the idea of virtual lawless zones that are somewhat or totally beyond their control. All of them are therefore stepping up their efforts to develop credible and effective policies in the field of cybersecurity. The resurgence of terrorism, but also other illegal activities such as trafficking in drugs, weapons and human beings, which are using new technologies in order to develop, is giving rise to policies for the security and surveillance of cyberspace. In turn, they are severely criticized and questioned by some sections of civil society who, on the contrary, highlight the usefulness of these spaces where anonymity is relatively preserved for journalists or dissidents threatened by authoritarian regimes, thus allowing the free flow of information and freedom of expression. However, States are also using the capabilities offered by darknets to create a new form of interstate or asymmetrical conflict for themselves, that is now taking place in virtual space, but has very severe consequences in the form of cyber-attacks, such as the large-scale one that took place in Estonia in 2007, inaugurating the entry into a new dimension of modern warfare. While, according to journalist Duncan Campbell [CAM 07], States have been losing the battle of cryptography to prevent the spread of advanced encryption techniques in civil society since the 1990s, it seems that Tor-like encrypted networks now offer capabilities to resist cyber-attacks and are also of interest to States and companies wishing to better protect their online databases.

The author of this book does not intend to propose a detailed technical approach of the different protocols and applications related to darknet here [REN 16]. It is not a computer manual either. The objective here is to deliver the keys to understanding a rapidly expanding phenomenon by defining the notions of the darknet, dark web and deep web by paying attention to the intellectual and ideological production that has accompanied and still accompanies the rise of alternative networks, in addition to examining the economic, security and geopolitical issues that are linked to the darknet (or deep web). Particularly, we will try to show that the clash between these different issues and between the diverging interests of users, institutions and economic operators always refers to the question of Internet governance modes. The darknets are on the threshold of a much more important era of development and make these questions crucial today because, as Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado and Bryan Willman asserted in 2003, “the genius of the darknet is indelible”.