Welcome. This is the first post — a quick look at the history of darknets and how they’ve shaped the internet we know today.
A darknet is any overlay network that requires specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. Unlike the “surface web” indexed by search engines, darknets operate on top of existing infrastructure but remain intentionally hidden from casual discovery.
The term is often conflated with the “dark web,” but they aren’t the same thing. A darknet is the network; the dark web is the content hosted on it.
The concept predates the modern internet. In the 1970s, ARPANET — the precursor to the internet — already had isolated address spaces that were unreachable from the main network. These “dark” addresses were used for covert military communication and research.
By the 1990s, as the public internet grew, so did the desire for anonymous communication. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory began developing onion routing in 1995 — the foundational technology behind Tor — as a means to protect intelligence communications online.
Freenet, launched in 2000 by Ian Clarke, was one of the first widely available systems designed for censorship-resistant communication. It used a distributed data store where files were encrypted and spread across participating nodes.
In 2002, the Tor Project was released as open-source software. Originally funded by the U.S. government, Tor allowed users to route traffic through a series of volunteer-operated relays, making it extremely difficult to trace connections back to their origin.
The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) emerged as an alternative to Tor, focusing on internal services (called “eepsites”) rather than proxying traffic to the clearnet. I2P used garlic routing — bundling multiple encrypted messages together — offering a different anonymity model.
During this period, darknets shifted from niche academic and military tools to platforms used by journalists, activists, and whistleblowers in oppressive regimes.
The launch of Silk Road in 2011 brought darknets into public consciousness. Operating as a Tor hidden service, it demonstrated that anonymous marketplaces could function at scale using cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) for payments.
Its takedown by the FBI in 2013 and the arrest of Ross Ulbricht sparked global debate about privacy, law enforcement, and the ethics of anonymous systems.
Since Silk Road, darknets have continued to evolve. New networks and protocols have appeared — Lokinet, CJDNS, Yggdrasil — each with different approaches to routing, encryption, and decentralization.
Governments and corporations have invested heavily in both using and surveilling these networks. Meanwhile, darknets remain critical infrastructure for:
| Network | Routing Model | Primary Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| Tor | Onion routing | Anonymous browsing, hidden services |
| I2P | Garlic routing | Internal anonymous services |
| Freenet | Distributed store | Censorship-resistant publishing |
| Lokinet | Onion routing | Low-latency anonymous networking |
| Yggdrasil | Mesh routing | Encrypted IPv6 overlay mesh |
| CJDNS | Mesh routing | Encrypted P2P networking |
Darknets are not inherently good or bad — they are tools. Like any infrastructure, their character is defined by their users. They were born from a need for private communication, and that need hasn’t gone away. If anything, it has only intensified.
More to come.