Rebuilding the Internet for Privacy | Barrett Lyon on DoxxNet...

Erasing that is kind of what I'm trying to go for.

What you're saying is you've actually built this transient way for folks to connect in chat without having a record.

The really big problem is on WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, Telegram.

The question is like, okay, well, whose servers are those?

The internet was designed to connect people directly.

In this episode, A16Z's Joel De La Garza sits down with internet infrastructure pioneer Barrett Lyon to talk about Docsnet,

his attempt to rethink that architecture from the ground up.

They also discuss what happens when decades of online tracking meet cheap AI,

And you fly a lot, you're increasing your, I guess, your risk level a little bit.

I know we're here to talk about your new venture, which sort of is something very, I'd say, very different for you.

Well, okay, so DocsNet, first of all, maybe I should explain the name.

and the fact that the internet is really kind of stagnated a bit from protocol design

and then just noticing the shift of censorship and people's privacy being eroded

and foreign adversaries trying to learn about what you're doing

well I mean the original promise of the internet was this incredible marketplace of ideas

Yeah, and it's in the hands of a few.

and those, or China, yeah.

And the internet originally, like you said, was kind of designed with this like more open kind of concept.

and one of the biggest stains of the entire internet is carrier grid net.

Gotcha.

And also I think one of the interesting things is we always talk about sort of foreign governments restricting internet access, right?

And so we're actually seeing the creep of kind of the censorship even within the United States.

And it's being done in a way that's kind of odd because a lot of times they're asking the network to solve an identity problem.

You know, if they want to restrict things for certain reasons, then that should be done in a much different way and not asking the network to do it.

And it's also not just with like age restrictions, but an interesting problem popped up the other day where Google or Cisco Umbrella broke for like a major carrier

Well then there's the blast radius of that

Those classifications are always the worst

We were looking at an investment opportunity in a company that makes chatbots

Yeah, we've run into that a little bit too.

Oh, nice.

So this creeping information totalitarianism has given birth to a whole bunch of products of which we know we all super familiar with right And VPNs is probably the most common And so maybe it be great to hear a little bit about sort of why the existing tools aren enough Why are you building docs How is it different Maybe we could double click a bit on sort of your thoughts around it.

Yeah, sure.

And that's to solve your IP address as your identity problem.

It's very basic.

And you're just using the VPN protocols as a way to get into that area.

So it's a whole different ecosystem in there.

the rest of the class on top of the app, run across the mesh network,

No phone numbers, no email addresses, no names, no nothing.

So it's funny, it's funny, and that's phenomenal,

because I think, you know, we're both pretty well steeped in the security space,

and, you know, I think I come from sort of a, I've had it drilled into my head that if you want to have a private conversation, don't do it anywhere with anything with a battery or an electrical signal, right?

Yeah, so you create your account, you just have to prove you're human by doing a little puzzle.

But it's actually doing a cryptographic exchange with each other

I think the key lesson of PKI was actually if you tell people it's PKI, it's not going to work.

Yeah, well, it's not even PKI.

So anyway, you and your friend decided, okay, we trust each other.

Now that'll unlocks the ability for the phones over the mesh network to talk to each other directly.

The really big problem is on WhatsApp,

and by the way, Telegram's creepy.

All of those applications disguise themselves as you sending something to somebody else.

and then the server's then having the other person pull that.

You might be in one part of the US and you're uploading it to another, so the upload's a little slow.

So when we use our applications, it extracts all of that.

It's gone.

So it's really no middle man, no server in the middle,

It works great.

20 gigabytes, private network, point-to-point latency.

So yeah, it's post-quantum.

So I don't know, when you start stacking up all of these things, DocsNet is kind of like this giant toolkit for freedom of speech, I guess.

Freedom from surveillance.

Yeah, yeah, we should talk about that too.

I mean, you mentioned that, you know, Telegram is creepy.

I would say I think I find all, it just seems like a lot of the VPN, I don't want to say all because it's an absolutist term, but it seems like a lot of the VPNs are very creepy, right?

And without bashing on anyone specific, I think for me, the most illustrative story was in the news, there was actually an issue where a bunch of organized criminals were arrested across the world.

And so like in the U.S., right, we've seen this activity.

And then if you look on any app store and you look for VPN, you probably find 50 VPNs that are all free abroad.

Well, if it's free, there's nothing free.

You know, the United States has pretty cool laws.

And so DocsNet's U.S.-based, but we also have a Swiss company that handles all of European operations.

So there separation between the operations between the two regions We doing other regions like that too So it you know corporate governance actually matters in these types of situations But like you know I just don feel comfortable with my data going to a company that doesn talk about who owns it why they exist other than privacy

You know, we made a very, very conscious decision that we're very open about what we're doing,

But, yeah, there are creepy VPNs out there.

Oh, yeah.

And, you know, it's not just, I mean, it's funny because we like to talk about nation states.

But in reality, like the risks are a lot more low level than that, right?

where people's accounts were getting drained and they were using some of these services that were in other countries.

And it turns out that like, you know, in some of these countries you have the meshing together of the intelligent state apparatus and organized crime, right?

Yeah, I mean, and then people look at the policies for the VPNs, like, oh, no logs, no this.

And the question is like, okay, well, whose servers are those?

But there's that whole underbelly and learning about that has been difficult because I personally was not up to building infrastructure all over the world as rapidly as I could, but I ended up realizing that if it's not your equipment, you can't set policy.

It's just you can't.

And then the next layer of policy is the carriers and interconnect beyond your cage or whatever it is.

And this is like one big difference with I think a lot of folks, right?

Is that you own the full stack from like software to wire.

Yeah, software to wire and even all the AI components that run routing and things like that are all on our metal.

Well, I think that was one of the funny things I think when we started talking about this was you were incredibly distrusting of large inference and AI providers.

And you've built your own AI stack.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, GPUs are in shortage.

Like, how did you pull that off in probably six months?

Well, I mean, we built, so far it's like 26 sites around the world with each other routing.

And how many employees in the company?

Total, I think the people involved is 12.

And we have no network administrator, or no sysadmin, that's all done by AI.

Wow.

And it's actually working quite well.

The nice thing, though, if you think about our footprint of, like, who's involved,

You know, the blast radius of just corporate structures is very minimal.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, the thing we very rarely talk about, because it's kind of uncomfortable, is just how great an extent insider threat is.

Yeah.

And how it's, like, the most crippling, catastrophic cyber attacks are always sort of the insider threat angle.

And now you're saying with agents, like, you're kind of, you're eliminating at least a good portion of that race.

Yeah, and it's running in its own secure environment that's not exporting data to, like, one of the big AI companies.

So all the contacts and inference and stuff stays inside.

And we have it secured and we monitor all our equipment with cameras and no one goes in and touches anything.

Do you have agents that watch the camera footage?

Actually, well, I mean, technically we don't, but the camera companies that made the agents do.

Yeah, we get alarms if something moves and something goes around.

But, yeah, we even thought about putting lasers in a couple of spots.

Kind of make a Mission Impossible style.

You've got to have the one data center that you take people to to impress them, right?

Like, the switch data centers in Las Vegas.

I mean, I love lasers.

Anyway, long story short, we did look into it and even got the light-actuated switches.

So if the beams did break, it would actually set off the alarms and things.

But just the problem was the data center doesn't turn off the lights.

So you don't get to see this really cool display.

And there's no dust in there.

There's no particles.

No, it's like, Let's smoke up the data center for the laser show.

That's the other thing that's really crazy is people don't understand data centers at all.

Oh, yeah.

It's crazy. I think you're seeing that in the popular press, right?

Oh, yeah.

The data center's been around for a very, very long time.

And they need water when they break.

And you have to replenish some of the water and there's some evaporation.

But it's not like they're running off of water.

Yeah, and it's just sort of like, I think in order of most impressive machines humans have built, one is probably commercial airliners, right?

And two, it's got to be data centers.

Like, they're so incredibly sophisticated.

They're closed systems.

Yeah, I mean, the data centers themselves are kind of just boring buildings.

And the other thing is, like, the sounds... I've never heard sound outside of a data center before.

I see videos where people are watching videos, and it's like, look at the hell, and it's audio from inside being dubbed, and people aren't smart enough to know that it's fake.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's all contained inside these things.

People are being manipulated by this data center thing. Isn't it amazing, right?

And I think, like, it's going to be, I think over as the years progress, it's going to come out that this was all just some sort of, like, very interested group of organizations or interests.

Manipulating public opinion to some end.

Yeah, but it's very interesting to be in the know and then watch this.

And then go, oh my goodness, these people are missing the mark.

Have you seen, I mean, because you've been to 20-something data centers in the last couple of months, have you seen actual protesters outside?

No.

Yeah, I know.

I haven't, like... No, you see nothing.

It's just most of them, especially, like, the big data center park in Virginia,

you know, you just see bunny rabbits in the field.

Just a big building and a bunch of parking lot and nothing.

Meanwhile, that's, like, one of the richest counties in the country because of all the data centers, right?

Right, because it brings jobs.

The people that work in them aren't getting paid pennies.

And it also brings high-tech talent and then also infrastructure and infrastructure powers everything you do.

So if you have a data center by your internet's faster, things like that work better.

Depending on which one it is.

And then the argument about data centers, drinking water goes back to some quote that was like fabricated entirely.

Well, I think there was the switch data center built near Reno and they built this big like lake out there and then people think that it lives off the lake.

And the reality is, you know, if say you have a chiller failure and you have to drain all that closest amount, you need to refill it.

Drain it to the lake.

Yeah, so anyway, so it's interesting to see people like, I work in these buildings and then you see the conspiracy theorists and it's like, oh no, we're way off here.

I'm sorry. This feels just like the people that think the moon landing was faked or like it just feels like classic sort of,

But I do think, like, this is, it's coming at such an important inflection point for, like, the future of our country tech, society in general, and to just have this conversation that seems to be manipulated at some end.

It feels very manipulated.

And to me, the future of our tech is needing to build this infrastructure now.

And if we're crippling it, then we're making bad decisions.

And we're making bad decisions on Instagram posts.

Oh, yeah. Or TikTok, right?

Like, which who knows where that content is being.

Or, like, some crazy anti-Data Center music video.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's public opinions being framed by that.

Well, and this is the second half.

I mean, I guess that, I know we had talked about sort of intelligence agencies and the big, bad, scary government, right?

but like, and now we're talking more about clearly an operation that's probably being done by some sort of commercial interest to manipulate public opinion, right?

Which goes to kind of the second half of why you built docs, which is like, you know, advertising, which is sort of like,

people like to think the NSA is incredibly sophisticated, but you know, advertisers are probably far ahead of what they're doing.

And I think you're seeing now where intelligence agencies are actually using data brokers and using the techniques of bad agencies.

Yeah, so like all your apps have these trackers.

WhatsApp has DIT.whatsapp.net.

Apple even has Apple telemetry.

They call it telemetry or metadata, whatever they want to call it.

Some level of it is a tracker and you can block them.

It doesn't break the app.

Most websites don't have any problem with that telemetry data breaking because the rest of the site was still alone.

But, you know, so we asked me, very controversial, wealthy individual said, well, so what?

Someone won't know that I purchased underwear off of target.com.

And I'm like, well, it's not really that one.

It's all of them.

When you combine all of the tracking that's being done on every different app that you're using or every different website and it accumulates and then it's being stored by who knows who where and being sold.

And then when you aggregate all those data points together, you could know if you're a coffee drinker, what time you wake up in the morning, what your income is, where you shop, how often you purchase things.

I love all that stuff being turned off

I hate that kind of stuff

so that's a big piece of the app is the network it's not just part of the app it's part of the network is to kind of deconstruct all of that and get rid of it and just kind of like get back to the old internet that has the ability to connect to things and has the ability to create and then also not be spied on by advertisers and governments and everybody else Well it seems like

we're really at an inflection point because you have the birth of essentially coin-operated intelligence at scale, right?

You can deploy millions.

You've got the proverbial millions of monkeys with millions or infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters.

And so we're sort of looking at this world in which there's more telemetry, there's more data, everything you do is being tracked and you can combine that with intelligence, right?

To actually arrive at some pretty scary conclusions.

Yeah, you can take all that and just dump it into an LLM and say, tell me about this person.

Probably really effective targeting against things like data centers as well, right?

Yeah.

You start to see these mass movements orchestrated across multiple platforms and you start to think like, huh, that's pretty clever.

Yeah, people should be targeting those and maybe not the data centers, but the tracking is pretty bad.

Ad tracking, it's, you know, that kind of stuff really can go away and your life would be better.

So yeah, that's, at the core, it's like trying to recreate that vibe that the internet used to have and then see where we can take it.

You know, with bigger resources and things like that, you can start creating more protocols and things like that don't exist yet.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the internet succeeded because it was free.

And so thank you for trying to make it free again.

Trying, but you have to pay me. Just kidding.

So I don't know if you know this, but our paths crossed a long time ago.

I was looking back through some of my archives and I did a lot of work sort of in the early 2000s on DDoS bots.

So Skokletrot, TFN, TFN2K, and then obviously a large denial of service distributed attacks.

And you were at the forefront of building a lot of solutions to prevent that, like at Prolexic.

Yeah.

Like, how did that get going?

Well, actually, it kind of goes back to Docsnet.

in high school, people were attacking my servers. And so we had to figure out better ways to protect them and techniques and tricks and all the different things you need to do to survive a DDoS attack. And I started writing kind of my list of what you would do to survive. And then somehow I presented that at SANS and then it got in Google and then people started calling me. And then we started dealing with real cyber crime extortion, people trying to take, you know, one company sells watches, the other sells watches, the other one is attacking the other watch company during Christmas sales season. Or, you know, Super Bowl is about to start and all the gambling sites go dark. Things like that. And it got pretty serious. And so I built a whole company to protect businesses from these attacks.

And the way I looked at it is you need big scale.

You need to have the biggest, most expensive stuff and not everyone can afford that.

So we'll turn that into kind of a least service as one of the first cloud services to exist.

And it was pretty successful. It still exists today.

Akamai Prolexic.

Yeah, absolutely. They even kept the name.

This is rare. And then we did DefenseNet later on which became F5 Silverline.

And then, so in between all that I really liked big scale stuff and bandwidth.

And so the other one we did was called Big Gravity and that was one of the first or the first video-centric CDNs.

So big file, big object delivery and we had some really great customers there early on.

People got it, and we had a lot of tech around it to save people money.

People didn't realize it. Hit play, and you're downloading a progressive file, and before all this kind of media management stuff existed, you're just wasting bandwidth just to scroll into the middle of a video. It costs people money.

So anyway, we created all kinds of cool stuff around video.

So as far as building a new network for consumers, well, actually, it's a little bit for bots, too.

There's actually a lot of intrinsic networking components to it.

It's right up my alley because I love building big infrastructure.

I love building scaled stuff.

But now it's kind of like twisting it. Instead of doing this for corporations, we're doing for people.

I've really seen a lot of that being done, at least well. So it gonna be fun to see how people adapt to it But I think one of the more interesting things about that is we might even see some DDoS on our network I sure you ready for that Well inbound from the internet But what happens if somebody gets onto my network and starts using it inside and not have to deal with those silly people But yeah the truth is

even if you have privacy, there's still laws.

And you need to at least follow them as much as you can.

I think one other interesting thing, so, you know, it's sort of a, and this is the kind of spending years talking with you.

One other interesting thing is that you created an artwork that actually hung at the MoMA.

Yeah.

And it's part of the permanent collection.

There's two pieces.

Yeah, a college project.

I studied philosophy. Oddly enough, I studied.

I studied the art of aesthetics and some other stuff, but a lot of it was theoretical AI.

And I'm like, wow, actually a philosophy degree makes a lot of sense now.

Totally. This is helpful.

But yeah, I started mapping networks because I was a penetration tester and hacking, ethical hacking into other companies.

And I found that casing the joint was the easiest way to start.

So you make a network diagram of where all this stuff is and how it all works and what you think is where.

And then I started automating that.

And then I got mouthy at lunch one day bet some guys that I could probably use the same technique to map the entire internet.

And that started a $50 bet that I was pretty sure I was going to lose.

And then I got hit by a car on a bicycle.

project and that ended up in not just MoMA, but like Boston Museum of Science all over the world in different traveling exhibits.

And then they did animations of that too.

And it's pretty neat because that project has gotten a lot of attention, not just because it looks cool, but there's kind of really interesting history in the video as things are happening.

You can see companies crash and burn and all kinds of stuff.

And I was lucky enough to be able to talk to EventSurf about it and have an opportunity to ask my questions to him.

And it's pretty cool.

That is awesome.

And you've now done, you've probably accomplished two of the harder things to do in this world, which is one, starting a successful tech company and two, being a successful artist.

Being an artist, a successful artist is probably much more difficult than starting a tech company.

It was actually kind of strange.

You know, after I went to the opening in MoMA, and it was, you know, this giant party.

And, you know, they had a new exhibit, and I had the piece in there, and it was just kind of like, oh, man, this is kind of cool.

There's a DJ, there's drinking.

And then the curators, they took me to some really interesting parts of MoMA's other properties of their own.

And it was a really cool experience.

But the next day, I kind of had this imposter syndrome where I just felt super depressed.

I'm like, wow, am I ever going to experience what an artist feels like ever again?

Because this was kind of like accidental, you know?

But yeah, I got to do it again.

But it was, yeah, very strange, surreal moment in life.

Probably the only person in tech that can say that.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I have a lot of artist friends that are probably much better artists than me.

And they're all like, what? How did you get in the moment?

Yeah, I know.

And part of the permanent collection, too.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, you're one of a few hundred or thousand.

Yeah.

I forget about that sometimes.

I also forget about the book, too.

That is true.

Yeah, we have not talked about the book.

I don't know. Do you want to cover that?

Sure.

Well, it's on the list of great stories.

Well, I keep forgetting about that it exists.

And recently, so I have an AI-powered webcam that watches boats in Miami.

and it's 24 hours a day.

It's been up for almost a year now and it's got a little chat community of people on there and one of them figured out who I was and then the other day they're like, I just finished reading the book about you.

I'm like, what?

What do you mean? I'm like, oh shoot, that's right.

They figured it out. So what is the book about you and what is it about?

Oh, it's been so long. So it's about, I think it's the beginnings of Prolexic and tracking down these cyber criminals in Russia and specifically these guys, there's like a couple of them who are extremely aggressive, extorting and damaging a lot of our clients and so we just kind of had enough of it and said this has got to end I mean we had Christmases destroyed because we just dealing with customers and network outages

Well and these are like real criminals These are not just hackers These are people that are doing human trafficking they trafficking narcotics and they have a side hustle There some stuff going on yeah Yeah yeah it like real criminals right Yeah and then they went to prison for I think eight years hard labor or something like that.

And I don't know what happened to them afterwards, but yeah, that was really, we went out to Russia and got turned around.

We were there in Moscow for a while and there was some really interesting signals of like, you need to leave now.

So we left. but yeah that whole book is about that whole saga of what happened through that period of time and it's really weird because when you live it it seems kind of normal but then you look back and go oh jeez that was kind of crazy

I tell you every time we talk I hear new stories

let's not talk about Burning Man that could be a whole episode itself

Actually when was your first Burning Man is next week?

yeah it's this coming weekend

are you going this year?

yeah

awesome

I think it's year 14 year 14

somewhere around there I can't remember we lost a couple to COVID so I don't remember which ones I skipped

and you have a famous car

Well my partner has a famous car

so Pablo created the Mind Warrior and I created the Mind Warrior Camp and so we were partners in that whole crazy thing for a while and boy that car went from like you know a fun project to like a whole global phenomenon like it you know people paid money to go see it it's crazy

but no it was a lot of you know what I was thinking about this morning is like when you're passionate about something it kind of creates that oil around you and then other people pick up on it and we were very passionate about that project and I think it kind of inspired a lot of folks to do really interesting other projects that are similar to it and this is the first year we're not taking it to the playa so we're not going

Well, it's just getting started.

And thanks for trusting me to help build it.

People are using shortwave too, right? Like it's sort of.

Yeah, so you have radios, and then that's kind of fun. And it reminds me of being a kid.

But it's also like, you know, it's still a communications device.

So out there, I don't know, it takes the edge off when it comes to, like, finding things or organizing things.

People don't get stuck at the gate pretty long anymore.

But if you're sitting there watching movies, that's probably the wrong use for it.

You don't go to Burning Man to Netflix and chill?

No.

No, if you're using it for anything other than local communications, then maybe it's the wrong use.

But it has changed a bit.

Awesome. Well, as you said, right, like, you pursue your passion, and that takes you down all sorts of amazing radicals, and you are clearly someone that is always pursuing his passion.

So thank you so much for stopping by.

I am an incredibly happy DocsNet user.

And thank you for building it.

It's good to get that old internet flyback.

Yeah, well, it's just getting started.

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