The most commonly used of the three anonymous systems is Tor - which is so prominent that mainstream websites like Facebook, the New York Times, and the Washington Post operate versions of their websites accessible on Tor’s network. Today, the more commonly used internet has billions of websites - but the dark web is tiny, with tens of thousands of sites at the most, at least according to the various indexes and search engines that crawl these three networks. Not long after Freenet began, the Tor Project and the Invisible Internet Project developed their own distinct methods for anonymously hosting websites.

The structure of Freenet separates the identity of the creator of a file from its content, which made it attractive for people who wanted to host anonymous websites. In 1999, Irish computer scientist Ian Clarke started Freenet as a peer-to-peer system for computers to distribute various types of data in a decentralized manner rather than through the more centralized structure of the mainstream internet. Those programs got their start a couple of decades ago. Websites on the dark web don’t end in “.com” or “.org” or other more common web address endings they more often include long strings of letters and numbers, ending in “.onion” or “.i2p.” Those are signals that tell software like Freenet, I2P or Tor how to find dark websites while keeping users’ and hosts’ identities private. The difference is that they can only be accessed through special network-routing software, which is designed to provide anonymity for both visitors to websites and publishers of these sites. Dark websites can be viewed by a standard web browser like Firefox or Chrome. In brief, dark websites are just like any other website, containing whatever information its owners want to provide, and built with standard web technologies, like hosting software, HTML, and JavaScript. Unsplash / Caspar Rubin Seeking Anonymity and Privacy The dark web is much more than nefarious online marketplaces.

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