How does the Dark Web actually work?

The Dark-web is actually a part of the World Wide Web contents that exists in hidden networks of the internet, that requires a specific software like Tor to access it. Through the dark web, the computers could actually communicate with each other anonymously without leaking any sensitive information, such as the user’s location. It’s part of the web that is not indexed by any search engines. Sometimes, the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web.

The dark web usually could be connected to illegal activities like human trafficking, drug stores, weapons, pornography, and explicit types of content. That’s why they require special protocols and encryption techniques to be accessed by our computers. These protocols use a layered encryption model to make sure that no one actually tracks our activity on the web, like the skin of an onion. There is no traceable connection between the entry point and the destination. Users remain anonymous as long as Tor operates.

There are some noticeable differences between surface web, deep web, and dark web. The surface web is the most tame layer of the internet normal users can see. Most popular sites like Google, YouTube, Instagram, X, and Netflix are located in this layer. People can easily access this part of the internet because it was controlled by the government, and many big tech companies.

The next layer is the deep web, where people usually mistakenly used to refer to the dark web. It was actually just part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing. The data was not really “hidden” from the ordinary browsers. It was just locked by the login credentials. For example, you can only access your Google Drive folders only if you are signed in, otherwise it would be just locked by the permission system. Private social media profiles are also a great example of a deep web, the photos can only be accessed if we got permission by the account owner.

In the technical perspective, the site owners of the deep-web remove the robots.txt file to redirect search engines and avoid excessive traffic. It is a file that helps the Google-bot navigate through the pages of the site, and then index it to the database, so users could find it on the search engines. Estimates vary about the size of the deep web, but it forms around 90% of internet content.

The dark-web is a part of the internet that exists in the shadows. This hidden web features everything we cannot see without special tools. It’s really hard to track anything that’s happening inside the dark-web. That’s why it’s being used for many illegal activities, and also for the military because it has top-level security in terms of privacy.

The protocol of dark web first started in 1999, in the research lab of University of Edinburgh student named Ian Clarke. He wrote a paper about “a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage, and Retrieval System”. The next year, he released a working version of his project called Freenet. His goal was to provide members of the public with total anonymity. As concerns about online privacy and government censorship grew, nobody called it “dark-web”, at least not yet.

One of the most popular sites inside the dark web is a shadowy website called Silk Road, it was a dark marketplace for firearms, pirated software, and drugs. The FBI raided Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht in 2013 and closed the site, but the dark web remains a thriving marketplace. Silk Road 2.0 appeared immediately, followed by Diabolus Market and OpenBazaar.

The legal situation about whether the dark web is illegal or not is pretty simple. Using dark web tools is legal, but using the dark web to commit criminal acts is not. The benefits above are probably why the dark web remains legal and supported by some governments. Tor is the most reliable way to escape the attention of the big tech company surveillance.

The conclusion is dark-web is not a dark place in the internet, it was just a wild west of the internet without any government surveillance, that’s why many people use it for illegal stuff because the anonymity feature of the protocol made the use untraceable. However, the dark-web is not illegal because the government also used it as the communication bridge between military instances so it won't be traced by other nations.

References: Nordlayer, Wikipedia

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