What Is the Dark Web?

If you’ve heard of the dark web, most likely you first heard about it in the context of a news story about cybercrime or black market activities. If you haven’t heard of it, just the name “dark web” might sound dangerous and spooky.

Although most internet users will never have reason to visit the dark web, knowing the basics is useful for more than just impressing your friends with your encyclopedic knowledge. As politicians push increasingly authoritarian surveillance laws and freedom of speech is threatened in online spaces, it’s important to know your rights and have a broader perspective on internet technology. To that end, here’s a brief rundown of the most secretive and disreputable parts of the internet—the dark web.

What exactly is the dark web?

The difference between the dark web and the normal “clear” web is ultimately a technological distinction. The dark web consists of various overlay networks that exist on the physical infrastructure of the internet, but require specialized technology to access. This is generally a type of anonymizing software that allows users to connect with one another without revealing information like their IP addresses, which are normally required to navigate across networks. Examples of dark web networks include Tor, Hyphanet, and the Invisible Internet Project (I2P).

This structure, where both the visitor to a site and the publisher of that site are both anonymous, differs from other types of anonymization on the internet. For example, a virtual private network (VPN) allows users to hide identifying information like their IP address when they browse the internet, but information about the sites they visit is public and can be queried by tools such as the WHOIS protocol (though corporate ownership can still be hidden through shell companies, etc.).

Keeping both sides of online interactions anonymous has some obvious advantages, but it also comes with a lot of risk. While the clear internet certainly has its share of scams, malware, and misinformation, it can be a lot harder to avoid these dangers when the sites you’re visiting are also going incognito. Understanding internet safety is important for everyone online, but users of the dark web should be especially careful.

As internet researcher Robert Gehl notes in his book, Weaving the Dark Web, the term “dark web” is often used colloquially as a moral distinction—as if it simply meant the parts of the internet where illegal or unethical activity occurred. Much of the crime on the internet naturally gravitates toward the anonymity of the dark web, but there are also plenty of lawful uses for these spaces. While there are certainly drug dealers, botnets, and scammers on the dark web, it’s also an important space for whistleblowers, political dissidents, academic researchers, and journalists.

A brief history of the dark web

Gehl places the beginning of the dark web with the publishing of Ian Clarke’s master’s thesis at the University of Edinburgh in 1999. In his thesis, Clarke was critical of the World Wide Web, which had been created a decade earlier. Although the physical infrastructure of the internet was distributed and decentralized, Clarke noted that technologies like the DNS system centralized power in a single organization. This meant that a DNS administrator could arbitrarily censor a web server by simply removing it from the DNS system. Additionally, since both web servers and the computers that connect to them use their IP addresses to send information back and forth, no one on the web could be truly anonymous.

Clarke would go on to create Freenet, an alternative to the World Wide Web, to address some of these issues. Instead of hosting files on a web server that has its address indexed by a central authority (the DNS system), Freenet stores data in encrypted files distributed across a peer-to-peer network.

Freenet would go on to inspire other projects using different kinds of anonymizing technology. In September 2002, the first version of The Onion Router (later referred to simply as Tor) was released. Onion routing was a technology pioneered by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory that wraps a message in layers of encryption that slowly get peeled off as it passes through a network. Instead of a user navigating to the IP address of a web server, Tor users and Tor-based dark web sites meet up at “rendezvous points” to exchange information.

In June 2011, the dark web was thrust into the public consciousness when the website Gawker ran an article on Silk Road, a Tor-based online marketplace primarily dealing in illicit drugs. The site operated similarly to normal online storefronts like Amazon, complete with a shopping cart, seller reviews, and all the usual amenities you might expect. Purchases were made using Bitcoin, which meant that neither the seller nor the buyer knew who the other was.

After a lengthy investigation, the FBI finally tracked down and arrested the creator and operator of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, in October 2013. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Although the Silk Road site was taken down, Gehl notes that the use of dark web marketplaces continued to grow, and their users only became more paranoid and individualistic. Ulbricht later received a full pardon from President Donald Trump in January 2025.

At the same time as Ulbricht’s highly publicized trial, Facebook entered the dark web by creating a site on the Tor network, the same one used by Silk Road. Representatives from Facebook and Tor then worked together to get the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the standards organization that manages internet protocols, to recognize “.onion” as a special-use, top-level domain, giving the dark web a certain degree of legitimacy.

Finding things in the dark

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest hurdles to using the dark web is simply navigating it. The internet is such a part of our day-to-day lives that accessing it is fairly seamless. In fact, sometimes it’s difficult to avoid accessing the internet, such as your smart TV recording your screen to send you ads or your fitness app broadcasting the location of secret military installations.

Using the dark web takes quite a bit more effort. For starters, the dark web isn’t even a single network, but a collection of different systems, each requiring its own tools and protocols to run. Tor, for example, can be accessed by using the Tor Browser (or other browsers with Tor capabilities), security-focused operating systems like Tails, or third-party applications like the Briar messenger. You can also access Tor sites through a normal web browser using Tor2web sites, but the user’s side doesn’t remain anonymous in this situation.

Another issue is the fact that the dark web is constantly changing. Since anonymity is kind of the point of creating a dark web site, there’s often not an advantage to keeping a site up for more than a few months. Sites flicker into existence and then disappear without warning, much to the frustration of the researchers trying to study them.

One of the most common ways to find dark web sites is to get the information from someone who already knows it. For example, a dark net blogger might share a .onion link to their blog on forums (either on the clear web or the dark web) or through an instant message that you can paste into the Tor Browser to be connected to their site. In this way, navigating the dark web is a bit like the internet in the days before Google, where you found new sites through webrings and message boards instead of search engines.

There are also search engines on the dark web, such as Ahmia and Enzo’s Search, but these aren’t nearly as reliable as search engines like Google (well, at least not as reliable as Google used to be). A good search engine would make it much easier to find things on the dark web, but a lot of these sites, especially illegal ones, don’t want to be easily found. As such, it will likely always take a much higher degree of technical knowledge to use the dark web.

Why you should understand the dark web

The average internet user will probably never have the need or the desire to explore the dark web, but it’s important to at least understand the basics. For starters, it helps you to see past the fearmongering that is often associated with the technology. Criminals use the dark web for the same obvious reasons that they use cryptocurrency. Not everyone on the dark web is a criminal, and there are plenty of people on the clear web who are.

An understanding of the dark web also gives some perspective to some of the ridiculous laws that have been proposed in the U.S., from banning VPNs to mandating spyware on 3D printers. Not only are such laws incredibly burdensome on those who actually comply with them, but they’re also about as effective as ordering the crew of the Titanic to start bailing water. Politicians love to score points by promising easy technological fixes for major societal problems, but these empty promises only work if we’re as technologically illiterate as they are.

Finally, understanding the dark web helps us see the value that these technologies provide. Tor and I2P are some of the few methods for bypassing the Great Firewall of China and similar censorship systems in authoritarian countries. The internet is one of the most effective means for getting information to repressed populations and getting news out. It is also a powerful tool for organizing resistance, as famously seen during the Arab Spring in 2010. As governments crack down on social media sites and other means of online expression, the dark web becomes more and more important.

While we don’t have to deal with anything quite so draconian in the U.S. (yet), there are still reasons you might need the dark web that don’t involve drugs or stolen credit cards. You might be a whistleblower trying to contact the New York Times. You might be trying to stay in touch with family and friends who are caught in a warzone. Or you might just enjoy having political discussions with conspiracy theorists who are currently barricaded in their doomsday bunkers. And you can even have those discussions on Facebook.

Additional resources

• How Does the Internet Work?
• Understanding Age Verification
• Why Can I Only Get a Few Internet Providers?
• Best Routers for Security