In 1997, I published a working paper on the politics of the Domain Name System (DNS). It can still be found online. One of the main topics was the increasing commercialisation of a public utility: the internet’s name space. Google hadn’t even been founded back then. Despite the growing commercial pressure, the internet was still a wild place.

Fast forward 28 years, and we find ourselves in a very different internet landscape. It’s highly centralised, commanded and controlled by only a handful of big tech companies. We have been discussing this situation and its disadvantages on this blog for many years. We have also considered possible solutions, as well as the efforts of regulators to remedy the situation.

And yet…

it’s concentrated, fragile and utterly toxic.

These words are taken from an influential Noema piece co-authored by Maria Farrell, who will be appearing at NEXT25 next month. Her co-author was Robin Berjon, a digital governance expert.

This piece is interesting because it draws on a variety of concepts, but the lens it views them through is ecology. Healthy ecosystems are the opposite of today’s internet monoculture. The diversity of healthy ecosystems translates into a broad range of species. Conversely, over-centralised management through command and control suppresses complexity and resilience. Self-organisation, an important feature of early internet governance, is lost.

Systems thinking as a lever for change

Now, ‘ecosystem’ is a term that is widely used in internet parlance, and rightly so. A monoculture is still an ecosystem, albeit an unhealthy one. What’s interesting is the nature of the system. We’ve covered systems and systems thinking extensively on this blog. Systems change to ensure continuity. This insight gives us a lever for change.

Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.

The basic logic is as follows: if we’ve done it with natural ecosystems, we can do it with the internet too. This approach is the opposite of micromanagement. It’s more about fostering complexity and self-organisation. It isn’t nostalgia, either. We can’t go back to the early days of the wild internet. And we don’t need to.

However, like in every healthy ecosystem, we need to set limits for predators. The piece argues for the break-up of big tech monopolies – a topic that has been discussed for years, and which would still take years, if not decades, to achieve. But it’s getting closer! Perplexity recently announced a bid to acquire Google’s Chrome browser. It’s likely a bluff, but still…

The browser may not be for sale yet, but Google could be forced to sell it. Chrome commands almost 70% of the browser market. The possibility of spinning off the browser from its parent company is being discussed as a remedy in the Google antitrust cases.

The end of dependence

However, Maria will address another angle on these ecosystems in her talk at NEXT25, namely the end of Europe’s dependence on those monopolies. Now, at least partly, this is something we have in our hands, that we can control. We can decide what to use, one piece of hardware, software, or service at a time. Although it can be painful to migrate from products that we have used long-term, it’s possible.

This is known as ‘consumer choice’ and has been one of the remedies we have been discussing for years. Andrew Keen, who spoke at NEXT18, has been sounding the alarm for a long time. Mandatory interoperability is another remedy. The wild internet was designed around the basic principle of interoperability. The walled gardens have obstructed this in recent times.

However, as Cory Doctorow, a speaker at NEXT14, has pointed out, there are ways to reinstate interoperability. This is what he’s been calling “comcom” – competitive compatibility:

For most of modern history, this kind of guerrilla interoperability, achieved through reverse engineering, bots, scraping and other permissionless tactics, were the norm. 

In order to work, it must be combined with other mandates, such as the right to repair. Governments have a strong hand here thanks to their purchasing power. They just need to get out there and play.

A de facto utility

From an ecosystem perspective, it’s more about trying a wide variety of different approaches at the same time. As Maria Farrell sums up Cory Doctorow:

Comcom drives the try-every-tactic-until-one-works behavior you see in a flourishing ecosystem. 

In an ecosystem, diversity of species is another way of saying “diversity of tactics,” as each successful new tactic creates a new niche to occupy.

The internet has long become a de facto utility, and this is the case in almost every layer or part of the stack, not only in the physical infrastructure or the lower network layers. This means that we must treat it accordingly. Regulation is unavoidable. Utilities are subject to various levels of regulation.

We must ensure regulatory and financial incentives and support for alternatives including common-pool resource management, community networks, and the myriad other collaborative mechanisms people have used to provide essential public goods like roads, defense and clean water.

Rewilding the internet does not mean turning it into a state-run public utility. However, readers of this blog will already be aware that today’s major tech companies are more powerful than even the most powerful nation-states. Big Tech’s monopoly profits have long since become a kind of tax.

Infrastructure requires money, but the planetary nature of the internet challenges our public funding model, leaving the door open to private capture. However, if we see the current opaque system as what it is, a kind of non-state taxation, then we can craft an alternative.

As the American Revolution slogan said, ‘No taxation without representation’. Those affected by power should have a say in how it is used. Citizens should have the right to own their data. The digital sphere needs to be democratised.

And yes, this is a revolution.

Picture by “Das Internet war einst ein wilder Ort – und könnte es wieder sein” on Midjourney.