We Need To Rewild The Internet — Reading 1 Week 2

The internet has transitioned into a fragile "monoculture."

The current state of the internet, characterized by centralization and proprietary control, leads to a lack of resilience and reduced adaptability, similar to ecological monocultures.

Applying ecological principles is essential for restoring internet health.

Healthy ecosystems and a healthy internet share core similarities in system thinking, emergence, and the value of diverse ecosystems. Focusing on emergent properties and biodiversity translates to critical digital systems.

Infrastructure concentration causes systemic stress and vulnerability.

The dominance of a few firms across various layers of the internet (e.g., browsers, operating systems, cloud services) undermines innovation and creates single points of failure, making the entire system fragile.

Simplifying complex systems destroys long-term value and resilience.

The historical forestry analogy shows that efficiency gained through simplification is often short-lived and leads to systemic decline when applied to complex, evolving environments, whether forests or the internet.

Rewilding the internet is a concrete framework, not just theoretical.

The tangible goals of rewilding the internet include ending monopolies, expanding viable technologies and business models, and building pockets of diversity to adapt to future shocks, moving beyond mere metaphor.

A rewilded internet would have distinct operational and structural changes.

A rewilded internet would feature many more service choices, less essential centralization, funding models decoupled from data extraction, resilience through diversity, and the resurgence of decentralized and federated systems.

The internet's original architectural design is being undermined.

The "ossification and consolidation" of the internet stack, through closed standards and vertical integration, threatens its fundamental design principles of resilience and generality by concentrating control and creating bottlenecks.

Policy and regulation are crucial for internet rewilding.

Market forces alone cannot resolve the internet's concentration issues. Regulatory tools like antitrust, structural separations, and interoperability mandates can foster a more diverse and competitive digital environment by addressing harms beyond just consumer prices.

Rewilding requires a multi-faceted approach.

Achieving a rewilded internet needs legal/regulatory reform (antitrust), technical/standards-based reform (open standards), and economic/organizational reform (public funding for infrastructure and common-pool resource management).

Concentration of internet power is an ethical and philosophical challenge.

The control over "epistemic infrastructure" (search, information access, identity) by a few entities undermines societal values like freedom, fairness, and opportunity, shifting information from a public good to private property, thus impacting democracy.