We Need To Rewild The Internet — Reading 1 Week 2
We Need To Rewild The Internet — Study Notes
The central argument: the internet has become an extractive, fragile monoculture; rewilding it using ecology lessons can restore resilience, diversity, and open innovation.
Authors and intended audience: Maria Farrell (technology policy writer/speaker) and Robin Berjon (digital governance expert and web standards contributor) write for Noema Magazine to synthesize ecological insights with internet design and policy.
Key Concepts and Definitions
Rewilding (ecology): restoring healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces; aims for whole-ecosystem recovery rather than saving individual species; emphasizes emergent properties, complex food webs, and self-organizing dynamics. Source: IUCN definition; rewilding targets ecosystems, not just single components.
Pathology of command and control: a conservation term applied to technology that describes the urge to simplify, centralize, and control complex systems, eroding resilience and diversity. Applied to the internet as fixation on central choke points and proprietary dominance.
Monoculture vs. biodiversity: monocultures are efficient in the short term but fragile and less adaptable; biodiversity and complex interactions underpin resilience and sustained innovation.
General-purpose network vs. platform monoculture: the internet was designed as a general-purpose, interconnected system; today, it is increasingly shaped by concentrated, proprietary platforms and closed infrastructures.
Weaving two domains: ecology and technology align on systems thinking, emergence, and the value of diverse ecosystems for long-term health.
The Internet Today: Concentration, Risks, and Signs of System Stress
Infrastructure concentration as a global pattern: a few firms or entities control most of the stack — from protocols and networks to services and applications.
Near-planetary duopolies and market share snapshots (as of April 2024):
Web browsers: Google and Apple capture almost 85% of global market share.
Desktop OS: Microsoft and Apple together exceed 80%.
Global search: Google about 84%.
Mobile OS: >99% run on Google or Apple software.
Cloud computing: AWS and Azure together >50% of the global market.
Email clients: Google’s clients manage nearly 90% of global email.
DNS: Google and Cloudflare around 50% of global DNS requests.
Rationale of consolidation: walled gardens and core infrastructure consolidation enable rapid efficiencies for incumbents but squeeze out potential competitors and reduce systemic adaptability.
The metaphor of the internet as a zoo, not an ecosystem: unlike ecosystems, the internet’s core is increasingly centralized, with closed silos and single points of failure.
Consequences for innovation: centralization lowers the diversity of protocols, services, and business models, narrowing paths for new entrants and mutations of the network.
Ecological Lessons Applied to the Internet
Forest loss analogy (historic forestry example): in late 18th century Prussia/Saxony, forests were converted to single-species plantations under scientific forestry; yields were counted and harvested via lower-skilled labor; biodiversity and soil health declined; the term Waldsterben (forest death) emerged as monocultures failed against pests and storms. This illustrates that simplifying complex systems destroys resilience and long-term value.
Key ecological principles applicable to the internet:
Complexity is the goose that laid the golden eggs; simplification can eliminate the soil wealth built by biodiversity and symbiosis.
Shifting baselines: each generation may perceive the current monoculture as normal, which dampens urgency for restoration.
Emergent properties: interactions among many components create capabilities that no single part can realize alone.
The net result: the internet’s early diversity is exhausted in a few data-extraction engines that generate vast wealth for a tiny few, while the broader ecosystem (people, developers, small firms) loses opportunities.
What Is Rewilding the Internet Really For?
Rewilding is a framework and a plan, not mere rhetoric. It provides a way to:
Restore autonomy, diversity, and resilience to the network as a system.
Create room for self-organization and emergent capabilities rather than micromanagement.
Rebuild trust and collaborative relations among service providers, users, and regulators.
Practical aims of rewilding include:
Ending or diluting internet monopolies and their control over infrastructure.
Expanding the set of viable technologies, standards, and business models.
Building pockets of diversity that can adapt to future shocks without collapsing.
What a Rewilded Internet Could Look Like in Practice
A network with many more service choices and less essential centralization; fragmentation of monopolies while maintaining openness and interoperability.
Funding models that decouple data extraction from platform valuation: public goods like internet protocols and browsers receive explicit funding, enabling user privacy and competition.
Resilience through diversity: fewer single points of failure; more alternatives for identity, search, and communication; more open standards and interoperable implementations.
The resurgence of decentralized and federated systems: RSS, email newsletters, blogs, the Fediverse, Bluesky, and other distributed models reduce risk from a single threshold of control.
A rewilded internet would test new standards against the internet’s original values: generality (ability to support multiple uses), openness, and resilience rather than efficiency for the largest firms alone.
Acknowledgement of inevitable change: rewilding accepts that the internet will never be the exact replica of its early form, but aims to keep open opportunities for future innovations.
The Stack, Interoperability, and the Risks of Ossification
The internet stack (layers of protocol, software, hardware) was designed to keep core functions separate to ensure resilience and generality; consolidation undermines this design principle.
Internet infrastructure is a degraded ecosystem yet also a built environment; unpredictability is a source of opportunity, not just risk.
Ossification and consolidation threats include: closed standards, vertical integration, exclusive networks, and a handful of dominant DNS, email, and content networks.
Notable real-world bottlenecks and failures illustrating fragility:
Howard Street Tunnel (Baltimore, 2001): a derailment caused by a highly concentrated physical topology where resilience planning existed in theory but failed in practice because redundancy did not capture diversity across routes. Result: traffic slowed; resilience was proven to be insufficient due to lack of diversity across networks, systemic chokepoint rather than a single failure.
Dyn DNS outage (2016): a cyberattack on a DNS provider caused major sites to fail because many relied on a single chokepoint.
Fastly outage (2021): a cloud service failure led to outages across many high-profile sites, highlighting how market concentration can turn outages into market-affecting events.
These cases illustrate a broader point: centralized, closed, and highly trafficked chokepoints are attractive targets and rationalize the need for diversity and distributed control.
Regulation, Competition, and Antitrust: Pathways to Rewilding
The political science of rewilding includes reviving competition and limiting concentration by design, law, and policy.
The next drive for antitrust and competition includes:
Recognizing that harms extend beyond consumer prices to workers, small firms, and overall market health. Enforcement theories now consider envelopment and platform power as a systemic threat to democracy and opportunity.
Using broad tools: structural separations, interoperability mandates, and non-discrimination requirements to prevent lock-in and to enable new entrants to compete.
Global alignment and proactive enforcement to avoid the persistence of old monopolies that hamper future innovation.
Notable policy developments:
Biden 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy revived Brandeis-era competition rhetoric and created a framework for antitrust action against concentration.
U.S. FTC Chair Lina Khan and DOJ antitrust enforcer Jonathan Kanter are focusing on chokepoints in the AI stack (processing chips, datasets, computing capacity, algorithm innovation, distribution platforms, and user interfaces). The aim is to prevent cross-domain dominance from locking in a single ecosystem.
The regulatory discourse is shifting from: price-focused consumer protection to a broader notion of freedom, democracy, and opportunity. Regulation is framed as essential for ensuring that technology serves the public interest rather than enabling extraction by monopolies.
Potential remedies discussed (not exhaustive):
Interoperability mandates (comcom as a strategy): encouraging compatibility and modular interoperability rather than lock-in; emphasizing competitive compatibility and reverse engineering as legitimate tactics when needed.
Structural separations and utilities-style governance: designating certain network layers or services as common carriers or public utilities to guarantee open access and equitable treatment for all participants.
Rights-based and consumer-protection tools (GPC signal in browsers): codified standards to protect users’ privacy and control over data. California’s CCPA user-enabled global privacy control (GPC) provides a model for interoperable privacy controls via a browser-level standard.
The broader aim: to re-align incentives so that competition, rather than extractive dominance, becomes the default path for internet evolution.
Practical Pathways and Tools for Rewilding the Internet
Build a more resilient ecosystem through three broad pillars:
Legal and regulatory reform: aggressive use of antitrust, competition policy, and utility-style regulation where appropriate; ensure that regulators have tools to address cross-domain dominance.
Technical and standards-based reform: revive openness in standards development organizations (SDOs), push for global, open, and generative standards; foster interoperable implementations across browsers, search, DNS, and other critical layers.
Economic and organizational reform: fund public-good infrastructure (protocols, browsers) with public or shared financing; encourage common-pool resource management and cooperative models like IXPs and altnets; invest in public-interest research with open results.
Specific concepts and mechanisms driving rewilding:
Common-pool resource management and Internet exchange points (IXPs): ISPs collectively carry data at lower cost and with greater resilience; IXPs have grown into backbones for technical communities and economic development, especially in developing regions.
Altnets and federated systems: alternate networks that spread control and reduce dependence on a handful of global platforms; Fediverse and Bluesky are examples of federated, community-driven or algorithmically diverse ecosystems.
Competitive compatibility or comcom: a strategy for achieving practical interoperability through a mix of collaboration and competition; described as guerrilla interoperability that uses tools like reverse engineering and permissionless tactics when necessary.
Public-interest procurement and research funding: governments should increase investment in infrastructure and research that is released publicly, reducing dependence on private, opaque funding.
Public goods funding for protocols and browsers: explicit financing for foundational tools that enable universal, open access and interoperability rather than leaving them to platform economics.
The role of leadership and culture:
Hire the best people, give them what they need, and step back to let them work; a critique of command-and-control models.
Foster collaborative ecosystems across operators and service layers while preserving room for diverse, competing implementations.
Philosophical and Ethical Dimensions
Ethical imperative: concentration undermines democracy by controlling epistemic infrastructure (search, information access, and identity). A rewilded internet treats information ecosystems as public goods and shared infrastructure rather than private property that can be enclosed.
The practical ethics of change: shift toward inclusion, fairness, and opportunity, not just efficiency for the biggest firms. Regulation and reform should aim to restore balance between power and opportunity for users, workers, and smaller players.
The emotional and social dimension: ending monopolies is not just a technical problem but an emotional one, requiring collective will, shared stories, and a shared sense of possibility.
Foundational Quotes and Analogies worth Remembering
Ursula K. Le Guin: The word for world is forest — a reminder that the world is a living, interconnected system rather than a collection of isolated parts.
James C. Scott (referenced): a warning that centralized, single-species thinking can be disastrous for complex human-environment relationships.
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities): mixed-use, diverse, and bottom-up urban environments are safer and more livable; top-down planning often erodes the very fabric that sustains communities.
Elinor Ostrom (Nobel laureate): information and trust can enable self-organization for common-pool resources; individuals informed about problems and involved in governance tend to cooperate without external authority.
Steward T.A. Pickett and Peter S. White (1985): essential paradox of wilderness conservation — preserving what must change; disturbance and patch dynamics as drivers of resilience.
Important Examples and Case Studies
Oostvaardersplassen (Netherlands): a large-scale rewilding attempt that failed due to insufficient scale and connectivity; high herbivore numbers caused starvation because the vegetation could not sustain them; lesson in the limits of simple restoration without ecological connectivity and adequate space.
Howard Street Tunnel (Baltimore, 2001): a single chokepoint in a degraded, highly interconnected network led to cascading failures; WorldCom’s redundancy existed on paper but systems lacked true diversity and alternative routing; demonstrates that resilience requires diversity across infrastructure, not just capacity.
Dyn DNS outage (2016) and Fastly outage (2021): show how centralized DNS and content delivery points become critical vulnerabilities for the entire internet; accountability and diversity of critical services mitigate systemic risk.
Key Equations, Figures, and Numeric References (LaTeX)
Insect population decline (shifting baseline):
Global land-dwelling insects are dropping about -9\% per decade.
Market concentration indicators (as of April 2024):
Browser market share: \text{Browser share} \approx 85\% (Google + Apple).
Desktop OS: \text{Desktop OS share} \gt 80\% (Microsoft + Apple).
Global search share: \text{Google search share} \approx 84\% .
Mobile OS dominance: \Pr(\text{mobile OS on Google/Apple}) \gt 0.99 .
Cloud market: \text{AWS + Azure share} \gt 0.50 .
Global email clients: \text{Google email clients share} \approx 0.90 .
DNS requests: \text{DNS requests via Google + Cloudflare} \approx 0.50 .
Foundational principles (ecology and systems):
Emergent properties: systems display outcomes not predictable from individual parts alone.
Generality vs. specialization: the internet was designed as a general-purpose network; centralization reduces the ability to repurpose and adapt.
Notable quotes for recall:
The more proprietary solutions are built instead of open standards-based ones, the less the internet survives as a platform for future innovation. (Daigle’s policy insight)
Ostrom: informed, trust-based, self-organized common-pool resource management can sustain public goods.
Pickett & White: the essential paradox of wilderness conservation — preserve what must change.
Summary Takeaways for Exam Preparation
The internet’s health depends on ecological-like diversity, decentralized governance, and open standards. Concentration creates fragility and stifles innovation.
Rewilding offers a concrete blueprint: treat the internet as a living system, invest in public goods, encourage diverse and interoperable technologies, and regulate to prevent domination.
Concrete steps include strengthening interoperability (comcom), expanding IXPs and altnets, funding protocol/browser infrastructure as public goods, and using antitrust/regulatory tools to curb cross-domain dominance.
Real-world lessons from ecology and urban planning support the view that mixed systems with redundancy and diversity are more robust than centralized monocultures.
The path forward blends policy, standards, and community-led technical innovation, with a strong emphasis on accountability, transparency, and shared public benefit.