We Need To Rewild The Internet

"The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists."

Establishes the metaphor with a story about “scientific forestry” - the late 18th century growth hacking technique that "made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests". The first forest crop made vast fortunes, but with the second came aldsterben - a term meaning “forest death, minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead". Those initial fortunes turned out to be "a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered".

The same “pathology of command and control... to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate." The "internet’s 2010s" may have been a one-off harvest, resulting in "globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few. Our online spaces are not ecosystems... They’re plantations... closer ... to industrial farming ... that madden the creatures trapped within".

This concentration of power extends right into the infrastructure, reduced to a few "near-planetary duopolies... the “‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem.”:

• Google and Apple internet browsers... almost 85% market share
• Microsoft and Apple’s desktop operating systems over 80%
• Google runs 84% of global search, Microsoft 3%
• Slightly more than half of all phones come from Apple and Samsung
• 99% of mobile operating systems ... Google or Apple
• cloud computing: AWS + Microsoft > 50%
• Apple and Google email ... nearly 90%
• Google and Cloudflare ~50% global domain name system requests

These tech giants are closing off the commons that made them possible and rich, investing the vast fortunes they made there "through acquisitions, vertical integration, building proprietary networks, creating chokepoints and concentrating functions from different technical layers into a single silo of top-down control". This corrodes the resilience of the system and removes the possibility of innovation by "violating a core principle of the internet: that it does not create “permanent favorites.”"

Engineers have (apparently) failed to tackle this: "Bogged down in technical minutiae, unable to separate themselves from their employers’ interests and deeply held professional values of simplification and control". Instead, we should consider it as a "damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction... we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view... We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it."

Rewilding: “restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces... less interested in saving specific endangered species”, paying more attention “to the emergent properties of interactions between ‘things’ in ecosystems". It is "more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan ... a positive vision for the networks we want to live inside, and a shared story for how we get there."

It tells us about:

• shifting baselines: “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in... shifting baselines dampen collective urgency and deepen generational divides", with people like me likened to nostalgists, while "younger generations ... raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet... how can you imagine anything else?"
• it's an "essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change.” We don't need to rewind the clock. "Instead, rewilders seek to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes ... operating at scale to generate complexity... [so] Instead of setting purity tests for which kind of internet is most like the original, we can test changes against the values of the original design."
• “‘complex’ implies a system in which you have emergent behavior, a system in which you can’t model the outcomes"
• compare city planning: "mixed-use neighborhoods were safer, happier, more prosperous, and more livable than the sterile, highly controlling designs of urban planners like New York’s Robert Moses... [similarly] today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours... the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge"
• "Ecosystems endure because species serve as checks and balances on each other... [many] modes of interaction, not just extraction, but mutualism, commensalism, competition and predation... diversity is resilience"
• compare with the 2016 cyberattack on Dyn: "America’s biggest internet brands were brought down by nothing more than a network of baby monitors, security webcams and other consumer devices... [because] a single chokepoint ... failed... To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit"

What's the solution?

• "taking what’s been pulled into the big tech stack back out of it, and paying for the true costs of connectivity"
• moving away from Chicago school economics and reframing "antitrust enforcement and competition policy explicitly about coercion versus choice, power versus democracy", as in the early 20th century
• providing strong and mandatory interoperability ... "comcom... competitive compatibility... how people figured out how to fix cars and tractors" using a diversity of tactics approach: "try-every-tactic-until-one-works", which in an ecosystem means "species diversity"
• "vigorous, pro-competitive government policies around procurement, investments and physical infrastructure"
• "publicly funded tech research"
• support "alternatives including common-pool resource management, community networks... other collaborative mechanisms"
• "We need internet standards to be global, open and generative."