Beyond the Internet

One idea of the Internet, as a fully international enabler of free-trade and unfettered communication is already gone. The "splinternet" names the political and social fragmentation of a uniform network into partisan enclaves. Starting with embargoes on North Korea and China's "Great Firewall", the Old Internet has shed more and more nations, Russia, Pakistan, Iran…

The network has also split along other lines, into Big Tech and People Tech. On one hand there remains a strong vernacular foundation of small company websites, mail servers, on-premises storage, community, government, civic and domestic home networking. More visible are the massive mega-agglomerations of centralised compute, storage, capital and political power we call Big Tech. The divergence of interests of these two blocs is now very large, in part due to changes in the political status of The United States of America where most of these corporations reside.

A further split happened between humans and machines. Most people considered "The Internet" as a tool for human-to-human communication, whether for defence, education or business. The "Internet of Things" (IoT) added a new layer of telemetry and control data to that. In the last few years "Bots" have taken over and eclipsed everything else. Identified by intent rather than a simple bulk metric, machine traffic, namely; advertising bots, spam, scraping, generative "AI" slop, now exceeds human data. A huge amount of this traffic is very hostile, being automated intrusion attempts, surveillance and tracking techniques, cybercrime related, or related to mass data scraping by "AI" companies. The [Dead Internet Theory], once a sort of "conspiracy theory joke", edges ever closer to being a relality.

Concepts like "The Internet" and "The Cloud" have always been deflationary. That is to say, they hide more than they reveal and thinking that way makes us poor readers of reality. In a sense they were always lazy ideas.

Now we have some catching up to do if we want to preserve some of those ideals. Do they persist in a "post-Internet" digital world?

In this sense what The Internet (as DARPA built it) may ultimately be is a battleground for ideological cyberwarfare.

As proponents of civic cybersecurity we take a particular side in this conflict, namely of peace and civil security free from attack, coercion and domination in our digital lives.

Interestingly, in the early history of network security we used to build firewalls to have a [DMZ], a "demilitarised zone". A concept for demilitarised private networks is already common in organisational "wireguard" and intranet tunnels, but as the open network becomes increasingly hostile to everyone these techniques look set for a comeback as civil overlays, dividing the network into "government and health services", "shopping and commerce", "social networks" and so on.

Many purists would consider that a catastrophe for freedom and peace, because it represents the failure of the rule of law and the defensibility of networks in principle. That is to say, we cannot have nice things like parks and public roads.

The question is whether governments can work together to keep an Internet - roads free from highwaymen where people do not need to travel in armoured cars with half a garrison of bodyguards.