How to fix what has gone wrong with the internet

economist.com/special-report/2018/06/28/how-to-fix-what-has-gone-wrong-with-the-internet

June 28,
2018

HAS THE INTERNET failed? Sitting in his office at Christ Church, an Oxford college, Sir Tim
Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has his answer ready: “I wouldn’t say
the internet has failed with a capital F, but it has failed to deliver the positive,
constructive society many of us had hoped for.”

Two decades ago he would have scoffed at the idea that the internet and the web would
do anything but make this planet a better place. In his autobiography written in the late
1990s, “Weaving the Web”, he concluded: “The experience of seeing the web take off by
the grassroots effort of thousands gives me tremendous hope that…we can collectively
make our world what we want.”

Until a few years ago most users, asked what they thought of the internet, would have
rattled off a list of the things they love about it—that it lets them stay in touch with
friends, provides instant access to a huge range of information, sparks innovation, even
helps undermine authoritarian regimes. And in some ways it has been a tremendous
success. Just under a quarter of a century after the first web browser was released,
around half the world’s population is online. But like Sir Tim, many people have recently
become more critical of it, concerned that it creates online addicts, hoovers up
everybody’s data and empowers malicious trolls and hackers.

1/8
At the heart of their disenchantment, this special report will argue, is that the internet
has become much more “centralised” (in the tech crowd’s terminology) than it was even
ten years ago. Both in the West and in China, the activities this global network of
networks makes possible are dominated by a few giants, from Facebook to Tencent. In
his latest book, “The Square and the Tower”, Niall Ferguson, a historian, explains that this
pattern—a disruptive new network being infiltrated by a new hierarchy—has many
historical precedents. Examples range from the invention of the printing press to the
Industrial Revolution.

2/8
At the same time the internet has become much more strictly controlled. When access to
it was still mainly via desktop or laptop computers, users could stumble across amazing
new services and try many things for themselves. These days the main way of getting
online is via smartphones and tablets that confine users to carefully circumscribed
spaces, or “walled gardens”, which are hardly more exciting than television channels.
Makers of mobile operating systems can decide through their app stores which services
smartphone owners have access to. Another control point is cloud computing, which by
its nature puts outsiders in charge of applications and their associated data. Meanwhile
governments, which long played no part in the internet, have established power over
large parts of the network, often using big internet firms as willing enforcers, for instance

3/8
by getting them to block unwelcome content.

This is more or less the opposite of what the early cyber-gurus had intended. When the
first message was sent over the internet nearly half a century ago, on October 29th 1969,
the system was “biased in favour of decentralisation of power and freedom to act”,
according to Yochai Benkler of Harvard University. Its technological roots played a large
part in that. A child of the cold war, the internet was meant to connect disparate
networks and computers so they could still communicate even if central links became
unavailable, say in the event of a nuclear attack. “We wanted anything connected to the
net to connect to anything else connected to the net,” explains Vint Cerf, one of the
engineers who developed the communication protocols (he now works for Google).

To make this possible, Mr Cerf and his colleagues had to make the internet
“permissionless”, in today’s lingo. Any network and any computer can join in as long as it
follows the protocols. Packets of data are handed from one network to another,
regardless of content. This loosely coupled architecture later inspired Sir Tim, who
devised the protocols for the world wide web that work on top of the internet proper.

Those protocols were complemented by a set of organisations that allowed the rules to
evolve, along with the software that puts them into effect, and keep both from being
captured by outside interests. Chief among them has been the Internet Engineering Task
Force, whose philosophy was perfectly summed up by David Clark, one of its founders:
“We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running
code.”

4/8
The combination of open technical rules and flexible governance set off a frenzy of
creativity and innovation. Starting in the mid-1990s, millions of websites were set up and
tens of thousands of startups launched. Even after the dotcom bubble collapsed in the
early 2000s, this decentralised activity continued unabated, for instance in the form of
blogs. Users actually did what Sir Tim had hoped they would: publish online and link to
each other, creating a great virtual conversation.

Today the internet is a very different beast. The connections to transfer information still
exist, as do the protocols, but the extensions the internet has spawned now greatly
outweigh the original network: billions of smartphones and other devices, and cloud-
computing factories the size of football fields, containing unimaginable quantities of
data. The best way to picture all this is as a vast collection of data silos with big pipes
between them, connected to all kinds of devices which both deliver services and collect
more data.

5/8
The centralisation of the internet and the growing importance of data has given rise to
what Frank Pasquale of the University of Maryland, in a recent paper published in
American Affairs, calls a “Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian divide” among critics of big tech. One
group stands in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s founding fathers,
who favoured smaller government and less concentration in business. Its members want
to rein in the tech titans through tougher antitrust policies, including break-ups. The
other group follows the thinking of Alexander Hamilton, another founding father, who
supported strong central institutions, both in politics and in the economy. Its adherents
argue that to reap the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) and distribute them fairly,
online giants should be treated as utilities.

Jefferson v Hamilton
This framing also helps to understand the reactions to centralisation more generally. The
Jeffersonian side worries that a centralised internet offers less scope for innovation.
Although the online giants themselves are a source of much invention, they dampen it
elsewhere, so that fewer new ideas are being tried. Venture capitalists now talk about
“kill zones”, areas they will not invest in because one of the big players may squeeze the
life out of startups or buy them up at a low price.

The political consequences of the internet’s growing centralisation are even more
troublesome, if less obvious. Walled gardens often limit free speech, as Facebook’s
sometimes ham-fisted attempts to police its social network have shown. Having to hack
the algorithms of only a few platforms makes it easier for Russian trolls and their
Western counterparts to meddle in elections by spreading misinformation. The
concentration of reams of personal data in one place makes serious leaks more likely.
One example is the recent scandal at Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that
acquired data on 87m Facebook users in underhand ways (and as a result went out of
business). Dominant platforms are also handy for spooks, as shown by the revelations in
2013 by Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who leaked vast amounts of classified
information. Intelligence services had to tap into only a couple of computing clouds to
find what they wanted. And online giants have plenty of cash to influence offline politics.

Yet among Jeffersonians a sense of a new beginning is also in the air. The buzz at
technology conferences today is reminiscent of 1995, shortly after the birth of the world
wide web, when a new piece of software called a browser took the web mainstream, and
the internet with it. At today’s events startups are pushing ambitious plans, often based
on blockchain technology (immutable distributed ledgers of the sort that underlie Bitcoin
and other crypto-currencies), promising to “re-decentralise” the online world.

6/8
Hamiltonians, on the other hand, argue that without the free services and easy-to-use
interfaces offered by companies such as Google and Facebook, far fewer people would
be using the internet. Without cloud computing, which lets firms crunch vast quantities
of data, AI would be nowhere. Having a few powerful firms in control also helps curb the
demons of decentralisation, such as cybercrime and hate speech. This kind of thinking,
long used by online giants to make the case against regulation, has gained some traction
on the left in the West. But it is mostly thriving in China, where the government wants
tech titans to help it in its quest to turn the country into a cyber-superpower.

Tacking between the two sides is a growing group of academics who are trying to devise
new ways to rein in big tech through regulation. Some of their proposals are more
Jeffersonian, such as forcing firms to unwind recent mergers. Others are more
Hamiltonian, including making companies share some of their data.
7/8
This special report will start by chronicling how the internet became centralised, then
discuss all three strands in turn. While not hiding its sympathies with the Jeffersionian
side, it will conclude that to re-decentralise the internet, ideas from all three camps are
needed. There is no central solution.

8/8