Incentives

The internet is broken. Not the “buffering on YouTube” kind of broken, but fundamentally, architecturally, absurdly broken. We know why: history, culture, economics, politics, and human laziness have all conspired to turn it into a precarious tower of routers teetering on a cliff. The question now is: what can we actually do about it? The answer is messy, expensive, and occasionally involves telling very powerful people that their business model is morally questionable. ...

Once upon a time, the internet was described as an “information superhighway”. In truth, it more closely resembles the back alley behind a funfair: noisy, sticky underfoot, and populated by people selling things you probably do not want but will end up buying anyway. It is not defendable in any serious sense, and the extraordinary thing is that everyone knows this but insists on behaving as if surprise breaches and collapses are acts of God rather than consequences of design. ...

David Clark remembers the moment the Internet’s Pandora’s box creaked open and said, “Hello, world.” It was 2 November 1988, and the Morris Worm was slithering its way through cyberspace like a python on speed. Designed with the innocence of a curious grad student and the destruction of a cyber sledgehammer, it crashed some 6,000 machines—roughly one-tenth of the Internet at the time. Not bad for an opening act. Back then, the network engineers in the room weren’t pondering threats to democracy or ransomware gangs knocking on NHS servers. No, they were earnestly wrestling with TCP packet loss and the excitement of latency reduction. Making things go faster, scale bigger, and connect better. The digital equivalent of building a racetrack and forgetting brakes might be useful. ...