What does the future of the Internet look like? What do we need to do differently? What could we do to bring about the Internet we want? What should we be concerned about with, for instance, the massive investment in AI infrastructure?

Those are all questions that I’ve been focused on for years (well, except the last one… that’s new), and I always seek out many other viewpoints as I ponder my own. Today I want to bring you three essays I think are very important.

It’s a rainy weekend here in northwest Vermont, and if it’s like that for you… or if you just have a moment amidst the madness, I suggest getting a nice cup of tea or coffee… or whatever beverage you like. Maybe grab a scone or muffin or some other treat… and settle in… because there are lots of words here…

… but they are *powerful* words!

[Side note: will any of you be at ICANN 68 this coming week from June 8-11 in Seville, Spain? If so, I’ll be there speaking in some sessions. Please feel free to reach out (see contact info at end) and say hello. I always enjoy connecting with readers!]

If you just want to go read the essays and don’t care why I think they are important, here they are:

• Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet
• The Boring Internet
• Say Hello to the Internet of AI

If you want to know WHY I think these are a valuable use of your time (since they WILL take some time!), read on….

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Mike Masnick on Decentralization

I have long enjoyed Mike Masnick’s TechDirt site, particularly for his very direct, blunt, and extremely insightful commentary on the state of policies and technologies for the open Internet.

Back in the early days of the Internet, some of us spoke of “The Internet Way” as being “distributed and decentralized”. This was something I would say to people all the time.

And the early Internet was! People ran their own web servers, email servers, file servers, etc. And while a small % still do, for most people it was hard… and the convenience of centralized platforms won the day.

Masnick has been thinking and writing about this for a long time, and his latest essay was published this week and really brings the topic – and the importance – all together:

• Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet

A few key phrases:

There’s no reason we can’t build a new generation of services that restores that democratic, decentralized promise—an open internet that empowers users rather than funneling control to gatekeepers.

And:

Decentralization, like democracy itself, is something we have to fight for. Absent deliberate effort, the default trajectory runs toward centralization, because centralization is convenient, and convenience wins in the short term.

And:

The choice in front of us is the same one that’s always been in front of us, just with higher stakes and less time: Do we let the next generation of tools get built around chokepoints, or do we insist on architecture that distributes power instead of concentrating it?

I might quibble a bit with Mike mentioning Bluesky prominently and not mentioning the Fediverse (he does have a reference to ActivityPub), but hey, he’s on Bluesky’s Board so I’ll give him that. 😃

The key point is that we need to look at how we return to the idea of more decentralized infrastructure without the chokepoints. Especially as we look at the the ever-evolving world of the AI industry. And while we can have many different views ranging from that AI is a hype bubble waiting to pop … to that it is fundamentally transformative – and everything in between … the reality is that it IS changing so many aspects of the Internet – and we have to think about what we want that to look like. More centralized choke points? Or a path to more decentralization?

I believe we NEED to do this kind of thinking! If we are to have any chance of democracy surviving… and to have a “civic space” survive in any way… we must spend time thinking about this – and then building that future!

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[As I pause to go download ollama onto my laptop before traveling so that I can use a LLM locally. I wrote about this way back in March 2025, although those instructions are probably now outdated.]

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Terry Godier on “The Boring Internet”

On a similar theme, Terry Godier wrote this brilliant essay reminding us that that original decentralized network is still there, and we can use that to enable a better Internet if we choose where we focus:

• The Boring Internet

A taste of what he wrote:

The internet is not dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is dying.

The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.

Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.

It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about.

But it has one enormous advantage over the platforms that replaced it in your imagination.

No one owns it.

He goes on to walk through the different layers of the Internet, to talk about protocols and why they can’t be owned, to talk about Internet radio stations, about the old protocols that STILL work:

That is what survival looks like at the protocol layer. Not purity. Persistence.

And when I say “old” protocols… he goes back to some of the oldest like finger and others that you probably would never know unless you grew up with the command line. 🤯

He goes in to why this “boring Internet” survives, and touches on similar points to Mike Masnick about the importance of decentralization.

Now, Godier does “have a horse in the race”, so to speak, in that he is building a new RSS reader, Current, that re-invisions the model that RSS readers all took from NetNewsWire back in the day. It’s an interesting view… and something I’ve been trying for my own reading.

But he speaks about how he’s not trying to go “back” to some past, but rather build on what made those protocols powerful:

These aren’t acts of nostalgia. I don’t want to teleport to 1999 with a beige computer and pretend everything was better when getting online made a noise.

I am trying to build on the part of the internet that still has the properties I want software to have: durable, legible, user-shaped, hostile to enclosure, and quiet enough that a single person can still understand the whole thing.

I’m not the only one. Personal sites are coming back. RSS feeds are coming back. Webrings are coming back. People are remembering that a website can be a home or a place instead of a profile.

Mastodon is, for all its quirks, a federated SMTP-shaped thing for short messages and not a platform in the old sense.

It goes on… and it ends on the powerful point that you do not have to ask for permission. The building blocks are all still there. Waiting to be used. The time to build is now.

A powerful essay… beautifully displayed, too. Read it and share it!

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Om Malik on the Internet of AI

And then there’s Om. Way back in the early to mid-2000s, there were a whole group of us who were exploring the two new evolving worlds: 1) “blogging” that let anyone easily publish on the Internet; and 2) voice-over-IP (VoIP) that let anyone easily communicate on the Internet. Skype (remember them?) was revolutionizing telecommunications – and it was a HUGE moment of change.

I was writing on my Disruptive Telephony site and was joining into so many of the conversations. But perhaps one of the greatest analysts and thinkers in that time was Om Malik. He had a site that became “GigaOm” and spawned all sorts of media activity. He went on to become an investor and do many things. He has a brilliant mind and always insightful commentary (and he takes amazing photos, too).

Recently he has returned to writing and I encourage you to go subscribe to his “On my Om” newsletter. Seriously! Go take a moment and go over and subscribe! (and he actually publishes on a frequent schedule, unlike me!)

Om is someone who has been around for so long – and living in the San Francisco area has been in the middle of things for so long – that he has a powerful ability to connect the dots in ways that other people can’t.

And in the middle of his writing, he dropped this ginormous piece:

• Say Hello to the Internet of AI

Read it once. Then go back and read it again. You’ll probably need to pause for a bit and then read parts of it again… and maybe again.

🤯

Om goes beyond the hype of the AI companies to dive deeply into how AI systems and companies are actually changing the Internet’s infrastructure. He lays out four layers:

Inside the AI data center.
Data Center Interconnect.
Internets of AI.
Planetary AI Network.

… and proceeds to explore each of them.

He covers how data centers are changing.. how the way data centers connect is changing… how the “hyperscalers” are creating their own separate globe-spanning networks… and how the hyperscalers are now controlling and investing in the world’s subsea cables.

Along the way he explores the challenges around electrical power, investment, and so much more.

It’s huge… it’s deep… it makes you think.

You might need a second or third caffeinated beverage … but it’s worth it!

[I’ll note that Om followed this up with two more powerful pieces: “AI is the new Netflix” looking at how AI is changing the view around upstream capacity, and “Anthropic, AI and The “Numbers” Problem” about the challenges with the investment numbers in all of this.]

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And there you are… 3 essays worth reading, thinking about, and sharing!

Are there other essays like these that you have found exciting and interesting? Please drop me a note and send along links!

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A “Crow’s Nest” Monthly Video Call?

I’ve been giving a LOT of thought about building communities and connecting with others of similar interests. I’m thinking about the idea of doing a monthly video call (probably using Zoom) for a casual conversation where people could share what kind of emerging technologies they are currently interested in. *IF* I were to set something like that up, would you be interested? Drop an email back to me to let me know (or ping me on Mastodon or LinkedIn).

[The End]

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Recent Presentations, Posts and Podcasts

Content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

• TDYR 420 – Returning from a hiatus and a plan for 2026

Content I’ve published for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

• Climate and Environmental Sustainability Within the IETF and IRTF (for Earth Day 2026)

Presentations or panels I’ve been part of:

21 May 2026	Building a Culture of Accessibility within the Internet Society (presentation) – part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2026 (GAAD) online event
28 May 2026	Building AI That Represents Languages and Communities (panel)- part of CODI Universal Acceptance Day 2026 Virtual Event
28 May 2026	The Language Infrastructure Framework: Infrastructure for Multilingual Participation (presentation) – part of CODI Universal Acceptance Day 2026 Virtual Event
8 June 2026	DNSSEC & Security Workshop (session moderator) at ICANN 86 in Saville, Spain
9 June 2026	Regulatory Trends on DNS Resilience Affecting ccTLDs (panel) in the ICANN 86 ccNSO session in Saville, Spain

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Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

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Until the next time,
Dan

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Connect

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.