How We Lost the Internet—and How We Might Win It Back

The internet is undergoing a seismic transformation. Once hailed as a force for openness and connection, it is increasingly shaped—and constrained—by a handful of powerful actors. Big search, social media, e-commerce, and now AI companies dominate how we access information, interact with one another, and even imagine what’s possible. Their platforms are optimized not for the public good, but for engagement, profit, and surveillance. And governments have long been working to reassert control over digital space—sometimes to protect rights, but often to consolidate power. 

We’re not just watching the internet evolve—we’re watching it contract. In 2022, Canadian writer Cory Doctorow gave voice to collective frustration with a single term: enshittification. First applied to consumers’ experience on Amazon, the term now serves as a shorthand for the internet’s broader decay.

Probably no corner of the internet better exemplifies this phenomenon than X. The app formerly known as Twitter—once a tool of international pro-democracy movements—is now a MAGA megaphone controlled by the world’s richest man. And it’s not an anomaly. Across the web, experiences that once centered curiosity, connection, and serendipity are being flattened by algorithmic monotony and corporate control.

But what, exactly, has been lost? What did we once find promising about the internet? And what precipitated the fall from grace? 

The internet’s original architecture held radical promise. Two men valorized as its founding fathers, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, created the TCP/IP technical protocol used to route data over a network. It allowed data to travel flexibly and freely, irrespective of content or sender. TCP/IP enabled a decentralized and resilient communication network, serving as a technical foundation that helped democratize speech and inspired early—if ultimately naive—hopes that the internet could be an engine of political liberation.

Built on top of this architecture, the invention of the World Wide Web by another founding father, Tim Berners-Lee, made the internet more widely accessible to everyday users. Web browser experiences in the 1990s and early 2000s ushered in the new possibility of a digital commons. 

But that experience is mostly gone. Today, billions of people experience the internet primarily through a handful of apps and the curated filters of Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. Search results are shaped by opaque ad auctions. Our feeds are optimized for engagement, not enlightenment. And the emergence of generative AI, built and driven by the same companies that have profited from surveillance capitalism, threatens to deepen these dynamics and intensify the homogenization. 

So, how did we get here? 

It’s a familiar story, one of scale and consolidation. The biggest platforms locked in users with “free” services, paid for not with money but with personal data. They consolidated capital, shaped public norms, built an attention economy designed to hijack our focus, and offered convenience that turned into dependence. As Berners-Lee himself wrote, the once content-diverse web “has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms.”

But we are not just reckoning with the power of huge companies. Governments, too, have been working to reclaim the power they lost in the internet’s earlier years, as scholars have persistently pointed out. National governments are well aware that, as one 2008 book put it, “channels of communications are also channels of control.” And an internet largely experienced through a few apps is a much easier internet to control.

So what can we do about these two forces of centralization—corporate consolidation and state control? We can’t simply return to the heady early days of the internet. If we’ve re-learned anything from American politics in the last decade, it’s that nostalgic appeals to return to a glorious past are often misleading, if not outright dangerous.

While we owe much to the internet’s founding fathers, building a better digital future means moving beyond their vision. We need to imagine new possibilities, elevate new ideas, and center new voices that include women, people of color, public interest technologists, and civil society groups that represent the diversity of the world today. And we must take a critical, historical look at how the internet was built to avoid repeating its blind spots.

In a 2014 book, historian Andrew Russell chronicled the technical “standards wars” that shaped the early internet. Cerf and Kahn, he explains, weren’t creating an enlightened architecture in a vacuum. Their Defense Department-funded TCP/IP model was in direct competition with another vision: the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) framework, which was being developed by the International Standards Organization in a more genuinely open, multi-stakeholder manner. 

OSI was slower and more democratic, and TCP/IP more autocratic and faster. Yet as the victor, TCP/IP claimed the mantle of “openness” that fairly belonged to OSI. The internet’s origin story, then, contains one of the earliest examples of what we now call “openwashing.” This complicates the neat mythologies often told about the internet’s birth. If we want to shape a better digital future, we must resist idealizing the past. The enshittification of today’s internet is partly a consequence of being built in the image of the small, relatively homogenous, privileged group of its creators. The internet of the future should be plural, shaped by overlapping, competing models and a wider range of voices than were involved at the outset. 

Russell’s account also carries a warning. OSI’s “beautiful dream” collapsed under the weight of its inclusive process. As Russell notes, “The effort’s fatal flaw, ironically, grew from its commitment to openness… Any interested party [had] the right to participate in the design process, thereby inviting structural tensions, incompatible visions, and disruptive tactics.”

If you think this description sounds eerily similar to the dynamics that often ensnare pluralistic, democratic social movements, then you would be right. The lesson isn’t to abandon inclusive reform movements—it’s to better understand why such efforts have faltered, and how they might succeed. 

If nothing else, we must recognize that rebuilding the internet is not just a technical project; it’s also a political one. It won’t be solved by a new class of protocol designers or mythic “founding fathers.” Nor will it happen in a singular revolutionary moment. A better internet will emerge through the slow, deliberate process of reform.

People from all walks of life have long been hard at work building healthier, more inclusive online spaces. But progress certainly won’t just happen on its own. The internet of the future must be painstakingly created, defended, and sustained against the growing forces of censorship, surveillance, and consolidation. 

Let’s get back to work.

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