How the World Got Wired · The Other Internet

Your Generation’s Question

Thirty years ago, in countries that controlled what their citizens could read and hear, shortwave radio was often the only way to access news from outside the borders — voices like the BBC and the Voice of America that escaped national gates by reaching across the air. The technology of control has changed dramatically since then. The impulse to control has not.

What I want you to understand, before we leave this chapter, is that the open internet — the no-boss network that Cerf and Kahn gave to the world — was never a guaranteed thing. It was a choice. It is still a choice. Different countries, with different ideas about how a society should work, are making different choices about what their internet should look like. The result is the splinternet you are growing up inside.

The big question that your generation will have to answer, over the next several decades, is something like: what kind of internet should the world have? Should information cross borders freely, the way Cerf and Kahn imagined? Or should each country, or each region, be allowed to shape what its people can see and do online? Should a few American companies (or a few Chinese companies, or a few of each) be allowed to control the experience of billions of users? Should governments have more power over the internet, or less? When new technologies — like artificial intelligence, which is the topic of the rest of this book — arrive, who should be allowed to build them, and where should they be allowed to be used, and on whose terms?

There is no easy answer to any of these questions. There are very smart people on multiple sides of each one. By the time you are reading this with your own children, the answers we end up with may look completely different from what anyone today is predicting.

For now, the most useful thing I can tell you is this: when you open an app on your phone, you are using one version of a thing that could have been built many different ways. The version you have is not the only version. The version you have is not even the most popular version, in many parts of the world. The thing called “the internet” is, in a real sense, several different things, with different rules, depending on where you happen to be standing.

In the next chapter, we go back to the version of the internet you know best, and we meet the last of the giants. Not a company that makes anything you can hold in your hand. Not a company that has an app on your phone. A company that rents computers to other companies, by the minute, in enormous quantities, and that became, almost by accident, the most profitable business inside the giant Amazon you read about three chapters ago.

That’s Chapter 18.

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