#4: The Governance of a New Internet

We've discussed the design of the new internet. Now, let's turn to its governance.

Governance of the internet is a relatively new concept because the current internet is theoretically ungoverned. The foundational protocols of the internet have not changed in a long time, and while there is an internet consortium (W3C), it doesn’t make any significant decisions about the internet.

Practically, however, because these protocols are ungoverned, governance of the internet has effectively moved to the big tech companies. This is problematic because these companies are neither elected nor accountable to the users.

Why is Governance Important for the Internet?

Governance is crucial because the internet has grown to a scale where changes in its policies can significantly affect users, creators, businesses, and even governments.

Examples of Policy Decisions Affected by Governance:

1. What type of speech is allowed?

2. Which types of speech are promoted or demoted?

3. Which businesses are allowed to make money on the internet?

4. What is the process to allow, deny, or reinstate an account on social media?

5. Who owns the intellectual property or copyright on content?

6. Who earns money from the distribution of content?

Many of the major internet products today look similar in functionality but differ based on these policies. A classic example is X versus Threads, where the products are almost identical, but one is a free speech platform with heavy political content, while the other is strongly moderated to demote political speech.

Who Should Govern the New Internet?

The question of who governs the new internet comes down to who covers the cost of maintaining the global content database we described in the design of a new internet.

There are three primary governance models for fat protocols that are not owned by a corporation:

1. Land-Based Governments: Some digitally advanced countries have started developing digital public goods similar to the fat protocols we described. The cost of running the servers for these services is covered by taxpayers' money through the government.

Leading examples include Estonia’s e-residency and India’s identity and payment stack, Aadhaar and UPI. India is also expanding these protocols to compete with tech companies, such as its e-commerce protocol ONDC, which competes with Amazon and Uber.

However, the challenge with land-based governments creating content protocols is that most content is global (except in cases like China), unlike domains like payments and commerce, which are typically local. Therefore, most governments have not made serious efforts to create protocols for global content.

1. Non-Profit Tech Groups: Another model for protocol development is through non-profit tech groups. The most serious attempt at this is Mastodon, which has a very similar architecture to our proposed design, where the content database is de-linked from applications. It hosts many applications built on top of it, including Threads by Meta.

The challenge for non-profit tech groups is funding: where do they get the money to cover server costs? So far, the answer has been a mix of donations and apps hosting their own servers to store content.

This approach has two main issues: a) Relying on donations creates financial dependence, risking both insufficient funding and overreliance on a few major partners like Meta. b) Since each app maintains its own set of servers, a shared global content database is not achieved; instead, the database is fragmented across multiple entities.

1. Blockchains: This is one of the newest models for creating protocols that store data funded by users. This model creates financial feasibility since every user pays for their own data usage, leading to true network ownership.

All these 3 models can be summarized in the table below:

	Land based Governments	Non-Profit Tech Groups	Blockchains
Who covers the cost	Taxpayer money	Donations	Users pay
User ownership	❌	❌	✅
Globally shared state	❌	❌	✅
Examples	UPI, ONDC, E-residency	Mastodon	DeSo, Farcaster, Lens

From the table, the blockchain based approach seems the best but the downside, however, is that blockchains so far like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana have been too costly to store data at the volume required for social media apps.

Recent developments in blockchain technology, however, have made storing large amounts of data technically feasible—a topic we will discuss in the next essay.