In 2025 the Internet underlies virtually every facet of our lives. It serves as a foundation for the critical infrastructure that keeps our nation states running — from electricity grids and transportation networks, to financial services and communications platforms — and is integral to the personal, professional, and political activities of billions of people globally.

From a Niche Project to High-Stakes Infrastructure

The origins of the Internet trace back to ARPANET, a niche project funded by the US Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in the 1960s. ARPANET was originally used as a means for connecting computers that were engaged in ARPA research projects, and was principally intended to serve as a communications tool for the academic and research organizations who held contracts with the US Department of Defense.

The birth of the Internet as we know it occurred on 1 January 1983 when ARPANET and its Defense Data Network (DDN) offshoot adopted the newly developed Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). The TCP/IP standard enabled disparate computer networks to be connected by a universal language, and lay a foundation for the launch of the World Wide Web in 1991. The subsequent release of Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, spurred a dramatic increase in Internet adoption which ultimately led to where we are today – the Internet is virtually ubiquitous in the developed and developing world alike.

The Internet’s dramatic growth coincided with a vast expansion of Internet-dependent use cases that now extend far beyond those that were originally envisioned by the Internet’s creators. Consequently, the Internet’s original design – which was geared towards facilitating communications and information exchange in a fast, low-friction manner – is increasingly inadequate for many of the high-stakes use cases that now rely upon it. Noteworthy deficiencies of the Internet’s original design include its lack of security provisions at the core (security considerations were deferred to the edges of the network) and its lack of a native value layer (it supports information exchange, not secure value exchange).

The Relentless Slide Toward Further Centralization

While the Internet began as a distributed network of private networks that operated independently of the control of any one party, over time the Internet has become increasingly centralized. Today, a small set of major technology corporations — often with close ties to the governments of the nation states in which they are domiciled — exert control over most of our Internet-enabled interactions.

The centralization of the Internet extends far beyond the self-evident application layer. An overlapping set of centralized intermediaries operates deep down at the infrastructure layer — providing cloud hosting, computation, and application programming interfaces, resolving domain name queries, and performing other essential functions that power end-user experiences globally.

Although these centralized intermediaries undoubtedly provide value to society, they are unelected, unaccountable, and opaque, and have a history of being costly to maintain, error-prone and, at times, corruptible. They are incentivized – if not, coerced – into engaging in censorship and rent-seeking behavior, and ultimately introduce biases that distort the lens through which end-users experience digital life. As a result, the centralized Internet of today is a far cry from the distributed and decentralized vision that its early pioneers espoused decades ago.

Design Considerations for a Better Internet

Given the pivotal role that the Internet plays in modern society, it is beholden upon open-minded individuals everywhere to consider how the Internet could be improved so as to mitigate its original design flaws while simultaneously reversing its seemingly inevitable slide towards further centralization. Such a thought experiment naturally gives rise to all manner of scientific and engineering challenges. But before contemplating the how, we begin by addressing the what — specifically, what properties would our reimagined Internet be characterized by?

Transparency

A better Internet would run on open, transparent infrastructure and applications that could be scrutinized by anyone with the necessary desire and technical know-how. This greater transparency would lead to greater accountability from service providers, would alleviate the tendency for such providers to engage in censorship and rent-seeking behavior, and would help to ensure that no single entity gains undue influence. Influence would be kept in check by transparent governance mechanisms that all stakeholders would be able to participate in. The overarching transparency of the network would need to be balanced by built-in mechanisms that provide network participants with strong privacy guarantees that preserve their most sensitive, private information.

Verifiability

A better Internet would instill trust alleviating the need for end-users to place their trust in third parties. Rather, trust would be placed in cryptographic primitives that would enable all network participants to verify that all services – whether at the infrastructure, middleware, or application layers – act as they proclaim to. These primitives would prove the validity of state transitions and would ensure that the integrity of funds and data is maintained and failsafe.

Inclusivity

A better Internet would allow participants to join, use, and contribute to the network without needing to seek permission from anyone. It would impose minimal barriers to entry – anyone with an Internet-enabled device would be able to participate. The network’s built-in economic mechanisms would at once be sustainable while also ensuring that individuals from all geographies and all walks of life could affordably interact with the network. A better Internet would be resilient to attempts by authoritarian regimes to limit their citizens’ accessibility to this shared, global infrastructure.

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The properties listed above are by no means exhaustive. But they do shed some light on several of the high-level design considerations that should be taken into account when imagining how the Internet could evolve in order to better serve humanity. Future work will delve into these properties, and others, in greater detail.

The Need for Usability and Performance Parity

Despite its limitations, current Internet infrastructure does manage to provide intuitive and performant experiences for end-users – and it seems to be continuously improving in these respects. Any contemplated improvements along the lines of those discussed in this post would likely only be tenable at scale if they could be introduced without imposing material compromises in terms of usability and performance.

As we will discuss in future posts, this need for usability and performance parity with existing Internet infrastructure needs to be top-of-mind for any initiative geared towards improving the Internet. Any new approach that manages to embed the above-mentioned properties of transparency, verifiability, and inclusivity, while at the same time achieving performance and usability on par with the modern Internet, would deliver a giant leap forward toward a better Internet for the benefit of billions of people across the globe.