The Internet is broken. How to fix it?
Published on 2025-06-26
The Internet is broken. No, not connection down, but as a functional entity. In this article, I share my thoughts on why Internet is broken, and what the solutions to fix it would be.
Why the Internet is broken?
The internet was created in idealistic times by idealistic people. The thought of free information sharing across the globe to advance humanity sounds great. On paper.
Nowadays the internet is just a cluster of a mess. You have foreign governments hacking your networks. Social media has made people in to mindless sheep, also letting anybody from anywhere in the world to run targeted massive campaigns to impact local discourse. In some cases, this influence is meant to elect a certain candidate. In others, it has led to people to die due to false narratives.
And it is not just societal things that have been impacted. Businesses and individuals also have issues. EU consumer protections are some of the strongest in the world. If an EU consumer stumbles on a U.S. or Chinese web store, orders a product, and it does not match EU standards, what happens? Or have you ever tried logging into a streaming service when traveling?
My website is accessible from where-ever. I have no idea about the laws in Burma. Let's assume they have a law preventing sharing any code online. A software engineer from Burma lands on my blog. My blog has some code snippets here and there. Is the engineer responsible? Am I responsible? Is the Burman government responsible?
As you can see, the current system is safe to say broken.
Potential fix 1: Firewall it all.
For some reason, digital bits are supposed to have free flow around the globe, while people an goods do not. Russia and China have notably implemented national firewalls, in an attempt to control what goes in and out. Maybe they have it right.
The digital world should transform to have borders and controls, just like the physical world. Countries would make treaties: "Okay, we allow your schools to talk with our schools to exchange research, but nothing more," or "We have free flow of information." Traffic would be regulated and monitored, and should disallowed traffic come to be, the traffic would be blocked, offenders sanctioned, to the extend of getting a casus belli for war.
Obviously, like in the physical world, you would have data smugglers and incidents (the tourists don't always know the rules). But this would clearly make the data and digital world jurisdictions align with the real world, and would get rid of a large chunk of bad things the current borderless internet allows.
Potential fix 2: One world without borders
The other solution would be to go in the opposite direction. Single ruleset for the whole world. Both digital and physical. Everybody would know what is allowed and what is not. People, bits, and pieces would move around the globe freely.
While utopia, I imagine eventually one day as humans colonize space, like in most scifi, it will be a singular "Earth". Until then, this sadly is likely not going to happen.
Conclusion
It is sad to say but it almost feels like China and Russia have it right: The digital world should have stricter borders. Lot of businesses already try to do such things focusing on IP address geo-blocking, or making apps not available outside of the home market. This naive approach likely makes the C-suite happy, but it is easily circumvented and leads to actual issues when people move and travel.
Countries should go all in on digital borders, making sure traffic inside their country does not violate local rules, allowing blocking incompatibilities and hunting and blocking offenders. It is hard to imagine e.g. North Korea sustaining their money stealing operations when they could only get bits in and out of China and Russia, or having EU battle election influencing from foreign powers with a proper national firewall in place. This way, governments would do in the digital space what they are supposed to do: keep their citizens safe.