The explosion of digital infrastructure systems over the past thirty years may be the biggest but least recognised shock delivered by the internet. We need to develop the governance capacity to manage it and force it out of hands of the democracy-hostile corporations that control it today.

People mean well but ethics is hard. In tech, we have a knack for applying ethics in the most useless ways possible — even when we earnestly want to improve humankind's lot. Why does this matter, why are we failing, and how can we fix it?

What if the internet were public interest technology? Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about various digital issues or pieces of internet infrastructure (much of which I rely upon here), I have yet to read to an answer to this question: What global digital architecture should we assemble if we take seriously the idea that the internet should be public interest technology?

We know from experience and empirical analysis that open source and open standards projects drift into oligarchies that struggle to reform themselves and become ossified. Often, we can simply let them die and replace them with fresher alternatives, but when that's a costly option we can learn from theoretical models of institutional change to understand how to compost the oligarchy and regrow the project from within.