The Great War, Part 6: The Internet vs Itself
Tech policy wars reach new levels of salience when tech companies take sides, warring against each other not in the free market but on the battleground of ideas—and media buys. Of all the individual wars shaping the future of internet governance, perhaps the one most likely to result in a transformation of the status quo––for better or worse––is the battle of the internet versus itself.
The boundaries of the internet ecosystem are often in the eye of the beholder, but for purposes of this piece, my focus is on user-facing retail internet services, and not on internet access services such as ISPs, nor infrastructure services such as content delivery networks (CDNs). Three active instances of infighting among the “edge” service providers within this scoping of the user-facing internet merit specific attention.