The Open Internet is Dead. What Comes Next?

Mallory Knodel,  executive director of the Social Web Foundation and founder of a weekly newsletter called the Internet Exchange, and Burcu Kilic, a senior fellow at Canada’s Center for International Governance Innovation, or CIGI, are the authors of a recent post on the Internet Exchange titled “Big Tech Redefined the Open Internet to Serve Its Own Interests,” which explores how the idea of the ‘open internet’ has been hollowed out by decades of policy choices and corporate consolidation.

Kilic traces the problem back to the 1990s, when the US government adopted a hands-off, industry-led approach to regulating the web, paving the way for surveillance capitalism and the dominance of Big Tech. Knodel explains how large companies have co-opted the language of openness and interoperability to defend monopolistic control. The two argue that trade policy, weak enforcement of regulations like the GDPR, and the rise of AI have deepened global dependencies on a few powerful firms, while the current AI moment risks repeating the same mistakes.

They say to push back we must call for coordinated, democratic alternatives: stronger antitrust action, public digital infrastructure, and grassroots efforts to rebuild truly open, interoperable, and civic-minded technology systems.