Every time I teach Internet Law, I start by lying to my students about how the Internet works. I tell them the finely crafted story of how routing, packet-switching, and layering combine to produce a profoundly modular, decentralized, and standardized worldwide network. The only problem is that the Internet doesn’t work that way anymore, and hasn’t for years. Companies like Akamai, Cloudflare, and Amazon operate such massive networking infrastructure that they have warped Internet spacetime around them. The services they offer, and on which much of the Internet now depends, are integrated, centralized, and proprietary—the very opposite of what I tell my students.
Tejas N. Narechania and Scott Shenker’s How to Save the Internet brings the stories we tell about the Internet back into line with the Internet as it actually is. Narechania is a law professor and Shenker a computer scientist. Their article is a seamless fusion of their expertise—and a cogent guide to the Internet’s new normal and what it means for telecommunications policy and law. Continue reading “The Edge of Tomorrow”
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