Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet
Anil Madhavapeddy, Sam Reynolds, Alec Christie, David Coomes, Michael Dales, Patrick Ferris, Ryan Gibb, Hamed Haddadi, Sadiq Jaffer, Josh Millar, Cyrus Omar, Bill Sutherland, and Jon Crowcroft.
Paper in the proceedings of the sixth decennial Aarhus conference: Computing X Crisis.
The Internet has grown from a humble set of protocols for end-to-end connectivity into a critical global system with no builtin "immune system". In the next decade the Internet will likely grow to a trillion nodes and need protection from threats ranging from floods of fake generative data to AI-driven malware. Unfortunately, growing centralisation has lead to the breakdown of mutualism across the network, with surveillance capitalism now the dominant business model. We take lessons from from biological systems towards evolving a more resilient Internet that can integrate adaptation mechanisms into its fabric. We also contribute ideas for how the Internet might incorporate digital immune systems, including how software stacks might mutate to encourage more architectural diversity. We strongly advocate for the Internet to "re-decentralise" towards incentivising more mutualistic forms of communication.
The presentation slides also available.
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There are earlier revisions of this paper available below for historical reasons. Please cite the latest version of the paper above instead of these.
This is v1 of the publication from Jun 2025.