By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — February 19, 2026, 17:35 PHST

The internet was not designed to be owned, governed, or curated by a single authority. Its original architecture was intentionally decentralized, non-hierarchical, and resilient. It was built to survive disruption, route around damage, and function without a controlling center. This design choice was not philosophical ornamentation. It was the core feature.

Over time, the internet has drifted away from that design. What was once a distributed network of peers has become a system dominated by a small number of private platforms that mediate access to information, visibility, and audience. These platforms do not merely help users navigate complexity; they shape which information is seen, which sources are trusted, and which voices are effectively removed from public view.

This essay advances a single claim: the concentration of informational authority in private hands represents a structural departure from the internet’s original purpose, regardless of intent or outcome.

The Internet’s Original Design Principles

Early network architects emphasized decentralization for both technical and political reasons. Systems such as ARPANET were designed so that no single node controlled the network and no single failure could collapse it. Authority was distributed, routing was adaptive, and participation did not require permission from a central administrator.

These principles allowed innovation to occur at the edges. Websites could exist without approval. Information could circulate without ranking. Discovery was imperfect but pluralistic. The system favored diversity over optimization.

This model did not assume neutrality or fairness. It assumed the absence of centralized control.

From Network to Platform

As the web expanded, tools emerged to help users locate information across a growing number of sites. Over time, these tools became infrastructure rather than conveniences. Visibility increasingly depended on indexing, ranking, and algorithmic prioritization.

This transition transformed discovery into governance. Decisions about relevance, authority, and trustworthiness began to determine which ideas were amplified and which receded into obscurity. These decisions were embedded in technical systems, not public processes.

The shift occurred through adoption and scale, not mandate.

Authority Without Public Obligation

When a private platform mediates access to information at global scale, its internal rules function as public policy. Ranking systems operate as editorial judgments. Technical standards become enforcement mechanisms. Changes to algorithms can alter livelihoods, discourse, and institutional visibility without explanation or appeal.

This authority is exercised without the obligations typically associated with public power. There is no transparency requirement equivalent to a public broadcaster, no due-process mechanism comparable to a court, and no electoral accountability.

The informational environment that results is governed by incentives rather than principles.

Structural Risk, Not Corporate Intent

This analysis does not depend on allegations of bad faith. Even a well-intentioned platform, when positioned at the center of information flow, accumulates power incompatible with a pluralistic knowledge ecosystem.

Centralization produces predictable effects: homogenization of visibility, prioritization of engagement over accuracy, suppression through obscurity rather than prohibition, and alignment with dominant economic and political interests. These outcomes arise from structure, not personality.

A Documented Departure

The modern web’s dependency on centralized platforms represents a departure from the internet’s founding logic. Resilience has been traded for efficiency, diversity for optimization, and decentralization for managerial oversight.

This shift has been gradual and largely unexamined. Yet its consequences are now embedded in how information is discovered, evaluated, and trusted.

The internet was not designed to have an owner. It was designed to function without one.

This essay will be added to the WPS News monthly briefing or monthly brief available at Amazon.

References

Baran, P. (1964). On distributed communications networks. RAND Corporation.

Berners-Lee, T. (1999). Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web. HarperCollins.

Brin, S., & Page, L. (1998). The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30(1–7), 107–117.

Leiner, B. M., et al. (2009). A brief history of the Internet. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 39(5), 22–31.

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