It's been quite a while since most thinking people agreed that there is something wrong with the way the Internet affects public and private life. In the April issue of National Review, policy analyst Luke Hogg takes a hard look at one reason for these problems: the effects of centralization.
He begins by harking back to the early hobbyist-style years of the Internet in the 1990s. It was a time of relative freedom in the sense that users could control who they associated with and how much and what kind of information they shared. Many online users were seeking the ideal proclaimed by an early statement of that era which Hogg quotes from the operators of YouTube: "anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world."
A lot of bits have passed through the Internet since then, and users' current trust in social media isn't much greater than their trust in legacy media: less than one out of five people recently polled say they trust social media to provide accurate information. One big perceived problem is censorship, and while many states have passed laws prohibiting social-media platforms from viewpoint censoring, the U. S. Supreme Court has ruled that such laws are likely to be unconstitutional, as they restrict a private entity's freedom of speech, or freedom to refrain from speech.
And this is not just a U. S. problem. Hogg cites the case of how Facebook inadvertently helped the military in Myanmar to incite violence against that country's Rohinga minority group. It turned out that the Facebook monitors simply couldn't understand what was going on among the specific cultural groups involved.
Hogg sees these and other problems rooted in one factor: centralization. And he sees two solutions, both technological: to give users greater control over their experiences on a given platform, and also to enable them to communicate as they wish across multiple platforms.
Right now, such customization is nearly impossible. If you get tired of what's going on in your Facebook feed, you can up and quit, as millions of people have done from time to time. But just quitting a platform deprives you of all the good your social network might have been doing, as well as allowing you to avoid the idiots who made you want to quit in the first place.
Hogg talks about "middleware," which is a name for software that works as a kind of concierge or secretary between the centralized mega-platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, and the individual user. With the proper protocols in place, such middleware could defend children against pornography and stalking no matter which platform it came from, for instance.
There have been experiments in this direction, but they have either been new built-from-the-ground-up platforms, or specialized software that interfaces between the user and existing platforms. So far, they haven't made much of a dent in the problem, but they show that the technology is out there, waiting to be used.
Hogg says that some existing regulations would have to be changed in order for decentralization to progress meaningfully. In particular, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act have had unexpected side effects that allow current platforms to suppress both competing content they don't like, and also stifle the kind of middleware that would allow decentralization. These laws could be amended to fix these problems. And Hogg also calls on the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to encourage decentralization with a stick as well as a carrot. Obviously, if things are going to change in a big way, the regulatory environment will have to change too.
My heart is with Hogg's ideas, but my head and my wallet see a big problem that Hogg seems to avoid: how platforms will make money from a decentralized Internet.
Allow me to be nerdy for a moment by quoting something called Metcalfe's Law, which, according to Wikipedia, "states that the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system." So if a given network goes from 50 users to 1000, it's not twenty times as valuable, but twenty-squared, or four hundred times as valuable. While I may be taking this law a little beyond its original purview, it's the main reason that businesses whose essential function is to connect people and profit from their connections have a huge incentive to grow and take over absorb smaller networks. It happened with Western Union, it happened with Ma Bell, and it happened with Facebook and YouTube.
Much of what Hogg proposes to do to decentralize the Internet would directly threaten the network dominance of prominent social-media platforms. If Facebook can't guarantee control over what their users see and do, including ads, then they won't be able to sell ads as easily, and their whole economic model is threatened. If users are the product, they can't be allowed to just interconnect promiscuously and wander around and select exactly what experiences they want.
In the face of this problem, I see one tiny little light that might be at the end of the tunnel. Many of you may be familiar with a social-media platform called Nextdoor. It runs Neighborhood Network, which Wikipedia calls a "hyperlocal" social networking service. Compared to Meta, the $164-billion-revenue elephant that runs Facebook, Nextdoor is a $200-million mouse. But speaking for myself, I have fallen into at least reading Nextdoor posts and occasionally finding useful information on them, mainly because they are literally from people next door, or at least in my immediate geographic area. And I have nothing voluntarily to do with Facebook. Yes, there are idiots on Nextdoor too, but there are also people I stand a good chance of actually seeing in the grocery store and getting to know better. That virtually never happens on Facebook or the other centralized platforms.
Maybe some giant revolt will happen, and everybody will boycott the big boys in preference to decentralized social-media operations such as Nextdoor. I agree with Hogg that decentralization would be great if we could get it to happen. But the only way I can see it happening is if users insist on it, and keep insisting till it does.
Sources: Luke Hogg's article "Building a Better Internet" appeared on pp. 24-26 of the April 2025 edition of National Review. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Metcalfe's Law, Nextdoor, and Meta.