The System: how the internet works and what is wrong with it

Back in that extraordinary period of fast internet growth in the 1990s, when a new type of business, the ISP (internet service provider), put millions online for the first time, it wasn’t hard to discern that this exciting, magical, mostly invisible network could change everything.

The overused word at the time and ever since has been “disruptive”. The disruptive internet would give more people a voice. It would drive democracy forward. It would enable small “nimble”companies (they were always “nimble”) to disrupt the powerful old-school industrial giants, creating fairer opportunities. It would perturb, even overturn, existing power structures.

The System states otherwise. As Pulitzer-winning journalist James Ball argues in this welcome, accessible disassembly of the internet, look closer, and it’s clear that although things could have turned out differently, “online power structures mirror almost exactly the offline power structures which preceded them.” The system’s baffling technical and structural complexity helps obscure this depressing truth (even to many who think of themselves as “disrupters”).

The old Wired notion of “the wisdom of the crowd” now seems decidedly tired. Those telecoms companies laying miles of fibre-optic cables, the wealthy financial backers, those young, mostly white, and male founders whose unicorn (billion-dollar-plus) companies rake in venture capital: look past the pumped Nasdaq listings, the funky offices full of toys for grown-up boys (because the system is, alas, mostly boys) and the reality appears less digital revolution and more “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.

But it’s worse because the internet allows a reach, a global footprint, an amplification of power and a consolidation of wealth far beyond the nearest historical parallels in the industrial revolution. The most disrupted are those who had the least power already: all of us.

Demand for change

Yet, The System isn’t aimed at those seeking a dense polemic and summons to man the virtual barricades, even though it is ultimately a call to regulatory arms and a demand for change. Nor is it a geekfest, though it dives entertainingly into the origins of the internet and explains underlying technical components that, unfortunately, weren’t designed to manage what the internet has become (leading to many of our current woes).

The audience for The System – subtitled Who owns the internet, and how it owns us – is anyone wanting to better understand this network, how it was created, what it has turned into and why we need to fight for change.

What the book does exceedingly well is take apart the internet – as a mix of infrastructure and the people who created, fund, run and exploit it – and cast a cold eye on each element. The fast-paced narrative is full of interviews with some who were there as each constituent part of the system emerged into place. Ball gets out of the way and lets these individuals tell much of the story; generally a good thing, but many long passages of direct, sometimes rambling quotation could have benefited from editing and allowed more room for perspective and analysis.

Chapters are divided into the system’s parts: the creators, the “cable guys”, the system’s manager (in as much as anyone manages the internet), the money men, the ad men, the cyber warriors, the regulators and, finally, “the resistance”.

New insights

Every chapter offers much to engage and intrigue, even for someone like me, whose career has involved writing about all these areas and talking to some of these same people. But I gained new insights into how the pieces fit together and why, taken collectively, the system has turned into something genuinely alarming and threatening.

However, a reader doesn’t need to come to The System knowing anything about the internet, and this is one of the book’s great strengths: it is equally rewarding to a tech neophyte or a geek. Ball excels at explaining complex technical operations, from networking protocols to “adtech”, in approachable language and telling imagery that advances the reader’s understanding while avoiding detours into unnecessary detail – an enviable accomplishment.

The first two-thirds of The System is particularly strong, fun to read and informative. There’s some internet-origin history from its original architects, a dive into the internet’s physical cable infrastructure and a look at the net’s management body ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

This provides an overview of the internet as a physical structure before Ball moves on to three central chapters that should be mandatory reading for every politician and regulator (and everyone, actually). These include a stellar chapter on data-based online advertising (the internet’s toxic business model) – the best, most understandable explanation I’ve ever read; then one on venture capital’s narrow funding structures that drive the damaging “get big fast” internet ethos; and an eye-opening “cyber warriors” chapter.

The latter explains the broader system significance of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations of extensive United States and United Kingdom surveillance of the data of ordinary citizens, conveniently gathered by private internet companies and network operators (Ball worked directly on Snowden’s document drops).

Power structures

The final two chapters, on the regulatory system and “the resistance”, drive us towards Ball’s forceful conclusion that while the internet may still be dazzlingly new, the power structures are, nonetheless, the same old same old. These two chapters, unfortunately, lose some of the book’s earlier energy, though both have good interviews.

The last chapter, which should crown the enterprise, feels rushed. It would have benefited from greater complexity, more analysis and, especially, more voices. Only two people are interviewed. One is Jimmy Wales, perennial media favourite and Wikipedia founder . The other (adulatory) interview, with Cindy Cohn, director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, carries the chapter’s argumentative weight, with extensive direct quotations containing nearly all the chapter’s talking points.

Wales and Cohn, as interesting as both are, do not much of a resistance make. How about a social entrepreneur? A digital-security provider to global activists? A developer of open-source browsers, encrypted email or messaging apps? Campaigners from outside the US or the UK? The chapter needs wider perspectives – and more analysis from Ball himself.

But this lost opportunity is ultimately a minor quibble in a valuable, timely book. Already, 2021 promises significant internet regulatory battles in the European Union and in the US, additional antitrust lawsuits and ever more online security and disinformation challenges, all better understood by a reading of this book.

I will be recommending The System widely and hope its insights  will help galvanise the urgently needed regulatory and structural change Ball calls for.