Paul Vixie — Internet Hall of Famer, “Godfather of DNS” — describes the fragmentation of the internet without nostalgia: control will grow, technology alone will not be enough, and the only realistic hope lies in the competition between those who connect and those who divide.
[Editor’s note. The wording has been preserved in English, with light punctuation, capitalization and readability edits only. Proper names have been standardized.]
You are analyzing the splinternet phenomenon. Where is it heading? What consequences do you see, perhaps in the near future?
I think the arguments against it will depend very much on the motives, which will vary. Again, to borrow my earlier example, if you want to send me email, and you want it to be spam, and you want me to accept it, there is no incentive you can offer me. I will not negotiate. You will lose. I will find a way to block it. The more work you do to bypass my controls, the more work I will do to improve those controls.
Now, if, on the other hand, it is an ideological matter — for example, we are coming out of a period when Iran had a widespread internet shutdown during the early part of 2026, during several wars — if what they want is to make sure that they control the narrative heard by all Iranians and they do not want outside interference, again, I am not sure what incentive we could offer to make them say, “Well, okay, let’s permit outside interference.” For them, it might be an existential matter. Maybe the existence of the regime itself would be at stake if they deviated in any way.
But I don’t think we have to encourage this type of censorship. I think we can at least find a way to say: if we take a certain action, then it is inevitable that the internet will be censored by someone who does not like that action. What could we do differently that would not create the initial incentive for the censorship itself? Again, I am not saying that we should never try to improve the world. Human history shows that small groups of committed individuals can change history. But if we know that a certain tool is available to our opponent, we should not provoke its use unless we intend to provoke its use. Right now, I am afraid that we often do it unknowingly and uncaringly.
Do you still have any hope that we can reverse this trend and perhaps return to a pluralistic, open internet like the one you encountered when you began working on it as an internet pioneer in the 1980s? You must have had a lot of hope to keep working on it.
I did have a lot of hope then, and I have different hope now. In the early 1980s, the internet had no untrustworthy parties. There were only government contractors for the US government, including universities internationally, which meant that it was a utopia. It was a place where you could be heard. You could talk to interesting people who were educated and had self-control.
So we believed at that time that if we made this type of connectivity the norm for all of humanity, somehow all of humanity would behave that way. That is not what happened. What we got is the way all of humanity always behaves: the full spectrum, all the good and all the bad. So that was naive, I admit.
But I do have some hope, and it has to do with competition. There is a bright center to the internet, made up of the things that do intend to be reachable. They are not behind firewalls. They are not behind censorship. They intend to be part of the global hive mind. They intend to be part of humanity’s digital nervous system. The people who want to behave that way always win in the long game, because those people are building roads, and those who build roads always win in the long run against those who build walls.
Link to the interview https://youtu.be/tgmDyNc2b8M
