The Next Pandemic’s Web

For those of us who worked in social media and digital, internet-driven communications during the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of the internet’s role in it all is a salient issue. Our lines of communication and media dissemination are inextricably linked to the format and medium of choice; the diffusion of information, disinformation, and misinformation online happened within a set structure of the web.

Our Structure Now

This current structure, an IP-based client-server network with centralized internet service providers (ISPs) and monolithic, private information platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Rumble, etc.) with their own modes of content governance, was met with much criticism from across the political spectrum.

YouTube struggled to contain a video full of misinformation called Plandemic during the early months of the pandemic. Facebook never fully got a grasp on COVID information dissemination, though it pledged in high-minded tones to only follow science; it has since borne the brunt of much criticism, along with Twitter, which would flag and delete posts critical of government response to COVID or containing information deemed unscientific or inaccurate by their own internal, occasionally vague standards.

Our current web paradigm is of large, centralized platforms (debated whether they are platforms or publishers in current literature, with legal ramifications for one or the other), letting users post their own thoughts, memes, experiences, and the like, but with removal and account punishment based on automated readings of that material and its likelihood to spread and unduly influence public opinion.

The internet we have now wasn’t designed for any one thing; it was designed as a big, stupid pipe that could handle text, articles, video, frankly any medium that could be evolved in it, provided it satisfied the end-to-end design conditions and was stable. As a result, we have a web of everything.

Part of the trouble current platforms run into is derived from their legacy. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram grew up as politically neutral platforms in the Web 2.0 era, when we were all much more focused on reaping the benefits of the wealth of networks than on handling the veracity of that information. It was thought, after all, that people brought their own values, judgments, and opinions to the online world, and a cafeteria of freethought would emerge that would challenge, entertain, and educate us. Having grown up in this era, I can say we didn’t consider that these platforms would have such a massive influence in political life, or that information empires would be locked up in walled gardens and dissatisfy, well, everyone.

But this is the world as we’ve found it. The scientific establishment, especially government agencies such as the FDA and CDC, struggled to keep the science updated and accurate at the rate of scientific progress while the rest of the world moved at the speed of bits, nearly superluminal in velocity. A million flowers bloomed while governments carefully tended their sole garden, surprised when the updated information being published was now in contradiction to myriad rumors and alternative facts that hadn’t even been considered. Commons-based peer production of Web 2.0 had given way to commons-based information circles, much of it locked away and not visible to governments or scientific agencies.

For me, working as the social media specialist for the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services , the task was to provide accurate information as quickly as possible, and make reasonable assertions that didn’t sacrifice trust and accountability. All of this was under the aegis of differing political regimes and opinions, along with finding new information tools to counter claims made online.

There is a mixed legacy there, as there is for all government agencies during COVID-19, but the question of how information is published and shared in the current paradigm led me to wonder: When the next pandemic happens, what will our internet be? What are the modes of transportation for misinformation in twenty, thirty years, more or less? How will our future online structure influence the mode of information sharing when the next pandemic emerges?

Possible Futures

To put it mildly, there are simply too many visions of new internets, new webs, new protocols, and new laws to ever fully encapsulate what might come to pass in this line of thought. What I will do instead is focus on the largest, or possibly likeliest, paradigm changes in web thinking and evaluate what modes of information spread will happen in them. I haven’t a clue what the next pandemic will be, or when, but it makes a valuable case study for analyzing differing proposed web structures in light of our lingering questions about the role of the internet in our current one. I also won’t go into complete detail about each paradigm, as that would require many articles to fully deal with.

As for the structures least likely to return: Xanadu, the OSI model, Minitel, and MySpace.

Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is the only concept of the web that is guaranteed to occur in some form or another. If Web 1.0 was the first (pre-dotcom bubble) era of the consumer internet, Web 2.0 was the era of social networking as a powerful economic force. The lockup of data and centralization of information services online, such as Google, and the platformization of externalities and user-generated content, occurred in this era.

Web 2.0 was heralded by writers like Yochai Benkler and Axel Bruns for its developments of commons-based peer production and produsage, or the open-sourced blurring of lines between producers and users or customers. We’re still likely in Web 2.0 now, but there is strong debate as to what exactly the next step will be and when it happens (if it hasn’t already happened).

Simply put, Web 3.0 is just a general designation for what comes next. While opinions diverge on this (strongly, I might add), there are a few core features I believe will occur no matter what the final paradigm is. For one, artificial intelligence (AI) will no doubt play a large, possibly central role in this new web. New applications and mobile computing will increase services and abilities, especially with continuing evolutions to IPv6 addressing and 6G networks, which will reduce latencies to unbelievable speeds and allow haptic interfaces and a tactile internet to develop in earnest. We will likely also see a larger influence from things like ambient intelligence, the internet of things (IoT), and virtual reality.

Greater administrative control over networking, such as software-defined networking (SDN) and named data networking (NDN), and information-centric networking (ICN) might well give ISPs more control over information dissemination and the controls allowed to private companies or internet users. The internet protocol (IP), or the middle of the hourglass structure of the internet, might be replaced by content-centric networking (CCN) or similar content-based routing, which would replace the where of information with the what.

Web 3.0 might also see a splinternet along ideological lines, ala the private ISPs and fragmentation in Russia. There could be greater government control, such as a mimic of the Great Firewall in China that censors all politically inconvenient content and punishes dissent. Recently, leaked documents illustrated a plan for the Department of Homeland Security to more actively police online disinformation. It could become common to see COVID information policed at the ISP level in conjunction with government-backed policies and collusion. ISPs have always been more than happy to throttle users and services in exchange for government-guaranteed markets—just look at the net neutrality debates.

My political reading of the situation is that COVID, election disinformation, and general political meddling means we’ll see an increased governmental presence online, along with a desire to police said information with either government mechanisms or using distributed-but-influenced private governance and clandestine technological solutions, such as packet inspection, throttling of services, or artificially dropped packets, such as what happened with BitTorrent over Comcast networks.

My feeling is that, given the tides of online meddling and the nuisance public opinion can be, governments will take a stricter role in policing online content. This should be a negative outcome for any side of the political debate, as governments are renowned for obfuscation, deceit, and misinformation. A government in control of online information is more like China, with a state firewall, or Russia, with distributed but strongarmed ISPs doing Russian bidding or facing the consequences, or Iran outright censoring social media platforms for palpable political reasons and to quell dissent. While private solutions haven’t worked perfectly (or sometimes even well) during information crises, a single source of truth is a terrible idea for any open society. I expect this debate to take root in the 2020s and stay with us for many years to come.

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s baby: a completion of the dream he first had back at CERN. Simply, the Semantic Web is a web of application-layer, machine readable markup languages that links information and bits of data (uniform resource identifiers, or URIs) to provide a network of connected information. Derived from this are things like knowledge graphs, such as CORD-NER, the COVID-19 information-based knowledge graph.

The Semantic Web is already a reality in many sectors both public and private. Linked, open data remains a dream of researchers, and the use of RDF and OWL for the construction of information tuples and triples can help bridge the gap between unstructured online information across websites and search engines. This web is much like ours now, but with more links, greater connectivity, greater verifiability, and more backend information to provide resources for users and researchers.

Of course, omnipresent political factors could limit the efficacy of the Semantic Web. It might prove easy to use markup languages and RDF syntax to create artificial designations that make mis- and disinformation seem more credible than it is. Enterprising counter-information networks could easily hijack the mode and create a safe filter bubble for those who use the linked data, causing chaos. It’s likely the Semantic Web will continue one way or another, but whether it ever reaches true fruition, and what the outcomes of that will be, remain open to speculation.

The internet, it should be noted, is also rotting. Link rot, or the dead hyperlinks pointing nowhere to 404s, proliferate throughout the web. URL stability is a tough thing to manage, and any linked data must be able to account for a resource there today being gone tomorrow. In the case of pandemic information, this is vital.

Web3

Web3 is distinguished from Web 3.0 by its reliance on blockchain, cryptocurrencies, self-sovereign identity (SSI), smart contracts, NFTs, and metaverse ambitions. Where Web 3.0 can encompass any number of outcomes or combinations, Web3 is a concept as well as a buzzword. We’ve seen both the tremendous success and total collapse of alt coins and cryptocurrencies; we’ve seen the rise and fall of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the tokenization of physical assets for increased liquidity. It might be that the entire web, and all its URIs and URLs, will be cordoned off and for sale, a crypto-libertarian paradise.

I’m agnostic on this outcome; for one, those who decry Web3’s overt financial ambitions don’t seem to have paid much attention to the entire course of the internet’s history for the past three decades. The internet, upon private commercialization, has always been about securing greater wealth for a few and making money. Countless (literally countless) businesses have been formed online from the exact kind of innovation naysayers now can’t or shouldn’t happen from Web3 designs, as though the ladder of innovation only has so many rungs and no more.

On the other hand, naysayers are correct in lamenting or possibly even opposing the more brazen financial strategies of Web3 that violate our principles of an open, fair internet and web of information available to anyone. The web is the most powerful information dissemination source in the world, and in the world’s history; the ability to instantly share messages with anyone is a remarkable feat no matter what it’s used for. An open and democratic society should foster open and democratic modes of communication not contingent on wealth or financial stakes. If we hate the Golden Rule of they who have the gold make the rules, then we should oppose Web3’s more draconian financial dragnets.

It could be that paywalls and ownership of online sources gets so out of hand that no one creates, shares, or invests without explicit promise of payment or tokenization of services. Perhaps ISPs create a settlement layer native to the internet that fosters decentralized payments and means to interact in a hyper-capitalized online world, one must have the resources, such as a wallet and an address and verifiable credentials. Crucial scientific information might be further locked up and available only through smart contracts; online news publications might make exclusive articles or research only available as an NFT. Accuracy in scientific reporting might be contingent on staked tokens.

Web3 could allow more micropayments that foster equitable wealth, but time has shown that more likely slow centralization will again accrue to those with more financial capital to start with, and thus create artificial barriers to entry and information sharing. We’d again enter a world where only monolithic, massive conglomerate gatekeepers can choose what messages are broadcast, shown, or even created in the first place.

We’re already at the mercy of views and payments. During COVID-19, many reputable news publications eliminated paywalls for articles in the public good or about health or government efforts. The generous side of me says this was because they believed in benefits to pubic health; the pessimistic side says they did this because they knew consumers would revolt and turn to information elsewhere, and cash-strapped news sources would bleed clicks and eyeballs to cheaper publications with migrating ad supporters.

This isn’t entirely unfounded: The San Francisco Chronicle is now infamous on Twitter for publishing articles with scary-sounding COVID headlines…only to point readers to a paywalled article. Online news was happy to provide information for the public good when they felt they could benefit financially from the optics of it, but they returned to their old ways almost immediately. In Web3, there would be more of this.

On the other hand, the IPFS, FileShare, and provenance chains might mean more accurate thumbprinting and accounting of online content and its distribution sources. With the advent of uncanny deep fakes, we’ll need to know how and when videos were doctored and altered, along with social media posts and graphics. Cryptographically secure provenance chains might enable more reliable information diffusion than we have now.

Peer-to-Peer and Overlay Web

Peer-to-peer (P2P), or users as both client and server, has been around for decades now, but the newer technology, such as the InterPlanetary File System, might well replace HTTP and HTTPS standards and create more decentralized, user-driven content. Rather than relying on the servers of major providers, users might be their own server, and use structured or unstructured overlay networks in the application layer to provide information to other users, such as in a Chord ring or distributed hash table (DHT) formatted library.

Of all the possible outcomes, this is the one with the most potentially hostile repercussions for government-mediated online information. P2P is the solution with the least possible intervention by governments, requiring mediation by ISPs, much of which can and already is circumvented by VPNs and proxies. Mastodon, part of the decentralized Fediverse of social media on server instantiations, has already been hard-forked to make Gab, the right-wing social network; BitTorrent and other decentralized P2P networks are often accused of being used only for piracy and circumventing US copyright law.

P2P became famous for applications like Kazaa, Grokster, Napster (though this was a structured server P2P and not genuinely decentralized), Gnutella, Freenet, and BitTorrent. Many of these are associated with online music piracy and illegally downloading media content without payment. Governments, being purchased by corporations, have often targeted P2P players and made note that wild and wooly online environments often escape U.S. law and customs.

Secure cryptographic hashes and blockchain-based social networks might enable misinformation diffusion even more than they have already. Private users would have the ability to bypass conventional internet control and directly serve file contents, such as videos, articles, sites, books, and any other document, directly to other users. Using TOR or VPNs might ensure this content is spread massively without ever being publicly visible to governments, researchers, or law enforcement agencies. The CDC and FDA might not even know what to respond to anymore, as it remains locked in dark networks.

This is part of why I can’t join in the crowing when public figures or disreputables are de-platformed from major social networks: it just sends them and their supporters to other networks where they can continue to foster their views quietly. We don’t know what to respond to anymore; we end up with out-of-touch talking heads on television wondering, after a public shooting, how such alternative views could proliferate on Discord servers or Telegram messages without anyone being aware. How can one be “radicalized” and no one is the wiser? Turns out it isn’t that hard.

Rumble, Gab, Parler, and Truth Social make up an alternative political ecosystem, along with message boards on Reddit. In a P2P network, these views might be more entrenched, served directly to others without interference, and escaping notice. VPNs are already criminalized by draconian governments for their ability to escape detection. It might not be long before the United States tries the same in an effort to curtail overlay networks and dark social media that can’t be found.

The United States is no stranger to losing protracted wars for hearts and minds. In fact, I’d say it’s almost become a national pastime at this point. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the War on Terror in general, the War on Drugs, you name it, we lose it. A government initiative to police online content would run directly into the wall of P2P the way governments around the world already have. There is no more losing game than trying to curtail speech online, and nothing more likely to backfire.

A government disseminating official information about a pandemic would struggle to keep up with private information diffusion it can’t even accurately track. Agencies tasked with seek-and-destroy of counterfactual or insurgent websites, such as proposed by the DHS, would run into distributed servers and Fediverse-style forks that mean policing is impossible—it’s been designed to be so.

Pandemics and Spreading for the 21st Century

There is one ultimate truth remaining from all these possible visions of the future web: People will share the information they desire. They will find ways to circumvent firewalls, policies, protocols, platforms, anything you can throw at them. The more you try to enforce views, the more people will rebel against them. You can release official information only to see it disappear in a puddle of misinformation, nonsense, or even facts.

I know this firsthand; I’d follow social media comments and their sources of information to half-assed WordPress sites with stuffed keyword densities and artificial links. It didn’t matter—on our official DHHS posts, with CDC-verified information, we’d get a hundred comments with incorrect statements backed up by a flimsy site, from bot or sockpuppet accounts, which scored hits before we could respond. It likely influenced people faster than we ever could. I used CrowdTangle to see where our links had been shared across Facebook, only to see they had been coopted by rogue or dark social profiles and bots.

Limiting speech and opinion turned commenters against you, seen as censorship; not responding meant being embarrassed or hiding from the truth. Posting too frequently was damage control, and posting too seldom was seen as inaction. Good graphics were too polished and official, bad graphics too shoddy.

It can, and did, provide many headaches. But a lesson from it, and from all of it, is that sometimes our reach exceeds our grasp. Sometimes our technology evolves faster than we do, or faster than we know how to handle it. The truth is, I’d be lying if I said I knew what was best for online structure going forward, any more than I know what the eventual protocol will be. My best guess is that it’ll be a continuing and evolving hodgepodge of everything, little here, little there, that satisfies different user needs and Quality of Services in ad hoc and piecemeal ways, with governments always slow to respond.

Governments should be in the business of sharing facts, not deciding truth. In the next pandemic, government response would do well to remember scientific fact is indeed a powerful thing, and though humans are haphazard, they’re also inclined to listen if you have something they want to hear. A government that uses the network as it’s designed is a more responsive, agile one. Whatever the next pandemic, I hope the structure of online government response meets and mirrors the medium it broadcasts in.?