12 November 2025: THE "INTERNET RESPONSIBILITY ACT, 20XX": PART 1

I spend a not-insubstantial portion of my time thinking and talking about 
internet ethics. There seems to be a growing body of evidence to suggest that 
allowing enormous tech corporations unfettered license to innovate, create, 
and advertise their products and services, has placed rather too much trust 
in rather too small a group of people to effect enormous changes in our 
lives. The effects of technology on society have long been of interest to me 
and it's a subject readers can expect me to return to from many different 
angles. I like exploring different philosophical, political, and ethical 
arguments around the subject of technology. I like to imagine different 
possibilities of where human invention (and widespread adoption of those 
inventions) could lead in the future, in broad strokes.

One of the directions this is taking at the moment is the (often 
much-belated) introduction of regulations around access to specific types of 
content. Definitions as to *what* is acceptable to access, and by whom, 
varies between nations and cultures. The measures imposed are frequently 
quite poorly conceived, and easily misapplied. For instance, the UK's recent 
Online Safety Act, which requires certain web services to conduct digital age 
verification checks of the user before access is permitted: it scarcely needs 
saying that such an Act is much too little, much too late. Everybody and 
their dog advertises the services of VPNs on their YouTube channels, it's 
even built into some web browers without having to download or install a 
single add-on. The usefulness of implementing such checks was dead on 
arrival.

Also frequently being reported, discussed, and on my mind, are the 
environmental costs associated with running the internet as we now know it: 
not only the power demands of LLMs (which have brought this into the light), 
but also the vastness of cloud hosting. I wonder how much electricity per day 
must be produced to store memes alone. With ISP and hosting outages seemingly 
becoming more common, I wonder just how sustainable our current operating 
model of the internet really is. As a lay person, I can't speak with much 
authority on this, but my instinct suggests that these services are at risk 
of being somewhat more unreliable and temperamental in the future than we may 
be accustomed to.

All of the above has led me to an interesting question: who is responsible 
for preventing the failure of the internet?

Is it the owners of the connective infrastructure? The owners of the cables 
and satellites connecting us from our phones to our coffee machines, our laptops 
to our TVs, ourselves to our next door neighbours, to other fellow humans a 
few countries over?

Is it the companies who rent us the services running electronically upon that 
infrastructure?

Is it the governments who have chosen to make the internet the essential point 
of access to the public services we pay for?

Is it the companies who profit from the demand for use of the internet?

Is it us?

Who is responsible for ensuring that this creation, almost universally 
accepted to now be as essential as electricity, remains functional? And what 
does maintaining that functionality cost?

Perhaps access to the internet will eventually be rationed, in tokens handed 
out like the free-access-minutes disks of 90s AOL, to be traded and bartered 
(and, of course, jailbroken and sold like an illicit substance). It seems 
impossibly fanciful to conceive of internet access being regulated in this way. 
Yet, easy and unlimited internet access for personal amusement might, 
eventually, be looked back upon with the same horror as we do over-the-
counter cocaine and laudanum. 

"We once let people freely consume it?! What?!"

(to be continued...)