The internet has changed from 1987 until now, and so has the post office.

In 1987, things were different with the mail.

Email was essentially unknown, and the first boxy white USPS trucks (built by Grumman) were just entering service.

In 2021, email is ubiquitous, and apparently the USPS just hired Gru from Despicable Me as their new delivery driver.

The internet of yesterday wasn’t bulletproof, but you might say it was bullet-resistant.

The internet of today is increasingly fragile.

Even if your bread & butter isn’t The Internet, it matters more than you might think. Whether you’re a marketer, or a small business owner, or even just some dude typing out a weekly rant and hitting “send” to a small but rapidly growing email list…the internet is where stuff happens. And your control of it is slipping away, whether you know it or not.

The internet of yesterday was stronger for a few reasons.

This is not because it was highly regulated (it wasn’t) or because it was particularly well engineered (it wasn’t) or because it ran on a dependable, reliable infrastructure (it didn’t).

The reason the original internet (the internet before the late 90s, at least) was so strong was because it was actually as close to a decentralized, distributed model of computing as we’ve ever seen. It didn’t rely upon monolithic entities to host, index, search, and serve information to the end user.

The original internet was just a bunch of people with modems, dialing into servers (which were really just loud, beige Pentium I computers running in someone’s basement).

As the internet has matured, it’s taken a lot of steps towards security and reliability and redundancy — but it’s actually becoming considerably less bulletproof.

It’s regulated now - and as we saw in various Arab Spring uprisings, or as we see with China’s Great Firewall, or India, or Iran, or Venezuela, or Uganda, many governments shut down internet access entirely. At the very least, they selectively monitor what their citizens are doing online, as is the case with essentially every government’s security apparatchik’s data collection programs.

It’s also monolithic now - both in organizational and practical forms. For example, the most perennially concerning is ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Since 1998, ICANN has enjoyed a dubious pseudo-governmental power to control the domains and routing of the internet. Who wants an unelected, ungovernable, and unfireable body that’s in charge of our domain names?

Another chokepoint is the proliferation of CDNs (content distribution networks) which essentially cache websites for more efficient distribution. It’s a technological advantage to serve websites across a global cache, to be sure, but that’s like owning a bakery and then hiring a middleman to stand between your customer and the counter, handing out donuts as they see fit. Maybe it’s efficient, but it’s another step. What happens if your donut man just decides to walk away? Cloudflare has the most internet endpoints of any entity in the world. What happens when they go down?

Hosts have been reduced to a few colossal services like AWS (33% market share) or Microsoft Azure (18%) or Google Cloud (10%) or IBM (6%) or Alibaba (5%).

On the consumption side of the internet, another chokepoint is the reduction of ISPs. Whereas you used to have access through your local ISP (pretty much whoever gave you phone service) these have been slowly consolidated into a handful of titans. The chances that your internet access is controlled by Time Warner, Verizon, or Comcast is insanely high.

Online content used to be published on sites written and hosted by the authors themselves (remember the old internet where every website looked different and you surfed the net through many different domains all day? Now, this content is ephemeral and mostly on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

All of that to say…your options are narrowing. The variety is gone.

The netizen of 1996 likely ran their site on their own server, on a local ISP, on a private platform, on their own machine, and processed transactions through their merchant card provider. The mailman brought letters in a respectable-looking and very square truck.

The netizen of 2021 just uploads stuff to Facebook and hopes Stripe processes everything correctly. The mailperson doesn't bring letters anymore, mostly just junk mail.

The internet started as a decentralized system. It’s now anything but that.

It may be easier, and more streamlined, now.

But it’s also fragile.