From the Commons to Rentierism: Governance Against a Closed Internet

By Mallory Knodel, originally printed in Open For Debate: Governance, Power, and the Limits of Internet Openness

The open internet has long been associated with productivity and innovation. Interoperable protocols, decentralised governance, and low barriers to entry enabled new forms of entrepreneurship and knowledge diffusion across borders. However, the relationship between openness and economic growth has changed remarkably. Openness, once grounded in interoperability, has been leveraged to entrench platform monopolies. The reconceptualisation of openness has recast economic and social values of technology (Kilic & Knodel, 2025). While openness is often invoked as a normative ideal or technical property, less attention has been paid to the institutional transformations that have altered its economic function.

The current phase of centralisation in digital technology is best understood not simply as a problem of surveillance or extraction, but as a shift toward digital rentierism embedded across multiple layers of infrastructure. In this context, regulatory intervention alone may be insufficient to preserve the open internet. Instead, governance strategies must also address the design of technical protocols and interoperability structures that shape accumulation dynamics upstream of market competition. We must reclaim "open" and a commitment to the commons on social and cultural grounds in the public interest.

From production and appropriation to rent

Early critiques of platform capitalism focused on production. The dominant concern was that users had become the product: their data and attention were monetised by advertising-based platforms (Zuboff, 2019). At the same time, the regulatory response centred on privacy—strengthening data protection rules, enhancing consent mechanisms, and embedding privacy into technical design. Instruments such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) exemplified this approach.

However, privacy reforms did not significantly alter concentration patterns. If anything, compliance costs and trust dynamics reinforced incumbents, consolidating their position as primary "trust intermediaries." Privacy became a competitive advantage for dominant firms rather than a structural corrective. The production-focused diagnosis, while normatively important, did not sufficiently explain persistent centralisation.

Another critique reframed the problem as appropriation. Here, the emphasis is on extractivism: platforms leveraging network effects and market power to appropriate value generated by users, creators, and complementary innovators (Mazzucato, 2018). The proposed remedy was to create alternatives: public options, regional "stacks," or open-source platforms such as Mastodon. Yet alternatives have struggled to dislodge entrenched incumbents. Network effects remain a formidable barrier, and user exit is constrained by the social and relational infrastructures that platforms monopolise.

This impasse points to a third dimension: rentierism. Digital infrastructures—from submarine cables to cloud services, certificate authorities, DNS resolvers, and dominant social graphs—have become sites where control over essential intermediaries yields ongoing rents with minimal productive contribution. Once entrenched, these actors do not need to innovate or extract more intensively; they simply collect rents from ownership of bottleneck positions (Saito & Sasaki, 2025). Such dynamics extend beyond the application layer into core internet infrastructure. The result is a structural enclosure of what might be termed "human relationality" as a digital common.

The limits of competition and sovereignty

Traditional competition law struggles to address rentier dynamics embedded in layered infrastructures. Antitrust law can discipline specific abuses but rarely restructures the underlying network topology. Even ambitious interventions such as the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) focus primarily on conduct obligations rather than architectural transformation.

Similarly, digital sovereignty strategies like data localisation mandates, national champions, or regionally bounded service ecosystems may rebalance geopolitical power but do not necessarily restore openness. They can narrow the field of intermediaries without altering the logic of enclosure. Substituting national monopolies for global ones leaves the rent structure intact.

Cross-border data governance frameworks further complicate this picture. Trade agreements seek to liberalise data flows, while rights-based regimes emphasise protection in "digital sovereignty" initiatives that are rebrands of typical networks-versus-services tussles (Clark, 2005). However, neither approach systematically addresses infrastructural concentration. Economic integration may expand markets, but without structural interoperability, gains accrue disproportionately to incumbents controlling key intermediation points.

Weak points in the stack

One indicator of rentier entrenchment is the presence of "patchwork" governance regimes that paper over architectural weaknesses. The certificate authority ecosystem provides a salient example. The CA/Browser Forum is a private governance body coordinating trust anchors for TLS (the Transport Layer Security protocol is the predominant way client/server applications communicate over the internet in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and message forgery) and occupies a highly consequential yet underappreciated position. Decisions within this forum have had geopolitical ramifications, including the removal of certain certificate authorities following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The trust model for HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol is the dominant protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTPS uses TLS to secure HTTP connections over the internet) relies on centralised authorities whose governance is neither fully public nor fully accountable, revealing both concentration and fragility.

Similarly, the DoH (DNS over HTTPS is a protocol for sending DNS queries and getting DNS responses over HTTPS) debate illustrates how privacy-enhancing reforms can inadvertently centralise resolution services. Users prefer a trusted provider for DNS lookups rather than conventional, opportunistic, and more decentralised lookups via their ISP. While encrypting DNS queries mitigates surveillance risks, the shift toward a small number of global DoH providers consolidates trust in a handful of intermediaries. Privacy gains at one layer may therefore reinforce rentier dynamics at another (Knodel, 2023).

Other weak points include the concentration of root server operators, supply chain dependencies in hardware and semiconductors, and the growing dominance of private satellite constellations in space-based internet infrastructure. Each represents a layer where control yields durable rents insulated from competitive churn.

Interoperability as structural intervention

If rentierism is embedded in infrastructural bottlenecks, then preserving openness as a driver of growth requires interventions that alter intermediation structures rather than merely disciplining conduct. Here, interoperability becomes central.

Open social protocols such as ActivityPub, ATProto, and the Decentralised Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) illustrate alternative architectures. By enabling cross-platform communication, these protocols reduce switching costs and weaken network effects that lock users into dominant platforms. However, voluntary adoption has been limited.

At the same time, without regulatory impetus, such as interoperability obligations under the DMA, dominant firms lack incentives to open their networks. Interoperability thus sits at the intersection of standards and regulation. Technical standards define the possibility space; regulation can mandate or incentivise their implementation. This triangular model—standards development, regulatory enforcement, and corporate advocacy—reflects an evolution in governance strategy. Protocol design shapes market structure upstream of competition law. Regulatory frameworks can accelerate adoption. Direct engagement within standards bodies allows public-interest considerations to influence technical architecture before it becomes entrenched.

Importantly, not all technical mandates are appropriate. Expanding the political mandate of standards bodies risks technocratising inherently social disputes. However, carefully targeted interoperability requirements, particularly at higher layers of the stack, may counteract enclosure without fragmenting the global network.

Openness and growth reconsidered

Historically, openness fostered growth by lowering transaction costs, enabling entry, and facilitating knowledge spillovers. Rentier concentration reverses these dynamics. High switching costs, data silos, and infrastructural gatekeeping dampen entrepreneurial experimentation and distort capital allocation toward rent-seeking positions. The early internet culture's undying loyalty to openness and the commons has served to stave off rentierism for longer and more durably than earlier regulatory interventions would have.

The digital commons has achieved the fabled balance between innovation and regulation, which is why it has been an ideological and tactical target of Big Tech companies seeking monopoly positions. From a growth perspective, the enclosure of digital commons reduces allocative efficiency and long-term innovation potential. While short-term adaptive strategies, such as national stacks, compliance regimes, or bilateral trade deals, may mitigate geopolitical vulnerabilities, they do not address the structural transformation of openness into controlled intermediation.

Safeguarding openness as a prerequisite for sustainable economic progress, therefore, requires a governance approach attentive to architectural design. Regulatory instruments such as the DMA, GDPR, and cross-border data frameworks are necessary but insufficient. Without interoperable infrastructures that enable meaningful exit and entry, network effects will continue to entrench rent positions beyond the reach of ex post regulation. One way that regulatory action has failed to address equities in a way that would preserve the commons is the Digital Services Act's targeting of Wikipedia as a "very large online platform" (Wikipedia, 2025). In this sense, openness is not merely a normative commitment but an institutional condition for dynamic growth. Its preservation depends on aligning technical standards, regulatory mandates, and market incentives to prevent the irreversible enclosure of digital commons.

If rentier dynamics embedded in infrastructural bottlenecks are the core threat to openness and growth, then interoperability mandates should be treated not as optional competition remedies but as structural economic policy. Requiring dominant platforms and infrastructures to implement open protocols—at social, messaging, and identity layers—would reduce switching costs, restore contestability, and reorient accumulation away from rent extraction toward productive innovation. Absent such measures, regulatory efforts risk managing decline rather than reversing enclosure.

From the Group Chat 👥 💬

Like many in the public interest technology community, we've spent the past two weeks discussing the cancellation of RightsCon in Zambia. Many IX community members had planned to attend, and the sudden cancellation was deeply disappointing. If you're trying to understand what happened, here are two interesting reads:

1. Tunde Okunoye, a Doctoral Fellow under the Standard Bank Chair in African Trust Infrastructures at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg South Africa examines how China's growing economic leverage and development assistance in Africa are reshaping the geopolitical landscape for digital rights, with the RightsCon cancellation serving as a critical example of Beijing's influence. https://developmentmusings.medium.com/china-and-the-emerging-geopolitics-political-economy-of-digital-rights-in-the-global-south-197a2545a5f0
2. Michael Caster, Head of the Global China Program at ARTICLE 19, argues that China's pressure on Zambia to cancel RightsCon exemplifies Beijing's broader campaign to undermine multistakeholder digital governance in favor of state-centric authoritarianism, calling for democracies to counter this influence through rights-based alternatives and renewed support for inclusive global forums. https://www.techpolicy.press/chinas-disruption-of-rightscon-is-a-wakeup-call-to-counter-its-authoritarian-influence

And if you still want a taste of RightsCon, FabRiders moved their planned facilitative leadership session from RightsCon online and opened it to all participants as a free alternative gathering. May 8. Online. https://www.fabriders.net/rightscon-cancelled-join-us-online 

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This Week's Links

Open Social Web

• Policy people often talk about two types of interoperability: "horizontal" (systems talking to each other as equals, like two messaging apps) and "vertical" (one system running on top of another, like an app running on an operating system). But Robin Berjon explains that real systems are more like governments with different roles and responsibilities. Some people can approve things, some can moderate, some can vote. Good internet protocols should work the same way, giving different actors in the system different powers that can check and balance each other, just like democracy. Bluesky's AT Protocol is designed this way, letting different parts of the network be governed separately while still working together. https://berjon.com/interoperability 
• FediForum published proceedings from its April gathering covering end-to-end encryption in ActivityPub, AT Protocol architecture, governance models, moderation tooling, and growth strategies for the Fediverse and Atmosphere. https://fediforum.org/2026-04 
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a guide to bridging Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads accounts so posts reach audiences across platforms without requiring multiple accounts, using tools like Bridgy Fed. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/bridge-somewhere-how-link-your-mastodon-bluesky-or-other-federated-accounts