Are we heading back to local internets?

A recent paper on SSRN reinforced something I have been noticing in my work with organisations and leaders.

The core issue with today’s internet is not simply bad actors, weak moderation, or a lack of technical sophistication. It is scale. At planetary scale, digital systems struggle to maintain trust, accountability, and shared meaning at the same time.

As platforms grow, their incentives shift. Accuracy is gradually displaced by engagement, while context becomes harder to preserve and responsibility more difficult to locate. Governance moves further away from the people affected by it, which slows correction and weakens legitimacy. These are not moral failures. They are predictable systems effects.

The paper is not anti-technology and it is not nostalgic. It makes a systems argument about how trust actually works. Trust tends to form through repeated interaction, shared norms, and reputational consequence, all of which function more effectively in bounded communities than in infinite feeds.

This points toward a return to more local, community-anchored internets. Not fragmentation, but federation. Smaller digital spaces that maintain local control and cultural coherence, while remaining loosely connected to wider networks for exchange and discovery.

Artificial intelligence accelerates this shift. As synthetic content scales, trust becomes the scarce resource. People increasingly seek spaces where context still holds, where identity is legible, and where behaviour has consequences.

Local internets are not a step backwards. They are a pragmatic adaptation to a world in which scale has begun to undermine sense-making.

Sound familiar?

Ref: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5870623