Introduction: What went wrong with the internet—and how do we fix it

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | Dan Drollette Jr

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a special issue examining the systemic decay of the global internet amid the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and resource-intensive data centers. This digital decline threatens the core functions of Western democracies as corporate monopolies prioritize short-term shareholder profits over long-term operational standards.

In The world has moved on. But it need not stay this way forever, Cory Doctorow details this platform decay, while The dirty parts of the computing world, revisited by Nathan Ensmenger frames data centers as industrial factories requiring strict environmental and political regulation. Furthermore, Enrique Dans explains in Three reasons Europe learned to distrust Big Tech before America did that Europe’s historical memory of Nazi and Stasi surveillance drives robust legislative protections like the General Data Protection Regulation Act. The United States lacks this memory. Finally, an interview with Vint Cerf explores the internet's foundational plumbing.

Comment

The divergence in digital privacy frameworks between the European Union and the United States stems from twentieth-century totalitarianism. In Europe, the legacy of the Stasi created a deep-seated aversion to systematic profiling. This trauma directly informed the General Data Protection Regulation Act. Consequently, European regulators view corporate data aggregation as a state-like surveillance threat.

This regulatory approach mirrors Germany's post-war constitutional development, where the 1949 Grundgesetz prioritised human dignity to prevent Weimar-era abuses. By contrast, the American legislative landscape lacks a comparable domestic trauma of centralised surveillance. This leaves the Federal Trade Commission to govern data privacy through commercial antitrust frameworks. Ultimately, this historical divergence ensures that transatlantic initiatives like the EU-US Data Privacy Framework remain structurally fragile.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the EU-US Data Privacy Framework remains structurally fragile due to these historical divergences, what are the long-term implications for intelligence-sharing mechanisms like the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program?

The trajectory indicates that persistent legal challenges to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework will likely force a decoupling of commercial data flows from state-level security cooperation. My assessment is that intelligence-sharing agreements will increasingly rely on bespoke, highly classified bilateral treaties rather than broad transatlantic accords. This shift will inevitably increase operational friction for joint counter-terrorism operations that depend on real-time commercial data access.

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