(Draft for a Featured Article)
The Internet we inhabit today is strained by forces its early architects never anticipated: billions of mobile devices, hyper-centralized cloud platforms, global AI computation, and geopolitical contestation over physical infrastructure. Yet these same pressures are creating an opportunity — perhaps the first in decades — to re-imagine the Internet’s architecture and its social role. The next decade will not simply be faster Wi-Fi or larger data centers. It will be a structural transformation touching mobility, optical physics, interconnection models, and even the nature of computation itself.