The internet forest
People say "There is no such thing as the cloud, there is only someone else's computer".
The internet can be thought of as a forest; we appreciate and refer to it as a whole but it is defined by many thousands of unique and differently behaved systems.
We can walk in a forest without knowing it's borders or the precise makeup of its many systems, but this does not mean we cannot affect or be affected by them.
Sometimes people try to own a forest. They necessarily have to define this ownership not by the relationship to the trees and the systems that grow in and amongst one another, but to the land that exists underneath it. This land exists with or without the forest, but only has the prospective value based on what the forest is made up of.
Ownership of forests has the prerequisite of abstraction.
If we determined a single owner of the internet and did so in relationship to the systems that construct it, we would no longer have an internet. Diversity of makeup and meaning defines the internet as its set of interconnected networks.
We have to define its ownership based on the land it sits on. This abstraction loses sight of the object and in fact may damage the object if the abstraction is successful enough. We have a signifier then that ownership is the antithesis of the mechanism by which the object comes to be. The former harms the latter. Can we therefore conclude that something such as the internet is best defined and protected by collective ownership?
The internet is not a place then, but a series of systems working in and amongst one another, which can be difficult to grasp and hold, but easy to capture and own.
You can point at a forest and say "thats a forest", without needing to identify every single component of it at once: It is a system that is defined by interoperability of systems and can only be defined either in relationship to the land it sits on, or in close examination of the systems that make it up.
(Photo of the River in the rainforest, Eutah Mizushima in Balok, Malaysia)