Why the Health of the Internet Matters

The Internet started as a way for researchers to share files. Today, it's where your grandmother sees her grandchildren, where surgeons consult during operations, where money moves between continents in milliseconds. It's not infrastructure in the way a bridge is infrastructure. It's more intimate than that. It's become part of how we think.

The Invisible Dependency

You check your email. In that fraction of a second, your device connects to your home network, which routes through your ISP, which hops across multiple networks to reach a server thousands of miles away, which retrieves your messages and sends them back through an entirely different path. Dozens of systems, millions of times per second, for billions of people. All invisible. All essential.

Invisibility breeds complacency. We don't think about the health of something until it breaks.

But consider what's riding on this invisible network: air traffic control. Financial markets. Emergency dispatch. Power grids. The boundary between "the Internet is down" and "society is partially paralyzed" has collapsed. They're the same thing now.

The Extension of Self

When your phone dies, you feel stupider. That's not a metaphor. You literally have less access to what you know. The restaurant you've been to five times? You need directions. The conversation you had last week? You can't find it. Your ability to think is tangled up with your ability to connect.

We're not just using the Internet anymore. We're extended by it. Your tools have become extensions of your mind. Caring for machines isn't separate from caring for yourself.

What Health Actually Means

You don't notice your nervous system until something goes wrong. Then every signal matters—the twitch, the numbness, the delay between intention and action.

The Internet is the nervous system connecting human and machine intelligence. Monitoring its health isn't maintenance. It's paying attention to the signals. Continuous monitoring catches the slow degradation that leads to outages. It provides visibility into systems we can't afford to take for granted. It turns vague anxiety into specific knowledge you can act on.

You don't wait until you're paralyzed to notice your body. The Internet deserves the same attention.

The Shared Responsibility

No one owns the Internet. It emerges from the collective effort of millions of people doing their part—every well-configured network, every promptly addressed issue, every system monitored with care.

Most people don't run Internet infrastructure. But everyone runs something: a home network, a business application, a service that others depend on. When you maintain what's yours with care, you're contributing to the resilience of something larger. The Internet is only as healthy as its parts.

You own some of those parts.