Interoperability: the word that could save the internet

You are reading this email thanks to the “secret sauce” of the internet: interoperability.

This is the first Project Liberty newsletter published on our new Substack. It arrives in your inbox because open protocols like SMTP allow emails to be delivered between different email providers.

Those open protocols were part of the early internet’s architecture. Over the past few decades, open protocols gave way to private platforms, which built powerful lock-in dynamics. Network effects were captured and commodified by platforms, concentrating power, making user retention the central business model, and turning people and their data into the product.

We are now at an inflection point. Will AI systems deepen that concentration of power, or open the door to something better?

In this newsletter, we consider the relationship between interoperability and digital sovereignty, and we explore why, in the age of AI, sovereignty—which is the ability to control AI rather than be controlled by it—matters more than ever.