Building More Than Infrastructure

The next Internet is no longer just about deploying faster networks or larger AI clusters. It is about ensuring that infrastructure, governance, and trust evolve together.

In this issue of dotmagazine, we ask what "building the Internet of tomorrow" actually means once the phrase moves beyond AI compute clusters and subsea cables. The real questions are increasingly operational: Who runs the networks? Who governs the data? Who earns users' trust? And who gets to build the next generation of digital infrastructure?

Infrastructure as strategy

The discussion begins with the physical layer. In a dotmagazine interview ahead of Atlantic Convergence 2026, Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX, describes how subsea cables, terrestrial fibre, and low-Earth-orbit satellite links are converging into a single resilient fabric linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas - and why AI workloads, through initiatives like DE-CIX's AI-IX, are now driving decisions about interconnection, energy, and where new infrastructure is built at all. The sovereignty question is taken further inward by Dr. Marc Wilczek, CEO of plusserver. He argues that digital sovereignty cannot be patched on after the fact; it has to be designed into security, cloud architecture, and AI adoption from day one - and that Europe still needs deeper growth capital and smarter public procurement if its champions are to scale on their own terms.

Trust in practice

Trust, meanwhile, has to be earned in smaller, more granular ways. Constanze von Kettler, Communication for Agnitas, shows how email - one of the Internet's oldest open protocols - is being made smarter rather than replaced, as hyperpersonalised newsletters use behavioural signals to deliver relevance without sacrificing the open standards email was built on. Martin Kuechenthal, CEO of LEMARIT turns trust to a harder deadline: as SSL certificate validity periods shrink toward 47 days by 2029, he lays out why manual renewal routines are becoming a staffing and security liability, and why certificate life cycle automation is no longer optional. Eric Clausing, Lead IoT at AV-TEST puts a European privacy claim to the test directly, reviewing how the new social platform W Social holds up against its own sovereignty and data-protection promises.

A different kind of drift is flagged by Patrick Koetter, Leader of eco's Email & Anti-Abuse Competence group and CEO of sys4: the tendency to label every form of online abuse as "DNS abuse," a conflation increasingly reflected in policy debates in Brussels with real regulatory consequences for the hosting and domain industry. And Catrin Schröder-Jaross closes the issue with a reminder that infrastructure is never the whole story. Vibe coding has just removed the last technical excuse for keeping women out of software development - yet, as she argues, the culture that shapes who gets to build has barely moved.

Beyond technology

Together, these pieces make the same point from different directions: tomorrow's Internet won't be built by infrastructure alone. It will be built - or not - by how deliberately we handle sovereignty, trust, regulation, and who gets a seat at the table while we do it.