On the 25th anniversary of AoIR, this roundtable will reflect on whether the internet that we have is the internet that we want. Pre-empting that the answer to this question may be no, because digital technologies are not always good for societies, the roundtable responds to Ruha Benjamin’s invocation that we must ‘Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within’. In other words, not losing sight of what we know about how digital technologies can end up doing harm, we will use our imaginations to challenge how things are and identify how we want them to be. Or, as

Toni Morrison puts it, we will ‘Dream a little before [we] think’ (cited by Benjamin, 2024). To this end, in the roundtable, we speculate on whether the notion of a good internet helps us do this dreaming, imagining and crafting.

We will confront the complexity of that simple, four-letter word, good, considering who gets to decide whether, how and for whom the internet is good, and how perspectives on a good internet differ globally. We will address this normative challenge head on, perhaps disagree with each other, and we might not arrive at a single, settled definition of a good internet. We will consider whether general principles for a good internet can be abstracted from context-specific requirements relating to particular tech deployments in different geographical locations. To imagine and craft the internet we cannot live without, we will reflect on what kind of internet we want to live with and in.

In addition to the five named roundtable participants, other AoIR and Digital Good Network visionaries will join the conversation, including Nancy Baym, Gina Neff and Ros Williams, and PhD students Arathy SB and Shaoying Zhang.