Ecosystem could even replace platform as the Internet industry’s favourite metaphor. It seems to have it all: a global networked structure with natural properties, the digital ecosystem exhibits self-organisation, evolutionary competition, collaboration, growth, scalability, and the multiplier effects of chain reactions. It is phenotype-d in ‘Natural Wifi,’ the particular places where the Internet dissolves into the environment.

Ecosystem’s borders are not limited to regional clusters, nation-states, contractual relations, or complementary providers, but to its product system. Any imbalance or asymmetry will resolve itself in time, either through adaption processes, or through ‘making tough choices when it comes to innovations, business alliances, and leadership of customers and suppliers. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s definition of coevolution in both natural and social systems provides a useful starting place. In his book Mind and Nature, Bateson describes co-evolution as a process in which interdependent species evolve in an endless reciprocal cycle — in which: 'changes in species A set the stage for the natural selection of changes in species B — and vice versa. Consider predators and their prey, for instance, or flowering plants and their pollinators.’ [1]

While the ecosystem metaphor might be stimulated by biological ecosystem studies, anthropology, or (again) coronavirus, the term operates as a symbolic force to depict the Internet’s development as organic, naturalising the digital divide.