Zac Smith has spent 25 years building the internet underneath the internet. He got into it in 2001 out of music school, hosting websites for musician friends, and ended up helping build the New York Internet Exchange back when moving bits cost $2,000 a megabit. He co-founded Packet, the bare metal cloud that made physical servers programmable, and sold it to Equinix for $335 million. Now he is CEO of Datum.

His argument is that the internet needs an upgrade, for three reasons. Policy is fragmenting: the splinternet is real, and increasingly you need to control who you exchange traffic with and where. Data has stopped being centralized; we spent 25 years with smart servers and dumb clients, and now the clients are smart and the data is everywhere. And infrastructure has fragmented across doz ...