At CloudFest 2026, “Finding the Future” didn’t feel like a track reserved for speculation. It felt like the moment the festival stepped back from the immediate necessities of NIS2 checklists and GPU pricing to ask a bigger question: who actually gets to shape what the internet becomes, and what does it look like when they succeed? From protocol design to domain names to the CMS stack, the sessions on this track moved from the earliest days of the internet to right this second, and back again.
Different eras
That swing between eras was clearest on the closing day, when Radia Perlman sat down for “Mother of the Internet: A Conversation with Radia Perlman.” The inventor of the Spanning Tree Protocol traced her path from an uncertain grad student to one of networking’s most cited minds, and her design philosophy landed as a quiet rebuke to a lot of modern engineering. She credited two so-called superpowers: a tiny memory that forced conceptual simplicity, and an impatience with computers that pushed her toward systems that just work without a pile of configuration knobs. It’s a lesson that ages well in an era of agentic sprawl: the fewer ways a system can be set wrong, the more of it survives contact with reality. With the soul of an artist and a great sense of humor, she fits in perfectly with the CloudFest community.
Ram Mohan picked up a related thread in “An Internet Everyone Can Understand,” moving from ASCII’s early stranglehold on domain names to the multiscript root zone that exists today—and where it needs to go tomorrow. He argued that language is infrastructure, not decoration, and that the next wave of internet users will come from regions where English was never the default.
Brewster Kahle‘s standing-room-only session approached the concept of the Open Internet from the preservation and curation angle, framing the Internet Archive’s trillion-plus preserved pages as a hedge against centralization, DRM, and the gatekeepers who decide what knowledge stays reachable.
AI is already reshaping the naming layer
Where these three Internet Legends guided us through history to explain what should come next, Andy Simpson of Verisign looked forward through pure numbers. His .com Stage talk, “Connecting the Dots Between AI and Domain Names,” traced how AI is already reshaping the naming layer of the internet in ways that don’t show up in the headlines. The global domain name base crossed 386.9 million by the end of 2025, and new .com and .net registrations tied to a real, functioning website rather than a parked name climbed 18 percent over the year before. Simpson’s most telling data point wasn’t about any single extension at all: domains built on AI-native website platforms are expiring and renewing at higher rates than the rest of the market, meaning people are choosing to keep what an AI agent built for them. For CloudFest’s hosting and infrastructure crowd, that one specific technical detail pointed to a broader signal: what happens on the right side of the dot in a domain name is where the earliest hard evidence of AI adoption tends to show up.
Two sessions closer to the CMS world made a related point about where control quietly migrates. “The CMS Landscape Through an Infrastructure Lens“ argued that power in the web stack has moved from the platforms attendees can see to the infrastructure and runtime layers underneath them. Vendor lock-in hasn’t disappeared, the session argued; it has simply relocated from the CMS to the hosting and Edge layer that renders it. “The 4th Revolution of Website Building: Agentic Era” carried that logic to its endpoint, describing a shift from one AI tool drafting a page to a coordinated system of agents that plans, builds, ships, and iterates a live site without a traditional agency team in the loop.
The key takeaway from CloudFest 2026
Taken as a whole, the Finding the Future track resisted a single tidy conclusion, and that felt appropriate for a track built to hold whatever comes next. Some sessions looked at the internet’s founding decisions and asked what discipline got lost along the way; as well as what’s worth rediscovering. Others looked at where control is heading next, whether that’s a new generation of top-level domains or a new layer of agentic infrastructure quietly taking over from the CMS. The through-line was more of an active mindset than a boring ol’ prediction: keep asking who decides what, and keep building room for more of the world to answer that question too.
