The hypothesis is that mass-market computer communications systems, at least, will become more and more like natural living systems. The scope and nature of that evolution is far from clear, and artificial life research and researchers can contribute significantly to the process, bringing fresh technical, biological and philosophical perspectives to the growth and development of the network, a process which only with great naiveté can be regarded simply as engineering. Alife models developed for natural systems can be and will increasingly need to be applied to the hardware, software and data of the internet. Biological principles, hypotheses, and scaling laws may find analogs in the growing computational ecosystem. There is much to be done.