Why the Open Internet Is Being Closed Off Piece by Piece
June 7, 2025 · Frisian News
Governments and tech giants have begun fragmenting the global internet through content blocking, surveillance requirements, and national walling off. What started as an open network now faces systematic closure through regulation and commercial pressure.
A software engineer in Bangkok cannot reach websites her American friend uses every day. A researcher in Moscow watches his access to academic papers shrink month after month. A small business owner in rural Brazil finds her online store blocked by a new tax compliance system she cannot navigate. These are not glitches. They are the result of deliberate policy choices made by governments and corporations to close off the internet they once promised would be free and open.
The fragmentation began quietly, then accelerated. China built its Great Firewall decades ago. The European Union imposed the Digital Services Act, which forces platforms to remove content at speed or face ruinous fines. Britain demands that social media companies prove they police their own spaces. India blocks websites it deems a threat. Russia and Iran disconnect from the global network entirely in emergencies. Each government believes it acts for good reasons: safety, security, public health, national sovereignty. Each step feels small, justified, necessary. Together they kill the internet that existed before.
Tech companies accelerate the process by choice. Meta, Google, and Amazon control the pipes through which most people reach the web. They set their own rules, change them without warning, and ban users and content without appeal. These companies operate as gatekeepers more powerful than any government in their reach, yet they face no democratic accountability. When Twitter changed ownership, one man rewrote the rules overnight. When TikTok faces regulatory pressure, it simply follows orders rather than fight. The internet has become a utility, but utilities belong to landlords, not to the public.
The push comes from real problems that governments and companies use to justify closures. Misinformation spreads fast. Child exploitation hides in dark corners. Terrorists recruit online. Fraud costs people money. These threats are genuine. But the solution offered, always, is to give authority figures more power to decide what stays and what goes. Few ask who decides, by what standard, or what happens when that power spreads to political speech, business competition, or unpopular opinion. The mechanism built to stop the worst content becomes the tool to suppress the merely inconvenient.
Small countries and small businesses feel the squeeze first. They cannot negotiate with Google or Meta or Apple. They cannot lobby Brussels or Washington. They accept the rules written by others or they disappear. The dream of the internet as a tool for the powerless, a way for a person in a small town to reach the world, has yielded to a reality where a handful of companies and governments decide what billions can see and say. The internet was never truly open. But it is closing faster now, and nobody votes on it.
Published June 7, 2025 · Frisian News