It’s time to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth. The internet, as we’ve known it for the last 15 years, is breaking apart. This is not just true in the sense of, say, China or North Korea not having access to Western services and apps. Across the planet, more and more nations are drawing clear lines of sovereignty between their internet and everyone else’s. Which means it’s time to finally ask ourselves an even more uncomfortable question: what happens when the World Wide Web is no longer worldwide?
Over the last few weeks the US has been thrown into a tailspin over the impending divest-or-ban law that might possibly block the youth of America from accessing their favorite short-form video app. But if you’ve only been following the Supreme Court’s hearing on TikTok you may have totally missed an entirely separate Supreme Court hearing on whether or not southern American states like Texas are constitutionally allowed to block porn sites like Pornhub. As of this month, 17 US states have blocked Pornhub for refusing to adhere to “age-verification laws” that would force Pornhub to collect users’ IDs before browsing the site, thus making sensitive, personal information vulnerable to security breaches.
But it’s not just US lawmakers that are questioning what’s allowed on their corner of the web.
Following a recent announcement that Meta would be relaxing their fact checking standards Brazilian regulators demanded a thorough explanation of how this would impact the country’s 100 million users. Currently the Brazilian government is “seriously concerned” about these changes. Which itself is almost a verbatim repeat of how Brazilian lawmakers dealt with X last year, when they banned the platform for almost two months over how the platform handled misinformation about the country’s 2023 attempted coup.
Speaking of X, the European Union seems to have finally had enough of Elon Musk’s digital megaphone. They’ve been investigating the platform since 2023 and have given Musk a February deadline to explain exactly how the platform’s algorithm works. To say nothing of the French and German regulators grappling with how to deal with Musk’s interference in their national politics.
And though the aforementioned Chinese Great Firewall has always blocked the rest of the world from the country’s internet users, last week there was a breach that Chinese regulators are desperately trying to patch. Americans migrated to a competing app called RedNote, which has now caught the attention of both lawmakers in China, who are likely to wall off American users from interacting with Chinese users, and lawmakers in the US, who now want to ban it once they finally deal with TikTok.
All of this has brought us to a stark new reality, where we can no longer assume that the internet is a shared global experience, at least when it comes to the web’s most visible and mainstream apps. New digital borders are being drawn and they will eventually impact your favorite app. Whether you’re an activist, a journalist, or even just a normal person hoping to waste some time on their phone (and maybe make a little money), the spaces you currently call home online are not permanent.
Time to learn how a VPN works. At least until the authorities restrict and regulate access to VPNs too, as they already do in countries such as China, Iran, Russia and India.
A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.