The Internet Is Becoming Less Open

The internet I grew up with made publishing feel direct. You could buy a domain, put a page on a server, and share the address. You did not need an account on a large platform or permission from an app store.

You can still do that. I do it with this site. The harder part is reaching anyone when search engines, social feeds, app stores, and hosting providers control so much of distribution.

There was no single moment when the web changed. Governments, platforms, app stores, and browser vendors each made decisions that moved more control toward a few companies. Most of those decisions looked reasonable on their own. Together, they made independent publishing less useful than it used to be.

The walled gardens won

The shift happened so gradually that it feels normal now. But stop and look at where people actually spend time online:

• Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit — you don't have a website. You have an account. The platform owns the URL, the audience, the algorithm that decides who sees you, and the rules that decide if you're allowed to stay.
• Google Search — the primary way people find things. Google increasingly answers questions directly in the results page, keeping users inside Google's property and starving the source websites of traffic. If Google's AI summarizes your article, the reader never visits your site. You provided the content. Google kept the user.
• Apple's App Store and Google Play — you cannot put software on most phones without going through them. They take 15-30% of your revenue, they decide what's allowed, and they can remove you overnight with no appeal. We accepted this because phones are "different," but phones are now the primary computing device for most humans. The open web — where anyone can publish software without permission — doesn't exist on mobile.

The pattern is the same everywhere: the platform controls distribution, and distribution is the thing that matters. You can have the best content, the best app, the best service. If the platform doesn't surface it, you're invisible. And "surface it" is a decision the platform makes, using criteria you can't see and can't appeal.

This is what "less open" means in practice. Not that you can't publish — that no one will find what you published unless a gatekeeper allows it.

App stores: the permission layer nobody voted on

The open web's core promise was: anyone can ship software. You write code, you put it on a server, people run it. No one approves it. No one takes a cut. No one can revoke it.

App stores killed this model for mobile, and the model is creeping toward desktop. The justification is always safety — malware, scams, child safety, terrorism. These are real concerns. But the solution — "one company reviews every app before it can exist" — is the most extreme possible answer, and it came with no public debate.

Consider what we accepted:

• 30% tax on all software. If you sell a $10 app, Apple takes $3. There is no alternative payment system allowed (in most of the world, still). This is a monopoly tax on software distribution, and we treat it as normal because "that's how phones work."
• Arbitrary removal. An app can be removed — and its developer's income eliminated — for violating a rule that was added after the app was published. The developer agreed to future unknown rules by signing up. There's no grandfathering, no notice period, no appeal to anyone other than the company that removed you.
• Content restrictions that exceed law. App stores ban content that's legal in the user's jurisdiction. A breastfeeding app gets flagged for nudity. A harm-reduction app gets flagged for drug content. A VPN app gets removed in certain countries at the government's request. The store's rules are stricter than the law and applied globally.
• No side-loading (until recently, and grudgingly). The EU's Digital Markets Act forced Apple to allow third-party app stores in Europe. Apple's implementation is so encumbered by fees and restrictions that most developers can't realistically use it. Compliance as hostility.

The result: a generation of users has never installed software from anywhere except a corporate storefront. They don't know that software can exist outside a store. The concept of "download and run a program" is becoming alien. That's not technical progress — it's a shift in who controls computing.

The DSA: regulation that sounds good and bites hard

The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) is the most consequential internet regulation in a decade, and almost no one outside policy circles understands what it does.

The stated goal is good: make platforms accountable for illegal content, require transparency, protect users. Who's against accountability and transparency?

The implementation is the problem. The DSA imposes obligations — risk assessments, content moderation reporting, transparency disclosures, rapid takedown procedures — that scale with platform size. Large platforms (VLOPs, "Very Large Online Platforms") face the heaviest burden. Small platforms are mostly exempt.

The goals sound reasonable. I am more worried about the incentives created by the implementation:

It raises the cost of running a platform. The compliance burden for a VLOP is enormous — dedicated legal teams, automated moderation systems, quarterly reports to the EU. Only the largest companies can afford this. The DSA doesn't kill small platforms directly, but it ensures they can never grow into large ones without taking on costs that only the incumbents can absorb. It's a moat masquerading as regulation.

It pushes platforms toward over-removal. The DSA requires platforms to remove illegal content "expeditiously." The penalty for leaving something up that turns out to be illegal is much larger than the penalty for removing something that turns out to be legal. So platforms remove first and ask questions later. Lawful speech gets caught in the net. There's no penalty for that. The incentive structure guarantees over-censorship.

It makes "notice and takedown" the default. Anyone can file a notice. Platforms have to act on it quickly. There's no requirement that the notice be valid. There's no penalty for filing a fraudulent notice. A competitor, a troll, a government, a random person can file a notice and your content disappears — at least temporarily. Getting it restored requires an appeal process that most people won't bother with.

It centralizes enforcement in the EU but affects everyone. The DSA applies to platforms with EU users — which is basically all of them. So a US-based platform, serving US users, has to comply with EU rules to avoid being blocked in Europe. EU law becomes de facto global law for online speech. This isn't unique to the DSA — GDPR did the same thing for privacy — but the DSA extends the pattern to content moderation, which is speech regulation.

The DSA isn't malicious. It's well-intentioned. But it's a regulation written by people who don't run platforms, enforced against platforms that can afford compliance, with the cost falling on users whose speech gets caught in the over-removal net. The open internet loses a little more air with every regulation like this.

Censorship: the thing nobody wants to call censorship

Content moderation is hard. Everyone agrees some content should be removed — child sexual abuse material, coordinated harassment, direct threats of violence. Everyone agrees that legal-but-objectionable content is where it gets complicated. And everyone disagrees on where the line is.

The problem isn't that platforms moderate. They have to — a platform with no moderation becomes a sewer. The problem is that moderation decisions are opaque, unaccountable, and made by entities that aren't answerable to anyone.

When a government censors, there's at least a legal framework — you know what's banned, you can challenge it in court, there's a process. When a platform censors, there's a terms-of-service document that can change at any time, a moderation decision made by an underpaid contractor or an opaque algorithm, an appeal button that may or may not do anything, and no court to go to.

The result is a privatized censorship system that's less accountable than government censorship. And because it's private, it's shielded by "it's our platform, we can do what we want" — which is legally true and democratically a problem.

Platforms need room to moderate because an unmoderated service quickly becomes unusable. Users also need a meaningful way to challenge those decisions. I do not think the current platform appeals systems provide that, and I do not think the DSA has solved it.

What I know: the current system — where five companies make global speech decisions with no appeals process — is not a stable outcome. It's going to change. The question is whether it changes toward more openness or less.

DNS and infrastructure: the silent layer

There's a layer below the platforms that most people never think about: DNS, hosting, domain registrars, CDNs. This is the infrastructure that makes websites reachable. It's supposed to be neutral — the phone company doesn't decide who you can call.

It's becoming less neutral.

• Registrars refuse domains. Registrars increasingly refuse to register or renew domains for sites they find objectionable — even when the site is legal. Gab, 8chan, various adult sites, political sites on all sides. The registrar isn't the government. They can do this. But when enough registrars refuse, the site can't have a domain. No domain, no audience.
• Cloudflare deplatforms. Cloudflare provides DDoS protection and CDN services for a huge chunk of the internet. When they drop a site, the site usually can't survive — it gets flooded with attacks within hours. Cloudflare has dropped sites for content reasons, most famously the Daily Stormer and 8chan. They argued it was their right. It is. But when one company can effectively evict a site from the internet by removing protection, that's infrastructure-level power over speech.
• Hosting providers refuse service. AWS dropped Parler. DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr all have terms that let them remove sites for content reasons. A site that's been dropped by its registrar, its CDN, and its host has nowhere to go — except to offshore providers with worse reliability and their own problems.
• Payment processors cut off funding. The silent killer. Visa and Mastercard can refuse to process payments for a site, and they do — for adult content, for political content, for sites that are legal but "brand-unsafe." If you can't take payments, you can't have a business. The processors aren't governments, but they function as a global licensing authority for online commerce.

Each of these is a private company making a private decision. Each is legal. The aggregate effect is that a site can be removed from the internet without any government involvement, without any court, without any process — just a series of private companies each deciding they don't want to be associated with you.

This is the infrastructure of the open internet, and it's not open.

Why this matters even if you're not political

You don't have to be posting controversial content to care about this. The narrowing affects everyone:

• Your favorite small site can disappear overnight because its host decided to change terms, or its CDN dropped it, or Google stopped surfacing it. You'll never know why. You'll just notice one day it's gone.
• Your access to information is mediated by algorithms you can't see. Google's results, YouTube's recommendations, TikTok's feed — these are editorial decisions made by code, and they decide what you know about. The "open internet" is open in principle and closed in practice if the only doors you walk through are algorithmic.
• The cost of independence is rising. Running your own site — your own domain, your own server, your own feed — is still possible (I do it, this site is on my own infrastructure) but it requires skills most people don't have and time most people don't want to spend. The open internet is becoming a thing for sysadmins and hobbyists, not normal users. That's a narrowing of who gets to participate independently.

What I'd push for

I'm not a policy person. I don't have a clean answer. But here's what I think matters, from the perspective of someone who self-hosts and cares about the open web:

Interoperability mandates. Force platforms to let users export their data and their social graph in a usable form, and let them import it into competitors. The lock-in is the power. Break the lock-in and the power disperses.

Infrastructure neutrality. Registrars, DNS providers, CDNs, and payment processors should be common carriers — they shouldn't be able to refuse service for legal content. If you're providing the pipes, you don't get to decide who can use the water.

Side-loading and alternative app stores. The EU is pushing this with the DMA. It should be global. The phone is the primary computing device. One company shouldn't control software distribution on it.

Algorithmic transparency. Platforms that make editorial decisions via algorithm should have to disclose the signals, the weights, and the manual interventions. "Our algorithm" shouldn't be a black box that decides what a billion people see.

Small-platform exemptions that actually work. The DSA's VLOP threshold is right in principle — small platforms shouldn't face the same burden as large ones — but the threshold needs to be high enough that medium platforms can grow without dying in compliance costs. Right now it's set too low.

A real appeals process. Every content removal should have a meaningful appeal — not to the platform itself, but to an independent body. The EU's DSA tries this with out-of-court dispute settlement. It's a start. It needs teeth.

The internet I want

I want people to be able to publish without asking permission and to reach readers without first building an audience inside someone else's platform. I also want infrastructure providers to behave more like neutral utilities than editors.

The web was never completely open or equal, but independent sites once had a more obvious place in it. That space is shrinking as discovery and distribution move behind accounts, feeds, and storefronts.

I keep this site on my own domain because I want that option to remain normal. A platform can change its rules or disappear. The domain is still mine, and I can move the site somewhere else.

Buying a domain or running a server will not fix the larger policy problems. It does keep a small part of the web independent and in use, which is reason enough for me to keep doing it.