Global Insight assesses the movement away from a ‘world wide web’ towards national internets where the rules for content are widely different.

In recent months, the internet has been changing rapidly. US President Donald Trump is looking to find a buyer for TikTok – an app with an estimated 170 million users in America, which is currently owned by China-based company ByteDance. Popular with young people for its easy use and addictive video scrolling, its rapid growth in the early 2020s raised fears that the Chinese state could access the data of US citizens.

To combat this perceived threat, in 2024 former President Joe Biden signed a law to force the sale of TikTok on the grounds of national security – despite ByteDance being mostly owned by international investors – with the app otherwise facing a ban in the US. TikTok and ByteDance have denied any misuse of personal data.

In 2020 meanwhile, TikTok’s operations in Hong Kong ended due to the city’s National Security Law, which was imposed by China and created a concern that the app would need to hand over the data of TikTok users based in the jurisdiction to the authorities.

TikTok isn’t available in China. The company provides an alternative service in the country through Douyin, a video-sharing platform that uses the ByteDance algorithm but is governed by China’s censorship rules. This means that TikTok, as with any other global platform, must increasingly operate according to national laws in its major markets – or face censure, closure or sale. That’s both a commercial reality – and a game-changer for the internet itself.

Gated communities

Such government pressure is, of course, not new, especially for internet platforms operating in countries such as China, Russia and Vietnam (see ‘Facebook, Meta and the power of tech’, IBA Global Insight, December/January 2022). Yet the forced sale of a major technology platform in the US points to a potential turning point. It raises the question of whether the US is now abandoning the concept of a ‘world wide web’ that connects people in a shared global village. Instead, there’s the possibility that the US is joining policymakers from Beijing to Brussels in working – unconsciously or not – to create an internet comprised of disconnected, regional systems that operate like gated communities.

Sceptics might dismiss that notion. Instead, it might be argued that the TikTok saga shows US administrations reasserting values of free speech and acting to protect citizens from what they perceive as foreign interference. Meanwhile, in 2022 and 2025 respectively, X and Meta hollowed-out their fact-checking services, bringing the uncurated political marketplace of President Trump’s Truth Social platform a step closer to the mainstream. Proponents of this argument might say, then, that far from the US attempting to restrict the internet, its government and tech platforms are attempting to help what they term ‘free speech’ go viral.

While some commentators had put X owner Elon Musk’s decision to fire hundreds of content monitors down to his mercurial personality, Meta’s move to replace fact-checkers with ‘community notes’ on Facebook and Instagram has been seen by critics as an attempt by the company’s Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to curry favour with President Trump.

When Zuckerberg explained the new regime in January, he said the company had been moving in the wrong direction on free speech. ‘Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do’, the company said in its press statement. This approach of allowing ‘more speech’, it said – specifically citing X’s initiative to do the same via a system of community notes – would reduce scrutiny on issues such as immigration and gender identity. ‘It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms’, said Zuckerberg.

Fact-checking isn’t perfect – especially when applied to emotionally sensitive issues. But advertisers tend not to like their content positioned next to contentious material. That means that in the short term, this move could cost Facebook and Instagram – with an estimated three billion and two billion subscribers respectively – revenue. Research published by digital market intelligence company Similarweb in late 2024 showed that X had lost a significant number of active users following its policy changes around free speech – although some of these departures may have been due to other factors, for example because of Musk’s overt support of President Trump.

Given the size of these platforms, however, and the lack of many credible alternatives, the longer-term financial impact will probably be negligible.

Multipolarity

There’s a more structural reason why US technology platforms may wish to act in unity on issues such as content moderation – and why such initiatives would get the backing of President Trump. It’s not only interference from China that US platforms want to be free from but the increasing regulatory pressure coming from the EU and the UK. Rolling back restrictions on US content both aligns with the country’s current political reality and attempts to deliberately ringfence it from costly moderation that may arise from current and incoming legislation from across the Atlantic.

For example, the UK’s Online Safety Act, which passed in late 2023 and is coming into effect in stages, aims to crack down on illegal content and activity on technology platforms. While most of its provisions cover content such as pornography, they also lay down rules on how technology companies need to organise their own affairs – with better and more costly moderation, reporting and training. The Act also covers hate offences and the UK’s regulator Ofcom has promised more intervention in future.

But the UK’s rules pale into insignificance compared with the array of recent legislation from the EU. The Artificial Intelligence Act, Data Act, Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, European Media Freedom Act and a rule book for cloud services all place significant, additional regulatory obligations on US technology platforms. While ostensibly aimed at protecting content users and businesses in Europe, the scope of many rules is extrajudicial – reminiscent of the way in which the EU General Data Protection Regulation of 2018 (the GDPR) has an impact where information crosses the Atlantic. Some commentators have seen such rules as an outright attack on US technology businesses.

In protecting its citizens, the EU has effectively created a European internet. Without substantial players of its own, that has meant introducing regulations, such as the GDPR, for the foreign companies it regards as ‘gatekeepers’. As a result, businesses such as Facebook must ensure that their European services, content and data processing systems continue to follow EU laws even if the content available to US residents is becoming less restricted.

While the aims of policymakers in Brussels may be ideologically opposed to those in Beijing, the trend these rules point to amounts to the same – the fragmentation of the internet.

Viewed from this perspective, the Americans have come late to the party. But given the size and power of the largest US companies, the country’s actions will have a decisive impact on the future and nature of the ‘world wide web’.

Arthur Piper is a freelance journalist. He can be contacted at arthur@sdw.co.uk

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