This trend has been happening for a while.
Bradley 23 – Journalist at The Week.
Sorcha Bradley, “How greater online regulation is prompting fears of a ‘splinternet’,” The Week, 05-26-2023, https://theweek.com/news/technology/961002/what-is-the-splinternet
Is the internet fragmenting?
The internet has been “long imagined as a “global online commons” said The Economist in a 2016 article, but it is “becoming a maze of national or regional and often conflicting rules”.
Early digital rights activists and thinkers, such as John Perry Barlow, hoped the internet would remain a place of freedom from the confines of nation-states, but as the internet has become “increasingly important to the running of the modern world”, governments have tried to “regain lost territory online”, said The Economist.
The physical infrastructure supporting “cloud computing”, required to support many internet services, is rooted in specific sovereign territories, enabling governments to enforce national laws and regulations.
This has sparked what the think-tank Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network has called a “legal arms race”, and since 2012 it has documented thousands of cases of jurisdictional problems online created by governments and courts.