How recent actions against Big Tech in the US, UK, and EU could inadvertently lead to more fragmentation and ossification of the internet
A big change in how the Internet is defined - and who defines it - is underway. — For a while now, it's been apparent that Internet and Web standards have stagnated at the ‘top’ of the stack.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mark Nottingham's argument lands on top of a regulatory arc that has been building for years: as governments worldwide moved to limit tech companies with unprecedented urgency, the US, UK, and EU are each now enforcing against Big Tech on their own terms. Earlier analysis had already warned that regulators treat "the internet" as one thing when only one layer of the stack is suffering market failure — and that standards have stagnated at the top of that stack, leaving no neutral body to arbitrate what the rules break.
First-order effects
- US, UK, and EU enforcers are each writing rules against the same handful of Big Tech companies from separate jurisdictions, so compliance becomes a per-country exercise rather than a global standard.
Second-order effects
- With web standards bodies stagnant at the top of the stack, Big Tech and governments fill the definitional vacuum themselves — the shift from advocating a free, open internet to imposing national limits means each bloc's rules harden into de facto regional specifications.
Third-order effects
- If enforcement keeps outrunning standards development, the internet fragments along regulatory borders and ossifies around whatever the largest jurisdictions first codified — the opposite of the open-protocol decentralization some argued Big Tech's own actions had sown the seeds for.
The trend: Internet governance is migrating from open standards bodies to national regulators, trading the web's universality for jurisdiction-specific rulebooks.