I wrote a journal last year about how credit card companies and so on could use their monopoly power to dictate what people can and cannot purchase by pressuring companies to not offer products. Legally they aren't stopping you from buying things, they're just taking away the options you never knew you could have had.

In the last month there's been a massive, global push from companies and governments and so on to fundamentally do the same thing: control what you can do online, and gather more information about everyone than they already had access to, even if the method is irresponsible and dangerous to the general public.

A centralized internet has been criticized for this reason for decades. Long ago, the way that the internet worked meant that even if a node went down (due to a nuke, which was a concern at the time), the network could pick up the slack and continue working even if huge chunks were gone. This also meant it was impossible to police the internet, and the attempts by governments to do so was joked about. China ended up creating the great firewall to better control what information their people had access to, but that's the only real method governments had to control the internet, cutting everyone off from everyone outside the nation. On or off.

Over time, some websites became universal, like google search, and then wikipedia. As more of these cropped up, advertisers gained a foothold. Before, ads were not seen as very profitable despite the number of people using the internet, but as more people flocked to specific sites, this allowed advertisers to target large parts of the population with less cost to them. And as more people on youtube became dependent on them for their income and livelihood, this gave advertisers more power to put pressure on them and the platform, gradually making things worse as the revenue stream took priority over creators and viewers. The solution would have been to make youtube publicly funded, like PBS, but that opportunity has passed, and the shareholders hunger for more as they always will.

And with centralization comes a greater capacity for control. The internet's no longer an on/off switch kind of thing, governments can easily put pressure on a corporation and so put pressure on huge chunks of the internet, even if the internet is still resilient to damage to the network.

Which is where we come back to the present, where governments and organizations have all in the same month pushed forward plans that will make it harder to access wikipedia for some for a time, will attempt to force adults to share their private information with corporations, and so on. They've been trying to pull this off for decades, and now is their chance to do it.

Over the next five years, expect to see news reports of corporations posing as identity verification groups selling or leaking private data online. But most importantly, look back on cabaret laws and licenses in the US. Even when people followed the rules, paid the fees, got their licenses, they would still be raided by police, taken to court, and punished to such a degree that they could no longer afford to perform for the public. Ultimately, the reason for these laws wasn't to keep the noise down, it was to kill off a culture that was becoming popular, to control the people without them realizing they were losing choices. You can't go to a club that never existed.

Read up on the past, and focus on how the government utilized its power, that will give you an idea of what they will be doing, and the real reasons why. It won't tell you who the specific targets are, that's too modern, but their methods don't really change that much from decade to decade, and you can easily learn those.

As for fighting back, it's too late. The problems the governments used to have are now solved, everyone uses the same top ten sites daily, everyone's emails are tied to the same corporations, and this last push looks like it's been planned for a long time. Otherwise, it's weird that steam and wikipedia and all of social media, youtube and reddit, all are being targeted by different actors in the same month for similar reasons leading to the same result.

Maybe if they push the issue hard enough the internet will splinter and decentralize all over again.