The Web We Were Promised and the One We Got: Power, Control and the Future of the Internet

PHOTO: Internet Map (Translated from Russian), The Opte Project on Wikimedia Commons

The internet  is a paradox of human ingenuity. Although it is arguably one of the most influential inventions in human history, it has simultaneously produced one of the most distinctive political and social ecosystems of the modern era. Since its creation, the international community has grappled with the unique role the internet plays in contemporary society and the extent of regulatory control they can exert over cyberspace, which often seems fundamentally ungovernable.

The global network

The internet today is a decentralised patchwork of private and public infrastructure networks. To the average user, it provides access to nearly 200 million active webpages dominated by private industries and corporations. The sheer scale of the network has led it to be both championed and criticised for its decentralised, largely ungoverned structure. Whether criticising it or supporting it however, across the political spectrum, commentators have often portrayed it as the foundation for an epochal shift in humanity. 

In 1996, political activist John Perry Barlow, responding to the United States’ first major attempt to regulate online material, wrote the ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, where he described the new internet as an egalitarian home of an emerging ‘civilisation of the Mind’. This society, he argued, would be more ‘humane and fair’ than those ‘industrial’ physical societies that preceded it. 

In contrast to these libertarian ideals, economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis argued in 2023 that the modern day internet had transformed society into a form of ‘technofeudalism’. Rather than the great democratisation of society untouched by the governments of old, Varoufakis portrays the global network as a societal force where our wants, desires and access to the market are mediated and controlled by a few private corporations which dominate every aspect of our online engagement. In this model power has been taken from the state by the corporation, who is just as capable of controlling, restricting and shaping human behaviour online.

Few inventions have simultaneously united and divided human society as profoundly as the internet and it is unsurprising that it inspires such intense debate. Modern social interaction and community formation are now deeply dependent on it, with an estimated 63.9% of the world’s population utilising social media in some capacity in 2025. The internet has also become the central repository of human innovation and knowledge, with over 180 million academic resources alone catalogued online using the global CrossRef referencing system. Its economic influence is similarly far-reaching with an estimated 22% of the global economy reliant on digital industries related to it. 

Control of the internet therefore, whether by government or private interests, represents an avenue of unprecedented societal influence in human society.

In 1966, computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock published one of the first papers outlining the concept of packet switching. Packet switching was a method by which transferred data could be broken up into smaller ‘packets’ and later reassembled at their destination. This concept convinced Lawrence Roberts, a member of the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), of the feasibility of a wide-area interconnected computer network. This idea would eventually manifest in the ARPANET project in 1969, widely regarded as the birth of the internet.

Few inventions have simultaneously united and divided human society as profoundly as the internet and it is unsurprising that it inspires such intense debate. Modern social interaction and community formation are now deeply dependent on it, with an estimated 63.9% of the world’s population utilising social media in some capacity in 2025. The internet has also become the central repository of human innovation and knowledge, with over 180 million academic resources alone catalogued online using the global CrossRef referencing system. Its economic influence is similarly far-reaching with an estimated 22% of the global economy reliant on digital industries related to it. 

Control of the internet therefore, whether by government or private interests, represents an avenue of unprecedented societal influence in human society.

Who controls the internet?

In 1966, computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock published one of the first papers outlining the concept of packet switching. Packet switching was a method by which transferred data could be broken up into smaller ‘packets’ and later reassembled at their destination. This concept convinced Lawrence Roberts, a member of the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), of the feasibility of a wide-area interconnected computer network. This idea would eventually manifest in the ARPANET project in 1969, widely regarded as the birth of the internet.

PHOTO: ARPANET in the 1970’s, Semaforo GMS on Wikimedia Commons

For the next 26 years, the backbone infrastructure of the internet was largely owned by the US government. While other independent networks emerged worldwide, the dominant position held by the United States enabled technological standardisation and regulatory protocols like the Internet Protocol (IP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to become the accepted norm for global internet development. In 1995, ARPANET, which had by that point been transferred to the National Science Foundation’s as NSFnet, was formally decommissioned and the network infrastructure privatised.  

By that point however, despite its control of the public network infrastructure, the commercialisation of the internet was already firmly established. While the US Government had owned the cables and network routing points that many smaller networks relied on, private companies were already heavily influencing everything the ordinary user accessed. This included the majority of web traffic and the first mainstream web browsers like Mosaic. 

The decentralised nature of the internet meant that even under significant governmental ownership of assets, no single actor fully controlled the network. Regulation of the network, while never impossible, was limited in scope and difficult to enforce across jurisdictions. 

Although governments still retained a range of means to enforce legislation online, such enforcement was imperfect. The concept of cyber independence, as championed by Barlow, while often impractical, did still have a place in the discourse of the 1990s and early 2000s internet. However as identified by Varoufakis, in the relative absence of governmental control, private industries gradually centralised influence. 

By 2025, while the internet was far from totally monopolised, key sections of it were in the hands of a few corporate giants. For digital services, Google’s parent company Alphabet owns 47% of data analytics, 69% of online advertising services, 67% of video playback and 65% of internet web browsing, allowing substantial control over everything we interact with online. Further, Facebook’s parent company Meta owns approximately 80% of the social media market share, controlling how we socialise and increasingly what news we access. In terms of physical infrastructure, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet collectively control 62% of cloud storage, the backbone for online internet data management and hosting and the gateway to establishing any internet service. 

PHOTO: US President Trump and Mark Zuckerberg shake hands in the White House in 2019, Washington DC, The White House on Wikimedia Commons

Control over the internet has therefore centralised in the hands of a small number of corporate entities, whose size enables them to exert disproportionate influence over their users, their commercial partners, and in many cases competitors themselves. In 2025, a US court ruled that Google had breached antitrust laws using commercial partnerships with Apple and others to make its search engine the default on millions of devices.

This concentration of influence has allowed these giants to position themselves as, if not outright owners of the internet, at least “gatekeepers to its use”. Through their control of the way in which users access webpages, consume advertised media and engage with online communities, these private companies dominate the channels of information and digital commerce. Ethics Centre Fellow Gwilym David Blunt has argued that company ownership have, through these practices, become ‘overlords’ and ‘authoritarian’ in their approach to control of the internet. 

Governmental overreach or practical regulation

Governments have approached private sector dominance of the internet in a variety of ways. Early approaches to internet regulation differed widely by region and rarely coordinated internationally. The USA prioritised limited intervention against total monopolistic practices and made minor attempts to regulate what was perceived as obscene material, but otherwise prioritised a streamlined deregulatory approach. The European Union, in contrast, attempted to compromise between streamlined deregulatory approaches across the bloc and the preservation of various national regulatory regimes and telecommunications controls, many of which predated the internet. 

In the modern era, however, public pressure has grown not only for stronger regulation and governmental involvement in the digital sector, but also for a more coordinated international response. Governments across the world have responded with new regulatory regimes with varying degrees of success. Notably, the European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which later inspired similar legislation in states such as Australia and China. The GDPR enshrined accountability mechanisms for major controllers of online data and outlined punitive measures for non-compliant companies. 

Perhaps most significant about the GDPR was that it held companies responsible based on the use of EU citizens’ data and not the geographic location of their operations. This represented one of the first major attempts to impose large scale regulations across the inherently global structure of the internet.

The GDPR and similar laws achieved some success in strengthening user protections in the face of major corporate entities. Critics, however, have pointed out that the regulatory burdens placed by the framework often favoured those corporations large enough to be able to absorb the compliance costs. Similarly, while the GDPR is applied globally, the nature of many digital corporations’ global footprint makes standardisation of these processes a necessity across jurisdictions. Without it, compliance across different member states would become prohibitively expensive for new and smaller companies. 

Recognising this, efforts have been made to standardise internet regulation at the international level. The United Nations extended specific human rights protections within digital regulation including a right to free access and free expression, while also advancing initiatives like the UN’s Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms. These Guidelines outlined member state and private sector obligations that should be enshrined in regulatory frameworks. 

However, these still represent preliminary efforts to tackle issues of private corporate abuses of key resources like data collection, algorithmic influence and publishing of obscene material and misinformation. Critics argue that despite discussions and the implementation of the guidelines, many of the underlying issues have shown little noticeable improvement since their adoption in 2023. Despite increased regulation, corporate monopolisation of key sectors is still prevalent and some argue that such systems have only entrenched the influence of corporations who were already powerful enough to dominate the cyber landscape.

Another notable criticism of the emerging regulatory framework is the concern that member states are utilising legitimate fears of corporate control to justify intrusive governmental oversight of the internet, rather than simple regulation. The UN Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms, for example, have been criticised for its emphasis on national regulatory bodies as the instrument of internet regulation. Further, critics point out that such an approach has been utilised by member states to strengthen censorship regimes and expand state surveillance. 

Initiatives like the Russian Government’s ‘Sovereign Internet Law’ which implemented a mandatory regulated national domain name system (DNS) under the control of the Russian authorities reflects these concerns. By controlling the DNS in a national regulatory format, the Russian Government has the capacity to actively restrict access to specific sites. This has led to bans on web services like Youtube and Whatsapp which many argue is primarily driven by a desire for censorship rather than the protection of citizens as justified by the Russian government. 

Despite these criticisms, it is increasingly apparent that there is significant public support for a stronger governmental role in the modern day internet. Supporters of government involvement point out that an absence of governmental oversight has not produced a free decentralised communication hub, but rather has simply ceded regulatory control to a few key private corporations. Political scientists like Madeline Carr emphasise the role of multistakeholder governance combining non governmental public figures, private sector entities and governmental agents into the development of regulatory regimes and policy discussions. 

These approaches attempt to mitigate total state control over the internet without ceding total influence over online content to the corporate entities that own the internet. While this approach flies in the face of Barlow’s utopian independent ‘Civilisation of the Mind’, this method may be the only obstacle towards total control of the internet, whether that be by a government or a board of directors. 

The end of the web’s ‘Wild West’?

The modern internet stands at a critical juncture in its development. What was once envisioned as a decentralised ungovernable frontier that many hoped would be free of the abuses of state power, has become the foundation for what many consider a ‘technofeudal’ elite. With the expansion of artificial intelligence and more advanced computing, cloud data storage and digital networking adopted every day, the internet and the possibilities it offers are still growing at an unprecedented rate. 

Like the Wild West of old, the internet has been shaped by its perceived lawlessness and dominated by a few key, powerful and emerging industries. And much like that Wild West, the internet is fast approaching a turning point on who will inevitably control it that seems likely to shape all of human society.