In February, Apple bowed to pressurefrom UK regulators and removed certain advanced encryption features from its products. This move is to give law enforcement easier access to people's data, but, ultimately, undermines the open internet. It's not an anomaly. The open internet has been under siege for many years, resulting in the splinternet.

For a time during the early internet, around the 1980s, there was a shared vision of an open information system that transcended borders and cultures. In 1996, the late cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow expressed this vision when he wrote: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”