In the early days of the web, the internet felt like an unstoppable force of globalization - a borderless bazaar where American ingenuity reigned supreme.
As Max Read recounts in a poignant New York Magazine essay published November 10, 2025, the U.S. didn't just export code and servers; it beamed out an entire worldview.
Hollywood blockbusters, Silicon Valley startups, and even liberal democratic ideals hitchhiked on dial-up connections, turning the web into a de facto extension of U.S. soft power.
By 2000, over 50% of global internet users accessed content hosted on American servers, according to early Pew Research data, and platforms like AOL and early Google shaped how billions discovered news, music, and memes. It was an era of unbridled optimism: the net as a great equalizer, fostering cross-cultural exchanges from K-pop fans in Kansas to Bollywood buffs in Brooklyn.
But that digital idyll has faded, much like a glitchy screensaver. Today, the internet is splintering - not with a bang, but with the quiet click of app store bans, firewall tweaks, and state-sponsored alternatives. Read's piece, evocatively illustrated with defaced billboards hawking Russia's MAX messenger (its cheerful green logo slashed and graffitied into a symbol of enforced patriotism), argues this isn't mere tech churn.
It's a profound paradigm shift: governments worldwide now see the web not as an inevitable global commons, but as a strategic asset to nurture domestically, shield from rivals, and wield against threats.
"This looks an awful lot like a global shift in how most governments - and their citizens - approach the internet," Read writes, "not as an intrinsically and necessarily global project but as a source of domestic power to be cultivated, protected, and protected against."
The harbingers are everywhere, starting with the U.S. itself. Once the exporter-in-chief, America now scrambles to contain imports. TikTok, with its 170 million U.S. users as of Q3 2025 (per Sensor Tower), has become a flashpoint in the renewed U.S.-China trade skirmishes. Lawmakers from both parties decry it as a conduit for Beijing's influence, citing ByteDance's opaque data practices and algorithmic tweaks that allegedly amplify pro-CCP narratives.
A bipartisan bill passed in April 2025 mandates TikTok's divestiture or a nationwide ban by January 2026, echoing earlier Huawei blacklists. Ironically, this defensive posture mirrors the very nationalism Washington once mocked abroad—revealing how even the architect of the open web now prioritizes sovereignty over seamlessness.
Across the Pacific, China has long mastered this playbook. Weixin - known globally as WeChat - stands as the envy of digital policymakers everywhere. Launched by Tencent in 2011, it has ballooned to 1.3 billion monthly active users by mid-2025, per company filings, evolving from a simple messenger into an "everything app" that handles payments (via WeChat Pay, processing $17 trillion in transactions in 2024), e-commerce, ride-hailing, and even government services like health code scans during COVID lockdowns.
Its alignment with the state is no accident: Beijing's 2017 Cybersecurity Law mandates data localization and surveillance access, turning Weixin into a panopticon that helped quash dissent during the 2022 Shanghai protests. Yet, this very surveillability fuels its economic muscle - WeChat Mini Programs alone generated $500 billion in gross merchandise value last year, per QuestMobile.
Elon Musk, ever the admirer of Chinese efficiency, has openly coveted a stateside equivalent. In a 2023 X Spaces audio chat, he lamented X's (formerly Twitter) stumbles toward "everything app" status, tweeting in 2024: "WeChat is the future - payments, social, everything in one. Why can't we have that here without the red tape?" Musk's vision for X includes payments and long-form video, but U.S. regulatory hurdles, including FTC probes into data privacy, have slowed it to a crawl.
Russia's MAX embodies this trend in its rawest, most coercive form. Rolled out by state telecom giant Rostelecom in early 2025, MAX is a blatant WeChat knockoff: encrypted messaging, video calls, digital IDs, and integrations for booking doctors, submitting homework, or filing taxes - all under Moscow's watchful eye.
Its launch coincided with deliberate throttling of WhatsApp and Telegram, which saw download speeds halved in major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg during peak hours in Q2 2025, according to Ookla's Speedtest Intelligence. Promotion has been aggressive: billboards plaster Russian streets (as mocked in Read's defaced illustrations), celebrities like singer Shaman pocketed endorsement fees, and schools now recommend it over foreign rivals.
By October 2025, MAX claimed 15 million users, per Rostelecom, though independent analysts like Mediascope peg active engagement at under 8 million - still a foothold in a market where VK (Russia's Facebook analog) dominates social with 100 million monthly logins. This isn't organic adoption; it's engineered nationalism, part of the Kremlin's "sovereign internet" law enacted in 2019, which allows traffic routing through state servers.
India, the world's largest WhatsApp market with 535 million users as of 2025 (Meta's own stats), is charting a similar path, but with a entrepreneurial twist. Post-2020 border clashes with China, New Delhi banned 59 Chinese apps including TikTok, spurring a "Digital India" boom in homegrown alternatives. Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, an avid promoter, tweeted in September 2025: "Nothing beats the feeling of using a Swadeshi [locally made] product.
So proud to be on Arattai, a Made in India messaging platform." Arattai, backed by Reliance Jio, now boasts 50 million downloads and features UPI payments integrated with government schemes like Aadhaar ID verification.
Other contenders like ShareChat (for short-form video) and Koo (a Twitter rival, now pivoting to enterprise chat) have raised over $1 billion combined since 2020, per Tracxn data.
At the official level, the Indian government has subsidized these via the $10 billion Production Linked Incentive scheme, prioritizing apps that "promote national interests" over global giants.
Europe, lacking a WeChat of its own, defaults to regulation as resistance. The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), fully enforced since March 2024, fines gatekeepers like Meta up to 10% of global revenue for anti-competitive bundling - WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption has dodged deeper scrutiny so far.
But the proposed "Chat Control" regulation, reintroduced in July 2025 after privacy backlash, would mandate client-side scanning of messages for child exploitation material, drawing fire from groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for enabling mass surveillance akin to China's Great Firewall.
Officials cite the same security fears as Russia and India: foreign apps as vectors for disinformation or espionage.
With 450 million potential users, the EU dreams of a "European super-app," but fragmented markets and GDPR strictures have birthed tepid efforts like Germany's Tuta (encrypted email) or France's Olvid (secure messaging), neither cracking 10 million users combined.
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This balkanization isn't abstract - it's economic. Global internet traffic once flowed 80% through U.S.-based CDNs like Akamai in 2010; by 2025, that share has dipped to 55%, per Sandvine's Global Internet Phenomena Report, as nations build domestic backbones (e.g., Russia's Runet infrastructure, tested in full isolation drills in 2024). Cross-border data flows, valued at $2.8 trillion in services trade annually (WTO 2023), face tariffs and blocks, inflating costs for multinationals. For citizens, it's a mixed bag: cheaper local services but echo-chamber algorithms and eroded privacy.
Read's elegy for the "youthful" web rings true - there's nostalgia for that frictionless era. But as governments from Washington to Wuhan treat the net as a national security asset, the dream of a truly global village recedes. In its place? A mosaic of digital fortresses, where innovation serves the state, not the species. Adulthood, it seems, demands walls.
