Fight for the Internet

July 1, 2026

Christine Lemmer-Webber: What happened to the fight for the Internet?

Net neutrality, SOPA... these battles for internet freedom had massive buy-in across the internet. 2012's Wikipedia blackout was especially memorable. It wasn't just the tech engineers of the world in that fight; family and friends who had never thought about the technical underpinnings of the internet were asking me questions, saying they were worried that we were going to lose our digital rights and asking what could be done.

Now we are facing an international swell of legal movements to age-gate and thus surveil the entire internet, lock down operating systems and hardware in the process, and generally crush the internet into an even more centralized shape than it's already been going.

And so it's with great irony that I believe it is actually because the internet got so centralized that we are facing the greatest amount of centralization and backdoor threats we've ever faced.