I fear that this forthcoming decade will bring a forthcoming consensus that the Internet is too big to manage by states alone alongside a desire for digital sovereignty and digital border control and that there will be a move toward heavily regulated national Intranets with potentially sub-Intranets for individual states within a country. While the Internet will be restricted to International communication for trade and Government. Large corporations will act as middlemen for any communication you want to do outside of the Intranet like the phone company is for international phone calls. Everything that goes in and out of a countries Internet connections will be monitored and surveilled by national security agencies. It would also make escaping it by VPN or Tor physically impossible.

The like of Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia would love the idea of a state controlled Intranet where anything negative of him is banned and where nothing can come in from outside the country because it would be caught at the digital border. At which point, moderation will move from moderators and AI run by websites to police and intelligence agencies running AI across the whole Intranet. It seems to come back to the desire of celebrities, politicians and other high status individuals to end user-generated content like comments, vlogs and posts to protect themselves from criticism, offence, uncomfortable truths and scrutiny (a.k.a. "hate speech" and "misinformation") and turn news agencies and media outlets into glorified press release outlets for themselves and approved individuals and companies (such as the vaccine manufacturers during Covid-19).

Proponents of the Intranet will argue that it protects kids from harm and that most people only access the likes of Google, Facebook, Netflix and Amazon and they'll still be running country based services on national Intranets so the vast majority of people will see no difference in their web browsing. They'd also argue that countries have the right to protect their digital borders in the same way they protect their physical borders. Oddly enough Satellite television in the 80s in Europe started as a pan-European concept before being segregated into national services behind encryption in the 90s to prevent those in other countries viewing content for other countries. The Internet is going the same way.

The UK Government has a concept that the whole of the Internet is a public place and that every private website is synonymous with a private building that is accessible to the public, including those who require memberships to restrict access. Which is why they're keen on banning pornography and nudity as these things would face criminal charges to anyone who did them in real life. It also relates to the concept that you don't have an expectation of privacy in a public place and the Government believes the same applies online.

There is also a desire for the abolition of anonymity online, where everyone can easily be identified to the authorities or anyone else on request, making it easier to expose whistleblowers, out those speaking uncomfortable truths and ensuring mass self-censorship for fear of being cancelled.