Nationalism, protectionism, and authoritarianism are killing the World Wide Web.

The news that the government of Kazakhstan has begun intercepting all internet traffic inside the country’s borders is another worrisome confirmation that the World Wide Web — the global and open internet that we have enjoyed since the early 1990s — is quickly going away.

Last week the Kazakhstan government began intercepting all HTTPS traffic inside the country and redirecting users to an ominous new page. The HTTPS protocol was created to offer encryption, security, and better privacy to users, but now the country’s ISPs are forcing all users to install certificates that enable the government to spy on every citizen at will.

This is becoming depressingly familiar behavior by authoritarian regimes around the world. China and Russia have been rapidly increasing their internet oversight, leading to increased digital authoritarianism. Russia has adopted the “Russian Internet Law” that sets in motion plans to use an alternative Domain Name System (DNS). Iran recently tested a country-wide firewall.

China’s internet isn’t completely cut off from the rest of the world, but access to the global internet is highly controlled through The Great Firewall, a blanket term for the collection of resources used to filter web traffic in China and blocks its citizens’ access to the outside world. China has also just added 100 new categories of banned content and is implementing mandatory reviews of all content posted on short video platforms.

More and more countries are demanding that data collected within their borders stay within those borders. So-called data sovereignty (or data localization) laws have allowed dictators to replace internet services provided by western internet companies with more limited and controlled homegrown products. From Australia to Vietnam, almost 100 countries currently require companies to physically store their citizens’ data within the country of origin.

There’s more. Increasingly countries with the resources to do so are cutting themselves off from the world wide web entirely and building national intranets in order to control what their citizens can view and read.

The world wide web, which began with the promise of free and open access to information and the hope of truly connecting the people of the world in a way never before possible, is rapidly splitting into two large and opposing types of internets.

The Capitalist Internet is the big flashy web of wealthy global corporations with their endless money and their ambition to create a never-ending stream of new consumers in every market in the world. To that end, they are willing to collect every scrap of information about every human with a bank account on the planet by whatever methods necessary.

The Big Brother Internet is the one in which dictators and authoritarian regimes seek to control and monitor the behavior of their citizens by building digital walls around their borders to limit their exposure to the possibilities of other forms of government outside the one they’re living under.

The “Splinternet” is happening and I’m not optimistic that the forces now in motion can be stopped. The World Wide Web is doomed. In retrospect, for those of us who were here at the beginning, this is both depressingly sad and a reminder that power and greed eventually corrupt everything.