This was not how it was supposed to be. Decentralized communications was once a central promise of the internet. In the 1960s and 1970s, with the world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon, a cadre of academic and military engineers set out to create a communications system that contained no single point of failure or control. The network they came up with, which evolved into the modern internet, connected every machine to every other through many different paths. That way, if any portion of the network were wiped out by an attack, traffic would simply route itself to a new path.

As the threat of nuclear attack diminished and the internet grew, its decentralized design became as much a political selling point as a technical one.

“Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere,” the activist John Perry Barlow argued in his 1996 manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” He predicted that because of the internet’s everywhere-ness, the world’s governments would never be able to lasso the digital realm. The computer scientist and activist John Gilmore told Time magazine in 1993, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

What the creators and early proselytizers of the internet did not foresee was the rapid commercialization of the network. The internet that Mr. Barlow and Mr. Gilmore envisioned was built and maintained by collectives of users; the one that users flocked to was tamed by companies whose very success turned them into some of the largest corporations on the planet.

The internet is now no longer “everywhere and nowhere.” Just about all of its economic value is instead connected to two very specific somewheres: the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, the homes of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook, the four monstrously large companies that own the internet’s central information platforms. As these companies began to build ever-larger empires online, they have evolved into convenient choke points — the very points of control that the internet was designed to eliminate.

Like all companies, online companies must offer some level of deference to governments. They obey local and national laws, court orders and national security authorities, and bend to other, less transparent means of coercion. They can fight governments — as Apple did when it battled the F.B.I. over unlocking a terrorist’s iPhone last year — but they often must pick their battles and balance their interests. Apple makes a significant fraction of its profits from China. Can it really risk all those billions to protect a handful of apps?

Apple offered this statement in response to my queries on how it decides to take down apps: “For some time now the New York Times app has not been permitted to display content to most users in China, and we have been informed that the app is in violation of local regulations. As a result, the app must be taken down off the China App Store. When this situation changes, the App Store will once again offer the New York Times app for download in China.” Google declined to comment.