＃My Assessment: the State of the Internet in 2026

Maybe It's Just Me, but the Future of the Open Internet Seems Especially Bleak Right Now.

I don't see much to be hopeful about with respect to the open Internet. While hundreds of millions of blogs remain on the Web, the corporate Internet machine has managed to hide them so well that even those who know they exist and want to find them have great difficulty. AI is taking over online search, which will probably make finding good blogs even more difficult than it has been since the large search engines began discretely moving commercial websites to the top of their search results well over a decade ago. In the past year, AI has greatly reduced search-engine-induced traffic to most websites, but it is merely the latest tool in the corporate tool chest. Mobile Internet users already prefer to run corporate-controlled apps on their phones. Currently, 60% of the human traffic on the Internet is from mobile users, and they favour apps over browsers by ten to one. And now governments seem to be doing their best to destroy whatever remains of our ability to obtain what we want from the Web. The result of all this corporate and government meddling is taking its toll on the Internet.

Increasingly, content is leaving the open Internet and being placed behind paywalls. One reason is the massive AI scraping of the Internet. When AI both raises the cost of running a website and simultaneously reduces any potential profit-generating traffic to it, allowing AI's to scrape no longer makes sense. Many websites naturally respond by pay-walling some or all of their content. Paywalls are a double-edged sword against the effects of AI. They block AI from scraping in the first place and also raise revenue lost by it. Just last week, I was blocked for the first time that I can recall from reading an article on 404 Media. I guess I have just not been paying attention, because 404 began pay-walling in January of 2024, when it learned that its articles were being scraped and paraphrased by "AI spinners". Even smaller search engines that don't use AI are being pay-walled or finding other means of generating revenue. One of my favorites, searchmysite.net, now charges to add a new site to its search index.

The increase in captchas resulting from the flood of AI scrapers all over the Internet has been hard to miss. Part of the reason for this is that, as of the beginning of 2026, more than a fifth of the Internet was protected by Cloudflare from DDoS attacks, and Cloudflare relies on captchas for blocking AI scraping. Although I have always detested captchas and never wanted to have them on my website, I have finally given in and created my own home-grown blocking approach with something very much like a captcha. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I do not feel that I have much of a choice because I estimate that around 90% of the total traffic that would otherwise reach dfdn.info would be non-human, and like most other bloggers, I do not feel that supporting AI and other scrapers is in my best interests. One of the benefits of operating on either the venerable Gopher or the modern Gemini protocols is that they remain, at least for now, free of AI scrapers and commercial interests. Gopher simply does not support user tracking, cookies or javascript. And In addition, Gemini is purpose designed NOT to be extensible so as to prevent it being captured by corporatisation. Long may they stay that way!

I should probably pause to apologizs to my long-term readers for making dfdn.info on the web a bit more difficult to reach. I am very sorry that I have had to resort to this. I really hope that you will continue to read, enjoy, and learn from my articles. I intend to continue writing them as long as even a few people are still reading them.

Recently, I have even been strongly considering blocking Google's scraping of dfdn.info, thanks to the traffic from it having fallen to almost nothing. And, Google's scraping is not as obnoxious as many of the other corporate-run AI's, which I began blocking many months ago. So far, I have restrained myself and continued to allow Google to access dfdn.info via HTTP or HTTPS.

Years ago, I hoped alternative networks would eventually give us a viable alternative to the corporate Internet, but their usage seems to be going nowhere fast. With the exception of the Fediverse, Gemini, and Noster, participation on alternative networks actually seems to be dropping. Noster's content is such a disaster that I just don't have time to bushwhack my way to the good stuff. ZeroNet is essentially dead. The last bit of news I found about Secure Scuttlebutt suggested to me that it may be struggling as well. If true, that is very bad news, because Secure Scuttlebutt had some great content when I last visited. If I had time, I would still be visiting it. While the number of Gemini servers is slowly increasing--and I do visit Gemini frequently--it consists largely of the same sea of what I call "zombie blogs" that one finds on every alternative network that has blogs. I have talked about that before as being due to the nature of volunteer-run networks. Although the issue is more complicated, when would-be bloggers are not being paid for generating content and have very little hope of ever being paid, the vast majority stop writing sooner or later, and mostly sooner. Based on what I have seen, most zombie blogs on and off the web have in the neighborhood of one to four articles. That is not enough to make me enthusiastic about reading them.

The outlook for the Fediverse does not seem as bright as it did a couple of years ago. Although reliable statistics are difficult to obtain, the Fediverse just does not seem to have grown much since the Twitter buy-out at the end of 2022, which tells a story. Many of us hoped for better. According to some estimates, Mastodon's monthly active users peaked at 2.6 million at the end of 2022. That number has since fallen to somewhere between 690,000 and 1.5 million. Meanwhile, Bluesky had grown to about 40 million accounts and 3.5 million daily active users by the end of 2025, underscoring yet again the propensity for average Internet uses to choose corporate-run walled gardens over social media with even a modicum of decentralisation. By the way, the degree of centralisation of Mastodon is open to debate, and I am concerned that the large Mastodon instances now hold too many of its accounts, causing Mastodon to have already become too centralizsd. Centralistion is the reason for many of the Web's problems, and I find no compelling reason to believe the Fediverse will ultimately escape its ravages.

At the same time that traffic to personal websites and most alternative decentralised networks has been falling, governments have been splintering the Internet at national borders. China has erected the "Great Wall", which seems to be about as close to impermeable as any totalitarian government could hope for, with the exception of a few others, like Iran. Russia has been slower to begin the process of cutting itself off from the rest of the world's Internet, but that process is still on-going. We recently learned that Russia's departure from the rest of the world's Internet had even gone as far as blocking Linux repositories. Since Russia is a big user of Linux, however, its government was forced to reverse the course of its blocking against still needed Linux repositories. But, that may only last until Russia completes the development of a Linux distribution of its own. Russia also passed a law in 2025 requiring bloggers with more that 10,000 followers to register with the Russian government, which is only one of several methods it uses to discourage free speech.

But perhaps the worst news for the open Internet in recent years is the united push by the majority of the governments of the so-called "democracies" of the world to enforce Internet age-verification laws. These laws invade Internet users' privacy, which often strongly discourages them from speaking freely on social media. Ostensibly, this move is to protect children on line, but with more of their personal data on line as a result, it actually makes them less safe. We should all be aware that age-verification laws are nothing more or less than online-identification laws in disguise. These laws are being pushed as a way of restricting children's access to adult material, but in reality many of them (AKA "chat control" in Europe) apply to online social media sites that have nothing to do with pornography. Governments are now forcing social media platforms to identify their users, so governments can potentially intimidate or punish any users who say things officials don't like.

Even many states in the US are piling onto this stinking dung heap of regulation with their own social media laws. I won't even dwell on Trump's attempt to force the sale of TikTok for the (pardon the pun) trumped-up reason of national security. Lest you think these laws only apply to big social media, I have had to block residents of eight US states whose laws I have no intention of complying with from having accounts on my site.

We know governments fully understand what they are doing because they have had to resort to extraordinary measures to pass these regulations. European countries have begun making exceptions to their online privacy laws for age-verification. The US Supreme Court even relaxed its standards for dealing with free speech issues to allow state social media age-verification laws to stand. An article on publicinterestprivacy.org, said, "The most significant aspect of this ruling [in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton] isn’t what the Court decided, but how they decided it. The Court applied 'intermediate scrutiny'—a more lenient constitutional standard—rather than the 'strict scrutiny' standard that courts have typically used to evaluate laws restricting online speech."

Apparently, even after these laws have been shown to lead directly to the theft of users' private data, lawmakers refuse to stop passing them. But the potential for abuse of a system that forces websites to collect million's of users' identity credentials was never really in doubt. Governments simply refuse to care.

Now, age verification has begun to spread to computer operating systems. This means your own computer, tablet, or cellphone may soon be requiring you to identify yourself before you can use it. US states have begun passing laws requiring operating system age-verification, and the US government is even working to pass a national law. California has already passed AB 1043, which takes effect beginning in January of 2027, and some companies are losing little time in their rush to build age-verification into their operating systems. Apple has not yet made turning on your MacOS computer impossible without verifying your age, but it has begun blocking access to the Apple Store from some states and countries. Among Linux and BSD users, this is controversial, to say the least. Applications are even being written to remove whatever age-verification measures Linux distributions decide to include. But, what happens to users of other operating systems who can't produce the proper identification? Does this mean they will have to either switch to Linux or go without using a computer? Why are we allowing computer usage to become something that is regulated and possibly for adults only, like cigarettes and alcohol?

We have certainly come a long way from the optimistic future envisioned during the personal computer revolution of the 1970's and 1980's. In those days, government leaders were too ignorant to understand the positive impact of personal computers on the freedom of the common man, woman, and child. Now, they know better, and they are doing something about it.

What does the combination of increasingly pay-walled content, laws that destroy online privacy and force the identification of everyone who uses a computer, governments increasingly limiting access to the parts of the Internet that are outside their control, and the lack of real alternatives to the Web all mean for Internet users? I think it means our ability to find information we want and speak freely in public (which today means on line) is increasingly disappearing. At a minimum, we are having to resort to paying for access to what was once free and are being forced to spend more of our time and money getting around the edicts of governments. Many Internet users are already resorting to VPN's, and VPN's that are less likely to sell users' data cost money. We will no longer be able to say what we really think on social media--especially about incompetent politicians, which the US currently has in great supply. This assumes we can even access the social media sites that we prefer to visit.

Will individuals be straight-jacked into the highly-controlled Web that governments and corporations are creating, or will they find individual solutions to the problems I have highlighted? We have been having conversations about creating our own private networks that are not subject to government oversight. But, what will the users of those networks talk about if they no longer have access to much of the information they need to be well informed? Does this mean newspapers printed on paper will be coming back into fashion? If not, what alternative sources of information will be developed? Will national borders once again become nearly impermeable to outside information and ideas? Will large social media sites all devolve into YouTube-like sites with influencers hawking products? Will small blogs and social media sites starved of visitors disappear completely? Will they even be permitted to continue in most countries? I don't know, but I am not optimistic. The Future of the Open Internet Seems Especially Bleak Right Now.

I am considering making this the first of an annual assessement of the state of the Internet. If you are interested in that, let me know.