When the internet went mainstream at the turn of the twenty-first century, it was widely celebrated as a revolutionary force for freedom and democracy. Its decentralized architecture promised to empower individuals, expand free expression, and weaken the grip of authoritarian states. Many believed that open information flows would make censorship obsolete and repression impossible to maintain.
That optimism has not merely faded — it has been decisively overturned. The same technologies once hailed as instruments of liberation are now being repurposed as tools of surveillance, censorship, and control. What is unfolding is not a sudden collapse of digital freedom, but a slow, structural transformation of the internet itself — one that is quietly reshaping how power operates in the digital age.
Crucially, this shift is not confined to authoritarian regimes. It is increasingly spreading into liberal democracies that once saw themselves as custodians of an open and global internet.
A Global Recession of Digital Freedom
Internet freedom is deteriorating globally at an unprecedented rate. The Freedom on the Net 2025 report marks the fifteenth consecutive year of decline, representing the longest recorded recession in digital freedom. Nearly 80 percent of internet users live in countries where a social-media post could result in arrest, and two-thirds are in nations where people have been assaulted or killed for their online expression. Governments in 65 percent of assessed countries block political, social, or religious content, while more than half restrict access to major platforms altogether.
This erosion is no longer confined to the usual suspects. Even established democracies are backsliding. U.S. internet freedom fell to a record low in May 2025, dropping three points in a single year — reflecting a growing willingness among democratic governments to deploy tools once associated with authoritarian rule.
That shift is already visible in practice. During the unrest in New Caledonia, France restricted access to TikTok; meanwhile, authorities in the United States, India, and Brazil have pressured platforms to remove political content. At the same time, Meta and X have rolled back transparency tools that once enabled researchers to track disinformation and government influence.
Two decades ago, such a trajectory would have seemed implausible. In 2000, President Bill Clinton famously mocked China’s early censorship efforts, likening them to “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” Yet China went on to build the Great Firewall — the most comprehensive censorship system in modern history — reshaping global assumptions about what information control could achieve.
What once appeared to be a uniquely authoritarian experiment has since evolved into a widely adopted model of digital governance, replacing the open, participatory internet imagined in the 1990s with a controlled, increasingly surveilled digital environment shaped not by a single censor but by the combined pressures of regulation, corporate incentives, and algorithmic control.
How the West Is Quietly Adopting Authoritarian Tools
In Western democracies, digital control rarely takes the form of overt repression. It advances quietly — through regulatory creep, technical adjustments, and procedural changes that seldom provoke public alarm. Surveillance expands, encrypted spaces shrink, and the line between state authority and corporate power blurs. Control is not imposed as repression but framed as protection, administered through law, normalized by bureaucracy, and legitimized by democratic institutions.
Encrypted communication — once indispensable for journalists, activists, and dissidents — is increasingly under threat. Europe’s proposed Chat Control legislation would require scanning private messages, weakening end-to-end encryption by mandating content inspection before or after transmission. In parallel, the UK’s Online Safety Act and Australia’s identity-verification rules introduce new points of access to private communication — often justified in the language of safety or child protection.
If eroding encryption compromises private communication, mandatory digital identity systems go further by undermining anonymity itself. Proposals such as the UK’s BritCard, the EU’s Digital Identity Wallet, and similar frameworks in Australia and parts of the United States would link online activity to state-verified identities. When integrated with corporate datasets — biometric, location, financial, and browsing data — these systems enable continuous monitoring without requiring explicit surveillance orders.
Much of this infrastructure is now supplied by private firms rather than built by the state. Companies such as Palantir have become central actors, providing data-fusion platforms to intelligence agencies, police forces, militaries, and immigration authorities across multiple (otherwise) democratic states. What began as narrowly framed security tools has evolved into systems that aggregate vast troves of personal data and deploy predictive analytics at scale — raising profound concerns about bias, accountability, and oversight, even in societies long committed to strong privacy protections.
Together, these tools are beginning to form an integrated surveillance system. Digital identity systems, predictive algorithms, and surveillance technologies increasingly reinforce one another, creating a state–corporate surveillance architecture that — though softer and more bureaucratic — mirrors key features of digital authoritarianism. Platforms police users to meet regulatory demands, while governments rely on private firms to enforce political priorities. Control expands not through overt repression but through routine administrative processes that quietly shrink the space for individual freedom.
Pavel Durov’s warning is therefore not an exaggeration. Digital liberty is not taken away all at once. It erodes through the accumulation of quiet legislation, routine deployments, and the gradual weakening of institutional safeguards, which slowly remake the internet into something it was never meant to be. If freedom is to endure, it must remain the starting point of governance — not its exception.
Otherwise, Durov’s warning may be remembered not as a call to action, but as a record of freedoms already gone.
