My belief is that the open internet began to pose a threat to those in power, they now seek to divide the internet back up along national boundaries via absurd regulations in order to for the traditional institutions to maintain their power. We are already seeing it with many sites being unwilling to deal with the compliance headache of GDPR and just blocking European users, plus it seems like half the internet is off limits to China because everyone blocks Chinese IP addresses because of their bad behavior.

Ultimately the only people who benefit as the internet gets more and more locked down and more and more regulated is the people at the top who are able to reassert control of the information those unwashed masses receive.