It once had that free-for-all atmosphere. You could search for anything, bring it right up right away, read it, all strings free. But that’s changing. Fast.

In 2025, more and more sites are putting up barriers—paywalls, passwords, and restricted access. More and more, “the open internet” becomes more and more a collection of walled-off sites, and I think it’s changing, in my head, the way that we process things.

To simplify things, let’s break down what’s happening and why it’s relevant.

Paywalls Are Everywhere

Hardly anyone paid to read news sites just a few years ago. Most people do nowadays. Like to read newspaper articles? You will have to pay after 1 or 2 free reads. Research papers? Most are entombed in academic journals. Now, even hobby blogs have “premium” Substack or Patreon entries.

Paywalls are not necessarily bad. Reporters and writers are just as entitled to paid compensation. But if all sites close, everyone ends up depending on a handful of free but sometimes less-reliable sites. It builds a kind of echo chamber where only the most easily accessible voices are heard.

Its threat lies not just in that there will be no access. It’s who will have the final word. Since only paid voices are represented, public discussion becomes increasingly exclusive.

The Walled Garden Problem

A walled garden is a feature that puts your subscriber anywhere in their walled garden. To visualize how:

• Facebook links are handled in-frame.
• Google promotes its own results or product offerings initially.
• TikTok does not support clickable links in captions.
• Amazon owns customers within its range of markets.

All that effort was toward preventing you from leaving the page. You know, businesses don’t want you exiting their page, utilizing their resources, and clicking off. That narrows one’s horizon down to the wider internet. You are surfing alone, but actually, you are surfing a filtered loop.

That also affects indie creators and lone publishers, who can’t compete with the reach of platform-owned content. Garden walls don’t bother people learning about your work, except if you are already inside.

Subscriptions Are Piling Up

There’s Netflix, there’s Spotify, there’s Disney+, there’s the NY Times, there’s Medium, and there’s YouTube Premium. You are just thinking, “Well, it’s still access, right?” But they all cost money. It’s not worth buying all of them for anybody. So they choose a few and just decide to forget about most of them. That creates more and more silos. Someone who subscribes to The Atlantic reads one type of news. Someone who’s on YouTube reads another type. The shared public square erodes. To that, some services even compartmentalize media between tiers so that even subs don’t have full access.

Search Engines Are No More What They Were

A search once gave us the number one answer, regardless of where it originally began. Today?

• Pay-for-play sites are ubiquitous.
• SEO tricks put low-value work at number one.
• Google, too, advertises its own services first.
• And yet more are locked away in login walls or pay walls.

That makes it appear smaller than it actually is. All that are available are things that are easily attainable, not necessarily things that are optimal or most correct. Worst of all, it makes it more difficult to hear new voices. The internet grows louder in your echo chamber but more unvaried.

Why It Matters

Open internet wasn’t ideal, either. It had all access, it exposed everyone out there to write, and everyone to read.

Then, of course, there’s the internet breaking down into company-controlled spaces and walled gardens. You have to have an account, one that costs money, or a login just to enter. It creates a barrier to discovery. It encourages digital inequality. Low-tech-literacy or low-resource people are locked in low-grade, ad-supported experiences while other people are subscribers to ad-less, curated feeds.

It’s not about convenience but about fairness. It’s about a healthy internet that relies on shared, public portals where one can roam about unimpeded.

What Can You Do?

That’s not necessarily on us to individually correct. But there’s some responsibility on us to take care of how we are engaging with the web:

• Urging high-quality sites when needed, but also calling for more fairness in access.
• Utilize other resources in order to burst platform bubbles. 
• Bookmark free, publicly available databases for news, research, and learning. 
• Experiment with decentralized services that are not dependent upon ad revenue or subscriptions. 
• Speak about it. The more that the problem is made known, the more that companies are pushed to improve. 

Side-step convenience risks, such as platform browsers that are automatically clicking links. Make sure to take that extra click of the mouse.

Final Thoughts

Open internet is not yet dead, but it is dying. Unless more people speak out about those walled spreading sites and call for better, we will have succeeded in turning the internet into a series of walled cities with tolls on all gates. That’s not the internet that was promised.