DIGITAL SPHERES OF INFLUENCE AND THE FUTURE OF THE WEB

Abstract

The World Wide Web was famously born with the Arpanet military project to guarantee the reticularity and dissemination of military information during the Cold War. With this historical phase concluded, this invention was transformed for civil purposes, influencing and being influenced by the creation of information from below. Yet, despite the “bottom-up” use of the network, the West has gradually implemented policies to control and channel information flows. The Internet can also become a vector of information competition, and for this reason more and more regional or national institutions are thinking about developing their own infrastructure and their own network regulation system. This article aims to present the transformation of the network from its birth to its current condition, to give an overview of the partitioning of the web nowadays.