Is the internet about to split in two?

In the 1840s, Britain's railways ran on two different gauges. Trains from one company couldn't run on the other's tracks. Passengers changed trains at the border between networks, and freight got unloaded and reloaded by hand.

They called it the gauge war. It took a Royal Commission and an act of Parliament to end it.

The internet is having its gauge war.

What's the pattern?

Every network starts open and fragments. Railways had gauges. Electricity had AC versus DC and, to this day, different plugs in every country. Television had three incompatible color standards. Mobile phones had GSM and CDMA.

The open, single, global internet lasted about thirty years, which is a long time for a network to stay unified. Now it's splitting along the lines networks always split: by government, by platform, by language, by which version of a fact your feed shows you.

I wrote in Radical Next about how large language models filter and rank information based on collective patterns, so that dominant perspectives become the paradigm. Add borders to that, and you get several internets, each with its own dominant perspective, each confident it's the real one.

The pattern says this doesn't reverse. Networks don't re-unify by good intentions. They get bridged: standards, adapters, treaties, the equivalent of a train that can change its wheels at the border.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things.

Stop planning for one internet. If your business assumes a single global web, it's assuming 2010. Plan for several, with different rules, and know which ones you're in.

Build for the bridge. Data portability, open standards, systems that work across borders. The companies that made adapters in the gauge war did very well.

And check your own filter. If your team's picture of the world comes from one platform in one language, you're already on one side of the split and don't know it. Read across.

The single internet was the exception. Bridges are the rule. Build them.

Which internet is your company on, and who's on the other side?

Related: Will you have to prove you're human online?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote