splinternet

plural splinternets

1. countableuncountableA fragmented internet, or one of its separate parts.

   Wise words from one of advertising's elder statesmen, who has seen the industry evolve from TV, radio, and print to today's splinternet.

   2012, Rachel Pasqua, Noah Elkin, Mobile Marketing: An Hour a Day

   3 more examples

   Increasingly, writers refer to internets or splinternets as ways to describe an increasingly fragmented web in which power brokers create limited access to the Web and the curricular informality of connectivity is challenged by formality.

   2012, Wayne D. Bowman, Ana Lucía Frega, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education, page 468

   The splinternet fear is often presented as a binary choice between one global Facebook or Google, or 200 versions. But there are ideas floating around to set a global baseline of online expression, and a process for adjudicating disputes.

   2021 February 17, Shira Ovide, “The Internet Is Splintering”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   The demise of “de minimis”, as the exemption is known, is the latest, symbolic reminder to digital darlings that frontiers exist—and that business models built on their absence are in need of a rethink.

   2025 September 4, “What the splinternet means for big tech: Unpleasant new trade-offs, for starters”, in The Economist