How much Facebook and other tech giants will be affected by a fragmented internet? Is FB still a $600B company if they are prevalent only in the USA, UK and Canada?
I wonder if this trend of closed borders limited information circulation could lead to the diminishing of companies that depend on the network effect and rise of the companies with hard tech.
I suspect yes to the first if widespread enough in GDP (frankly in the grand scheme of things they matter less than Italy) and a hard no to the second.
There is no reason to think that "hard tech" (assuming you mean more physical hardware) would benefit as a field they aren't really competitors even in terms of sucking up talent. Isolation wouldn't give them an edge there.
Second as fragments would call for reinventing the wheel locally or possibly copying it to serve an insular market. We have already seen this with Cuban mechanics. They didn't become "the Detroit of the third world" producing cheaper cars for other nations, or even a divergent tech path for transit that was better in some way. They just essentially practiced at the art of antique automobile necromancy. Small players with adjacent bigger markets can innovate and scale up. Small players in small markets stagnate. The "small and local serves you better" is more meme than fact. People really want their parochial corner to be just as good but it hasn't worked out that way and stays small for several good reasons, and "choice" isn't one of them.
Facebook and Amazon _never_ penetrated Russian market. Russian companies (e.g. Yandex, VK) dominate in their respective domestic niches. Yandex even bought out Uber's operations here.
I wonder if this trend of closed borders limited information circulation could lead to the diminishing of companies that depend on the network effect and rise of the companies with hard tech.