It's about universality versus particularism. The original idea of the internet (or rather its subset the WWW) was universality. One set of standards interconnecting everything. Information is free and accessible by everyone, everywhere.

Things are moving away from this vision. The way the private companies roll out their products (smartphones, apps, etc) is by creating their own proper standards, ones that are often not interoperable with the standards of other companies. With email, you could write anyone no matter who was your initial email provider (hotmail, gmail, yahoomail, whatever). However, with the messaging apps you can't do that. You can only write with users of that app.

Your analogy is interesting, but it actually adds to my argument. Interconnection protocols and other standards are like common languages. The internet and WWW were built on common standards. Hence anyone could communicate with anyone. You could think of it as a common language. Now different companies prefer to roll out their own standards, instead of agreeing with other companies on common standards. The language splintering of humanity has always been here since time immemorial, so it's not a trend. The proliferation of apps and ecosystems based on different standards is a trend.

In the initial stages of the internet, information was free. You could go on the website of any newspaper, and read stuff without paying. You can't do that now.

That's the point.