Why is the internet suddenly being controlled?

Is it me, or has the internet suddenly, over the past months, become more and more controlled by the government and countries, especially with the new UK laws, and I'm no conspiracy theorist, but why has this suddenly started happening to the internet?

When I was younger, the internet was a place where it was basically a lawless place like the wild west, you didn't need to put all your info it was bascially a way funnier and more secret like basically a secret world you would go to after a long day at school, and how everyone older would always tell you not to put yourself on the internet, because it's not safe, even the darn government would say that back then.

But now all of a sudden...You need to put an ID access MUSIC WTF?? and it's strange how it's for the kids, but I've heard they also have been censoring normal SFW websites too, which is honestly just sounds like something straight out of some evil empire you read about in a fantasy book? But still, why in the world do we now need IDs for everything, and why are they using AI to do this?  Why in the world is YouTube going to make us use IDs? Like, are they going to keep this in a database forever or something?... Like, why do they need all this info about their users? Why are all these companies suddenly starting to control what their users see, and why do they need so much info on who we are?

These past few months have me confused and worried me about what's going on with the internet, and I hope someone else shows the same thing as me.