While many studies of the web and related technologies of communication have focused on its use, there has been little engagement with the structural properties of the web and related technologies from a broadly social theoretic point of view. This article analyses pressures on the technological development of the web from the perspective of the Habermasian concepts of colonization and juridification. On this analysis, legal and quasi-legal tendencies can be seen to restrict the uses and development of the structures of the world wide web, as I will show with the use of several case studies.