When Independent Constraints Collapse in the Internet of Everything

Internet of Everything (IoE) systems were architected as compositions of independently governed layers: identity, transport, policy, orchestration, telemetry, and compute. This fragmentation was rational when constraints evolved independently. It is now failing because five structural pressures (accessibility mandates, Zero Trust validation, data sovereignty, AI-driven compute, and next-generation transport) collide within real-time interaction boundaries. Coordination complexity scales combinatorially; control mechanisms remain linear. The failure mode is not “insufficient tooling.” It is a missing architectural primitive: continuous interaction identity that persists across orchestration changes, policy decisions, and computational routing. Cross-vertical incidents throughout 2025 reveal this pathology. Cloudflare (November 18), Azure Front Door (October 29), Google Cloud IAM (June 12), Heroku (June 10), Microsoft Teams (December). Each experienced control-plane failures where configuration propagation cascaded globally because no interaction-scoped boundary contained the blast radius. The pattern is consistent: the pipes worked; the valve system failed. AI agent deployments expose the same gap. Breakdowns are governance failures, not model failures: context fragments at system boundaries, multi-step workflows collapse. Human operators were absorbing coordination costs the architecture cannot handle; when removed from the loop, the missing primitive becomes visible. Quantitative analysis projects fragmented coordination reaching ~10^16 surfaces by 2040, implying 90-100 GW continuous power for coordination overhead alone, roughly 2× current global data center capacity. Interaction-scoped architectures collapse this to ~10^11 surfaces: a 100,000× reduction that keeps 2040-scale IoE within buildable envelopes. The European Accessibility Act enforced June 28, 2025. Transitional provisions that grandfathered legacy systems are not a reprieve but a strategic trap: vendors can maintain existing fleets or compete for new revenue, but not both. Procurement gatekeeping excludes non-compliant vendors from 15-30% of enterprise ICT spend. The technical requirements (continuous synchronization under 200ms, selective delivery, multi-jurisdiction compliance) necessitate interaction-scoped governance by construction. The path forward is subtractive: collapse fragmented control contexts into unified interaction surfaces. Whether industry must build this capability or can deploy existing solutions will determine IoE’s viability at scale.