The rise of the Splinternet
There are the tech stories that everyone is talking about—AI-induced illusions, the impacts of social media on mental health, and the blistering pace of the AI race—and then there are the tech stories that fly under the radar, but could have even bigger implications for the future of the internet.
This newsletter is about one of those stories.
The global, open internet is rapidly disappearing. In its place, a fragmented internet is emerging, where each country controls and manages its digital infrastructure, content, connectivity, and governance.
This is the era of “the splinternet,” where individual nations carefully curate and control their internet.
What is lost during this transition? And with AI, what can we expect as a more political and nation-state-controlled internet takes hold?
// How the internet has been governed
Intergovernmental governance of technology has been around far longer than the internet itself. In 1865—eighty years before the founding of the United Nations (UN)—twenty European nations signed the International Telegraph Union to facilitate cross-border telegraph communications and set common technical rules.
Today, the International Telegraph Union has become the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency that oversees matters of information and communication technology.
Over the last twenty years, the ITU has helped convene major summits on the future of the internet, including the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). One of WSIS’s key outcomes was the creation of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a multistakeholder body convened by the UN Secretary-General.
The IGF brings together governments, civil society, technologists, and the private sector for open dialogue on internet policy. But it is a non-binding forum that supports soft governance and encourages best practices for those who choose to participate. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a separate organization that has more teeth; it preserves and enhances the operational stability, reliability, security, and global interoperability of the internet.
// A move towards digital sovereignty
Over the last few years, things have begun to change.
China and Russia have long prioritized data localization and the development of their own internet infrastructure. More countries have started to follow their lead.
Even established democracies have grown wary of the internet's openness. Concerns about disinformation, election interference, child safety, and extremist content have led to calls for greater regulation and oversight. The result is what some call “digital sovereignty,” and others describe as “cyber-nationalism”—a movement away from global coordination toward national or regional control.
The UN's Global Digital Compact, introduced by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, aims to establish new frameworks for digital cooperation. However, it faces the fundamental challenge that has plagued recent internet governance efforts: balancing national sovereignty, human rights, security concerns, and the technical requirements of a globally interconnected network.
This month, the United Nations General Assembly will review the past 20 years of internet governance. It is a critical moment when the future of the open internet and its multistakeholder governance could change.
This shift signals the potential end of the internet as a globally coordinated public resource and the beginning of an era where national sovereignty takes precedence over technical interoperability and universal access.
// The rise of the splinternet
The splinternet refers to the fragmentation of the internet into separate, isolated networks controlled by different governments—each operating under its own protocols, regulations, and infrastructure.
One of the most prominent examples of a state-controlled internet is China’s “great firewall,” the system of laws and technologies the government uses to regulate the domestic web. It blocks access to international sites, surveils citizens, detects political dissent, and gives Chinese internet companies advantages over foreign competitors.
For years, China has been trying to persuade other countries to follow its approach to digital sovereignty. In 2022, it released a white paper, Jointly Building a Community with a Shared Future in Cyberspace, that argued it is a state’s right to govern and control its internet—a perspective on internet governance that is now gaining popularity at the UN.
China isn’t the only one. Many other countries are taking a nationalistic approach:
- Myanmar, Iran, Ethiopia, and India have shut down their internet to quell protests.
- India has shut down its internet more than any other country—often to curb misinformation and maintain law and order.
- Iran’s internet is one of the most censored and controlled in the world, blocking access to a majority of the internet.
- Russia has a long history of internet censorship. In 2019, it amended its laws to centralize the management of the internet by the state authority. During the Ukraine war, Russia restricted access to Western media and shut down dissenting perspectives that opposed the war. Putin’s government considered the open internet a tool of the West, attempting to impose what experts consider a new digital “iron curtain.”
- The EU has pursued its own form of digital sovereignty through extensive regulations—from regulating the governance of data via the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), to its Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) that regulate platforms and tech companies, to its AI Act, which is aimed at regulating artificial intelligence.
As governments tighten control through new laws, content restrictions, sovereign AI campaigns, and nationalized digital infrastructure, the once-unified internet begins to splinter. One of its defining strengths, interoperability, starts to erode.
A splintered global internet has the potential to slow global commerce, erode the ties between countries that nurture cooperation, and threaten human rights and democratic norms.
The internet's early era of distributed multistakeholder governance may not return—but digital sovereignty doesn't require isolation. Countries can shape their digital infrastructure while maintaining interoperability.
// A toolkit for the new era
Earlier this year, the Project Liberty Institute introduced a new toolkit to equip policymakers to shape their digital infrastructure strategies. The toolkit acknowledges that a splintered internet is already emerging and may deepen, while also outlining how governments can pursue digital sovereignty in a way that preserves the internet’s core features, including interoperability, open standards, and data portability.
The toolkit breaks digital sovereignty into four steps, helping governments shift from reactive to proactive governance:
- Assess: Get a true picture of a country’s digital foundations. What works, what’s vulnerable, and where the biggest leverage points are.
- Design: Make intentional choices about how open the infrastructure should be, what standards it should align with, and who gets a seat at the governance table.
- Safeguard: Build in the guardrails from the start. Transparency, accountability, rights protections, data standards, and resilience planning keep infrastructure secure and trustworthy.
- Adopt: Equip people to use the infrastructure well. Digital literacy, clear communication, and user-centered design turn abstract policy into something citizens can rely on.
// AI and the fragmented internet
The nature of the internet is evolving, and as nations race to compete in the AI race, the internet risks becoming more splintered. The development of AI systems requires massive datasets, computational resources, and technical expertise—assets that only a handful of countries possess. As companies and nations compete to build AI capabilities, they're creating digital ecosystems that could become incompatible with each other, and their AI models are becoming closely guarded geopolitical assets.
The future of the internet extends far beyond AI. Whether nations can maintain global connectivity while asserting sovereignty—preserving the technical standards and interoperability that enable worldwide collaboration—remains a defining question of this era.
%20(1).png?width=1160&upscale=true&name=AI-becomes-Human2%20(1)%20(1).png)
