In March 2000, US President Bill Clinton likened China’s efforts at internet censorship to nailing Jell-O to a wall. “Good luck,” America’s leader joked in a White House speech. Beijing was then in the midst of constructing its Great Firewall. But Clinton, like many others, saw the internet as an unruly new frontier. The novel technology, he argued, would naturally push societies to open up. 

Years later, the Arab Spring was simulcast all over social media. Anyone with a smartphone — from anywhere — could intimately follow and engage with the region’s pro-democracy protestors in real-time as they tried to topple ossified illiberal regimes. 

“I believed that giving users such a simple way to navigate the internet would unlock creativity and collaboration on a global scale,” reflected Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, in an essay last September. “If you could put anything on it, then after a while, it would have everything on it.”

But today the internet is increasingly a realm where powerful actors exert control and malign groups exploit vulnerabilities. 

China’s rise as a technological power rests in part on Beijing having built much of the developing world’s digital infrastructure. This includes exporting its panopticon of state surveillance technologies. Brittle autocracies are reflexively throttling internet access for self-preservation. Organized hacking enterprises have grown cybercrime into the world’s third largest economy. The commercial spyware industry has exploded. Social media companies — helmed by billionaire owners — place users in algorithmically defined echo chambers and information silos. 

Renewed geopolitical hostility hasn’t helped either. Countries everywhere are racing to ditch their dependence on external providers of core services. Policymakers are thus barrelling forward on costly projects meant to advance digital sovereignty. Yet the concept remains ill-defined and technically daunting. 

In 2001, Clyde Wayne Crews, the then director of technology studies at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, coined the term “splinternet” in a piece for Forbes magazine. He argued that hiving off global cyberspace into distinct competing networks would be more effective long-term. The world’s dizzying array of users, including businesses and institutions, could choose the network whose governance, protocols and infrastructure best suited their needs. Demand would shape supply.

A quarter century later, the splinternet is now increasingly a reality — just not for the reasons Crews hoped for. Instead, its manifestation is being driven by authoritarian retrenchment, surging protectionism and private tech firms morphing into weighty global actors. And it’s all poised to get worse. 

So are the risks and consequences. Mounting global challenges demand greater international coordination and understanding, not less.  

The Unraveling of the Digital Commons 

“Instead of one globally connected internet, we are seeing the rise of regionally governed digital spheres shaped by politics, security concerns and economic competition,” said Francesca Musiani, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research, over email. She co-authored a 2022 study for the European Parliament forecasting how recently enshrined EU legislation — the Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act and AI Act — may help address patterns of fragmentation. But also, how they might produce unintended consequences. 

“The fragmentation is not only technical but ideological,” Musiani warns. “Democracies and authoritarian states are developing different norms around speech moderation, surveillance, encryption and online identity.” She points to digital sovereignty as........

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