# Splinternet The fragmentation of the once-global, borderless internet into a patchwork of **separate, nationally-controlled networks** governed by different rules, filters, and walls. A portmanteau of "splinter" and "internet" (the term dates to the early 2000s), it names both an observed trend — the open internet breaking apart along political lines — and the rival ideology driving it: **cyber sovereignty**, the doctrine that each state has the right to control, censor, and surveil the internet within its borders as an extension of national sovereignty. ## Cyber sovereignty vs. the open internet The post-Cold-War vision was a single global network governed by multistakeholder bodies and a free flow of information across borders. **Cyber sovereignty** (Chinese: *wǎngluò zhǔquán*) is the authoritarian counter-model, championed most forcefully by China and Russia: the internet should be carved into national segments, each subject to the host government's control, with information treated as a matter of state security rather than a universal right. China promotes this vision diplomatically (notably through its annual World Internet Conference) and demonstrates it in practice through the [[Great Firewall]]. ## How fragmentation happens The splinternet is produced by a stack of overlapping mechanisms: - **National firewalls and censorship** — the [[Great Firewall]] being the most complete example, now exported to other states. - **"Sovereign internet" infrastructure** — Russia's 2019 Sovereign Internet Law built tools (centralized traffic routing, deep-packet-inspection equipment under the regulator Roskomnadzor) intended to let the Russian segment (**RuNet**) keep operating if cut off from — or deliberately disconnected from — the global internet. - **Data-localization laws** — requirements that citizens' data be stored on in-country servers (China, Russia, India, and others), fracturing the global data layer. - **Platform blocking and app bans** — barring foreign services (and, in the U.S. debate over TikTok, the reverse), so users in different countries inhabit different information environments. - **Sanctions and decoupling** — geopolitical splits (e.g., post-2022) accelerating a technological separation of Western and authoritarian internet spheres. A softer, non-censorship variant is the **"digital sovereignty"** discourse in the EU and elsewhere — driven by privacy regulation, antitrust, and a desire to reduce dependence on U.S. tech — which fragments governance without the authoritarian information-control motive. ## Right-wing-KB relevance The splinternet is the macro-frame around several threads this vault tracks. Cyber sovereignty is the governing *ideology* that the [[Great Firewall]] *implements*, and the model authoritarian and backsliding states adopt to wall off dissent — a leading indicator of digital-authoritarian drift. It also surfaces inside Western politics: arguments for "data sovereignty," platform bans, and national control over information borrow the same vocabulary, so the line between protecting citizens and asserting state control over speech becomes a live domestic question. And the fragmentation interacts with the offensive operations of [[Chinese State Hacking Groups]] — the same states sealing their own networks while probing everyone else's. ## Distinct from neighbors - **[[Great Firewall]]** — a national *implementation* of internet control; the splinternet is the *global pattern* of many such walls fragmenting the whole. - **Cyber sovereignty** — the authoritarian *doctrine*; the splinternet is the *outcome* it produces. - **Digital sovereignty (EU-style)** — regulatory/economic autonomy without the censorship motive; a milder driver of fragmentation. - **Net neutrality** — about non-discrimination *within* a network; the splinternet is about partition *between* national networks. ## See Also - [[Great Firewall]] - [[Chinese State Hacking Groups]] - [[Cybersecurity Lexicon]] - [[Information Warfare Hub]]