I was getting ready to hit “publish” on this post at the weekend. But then the world changed… again. So I put this draft down for a few days and switched back to my current day (sometimes night) job. Now it’s Wednesday. Or Thursday. Time’s a blur.

This post started out to be about internet sovereignty. It’s a topic keeping way too many tabs open in my browser these days. The war the Trump Administration chose to start in Iran at Israel’s request — yeah, I said what I said — is about physical sovereignty. Borders. Airspace. Territory. Kinetic force. But there’s no tidy border between these two realms.

Another sovereignty dispute unfolded in Wash., D.C. where noted town drunk Pete Hegseth issued Anthropic’s CEO an ultimatum: give his Department of War unrestricted access to Claude or risk being declared a “supply chain risk.” Or be compelled under the Defense Production Act to tailor the model to military needs. Anthropic’s red lines were clear — no domestic mass surveillance, no autonomous killing without meaningful human oversight. On CNN Trump claimed he had banned government use of the “radical left” AI. The military used it anyway. The technology was already embedded. Capacity is policy.

Consider the fast-tracked debut in Iran of new, low-cost loitering munitions — a ‘suicide’ drone platform accelerated from unveiling to battlefield in just months… not years, because that’s how things work now.

Not everyone in Silicon Valley (colloquially geolocating) wants to end up on the wrong side of history. Employees at Google and OpenAI published an open letter warning that the Pentagon was attempting to force AI companies to compete over who’d relax safeguards the fastest. The fight’s been framed as patriotism vs. principle. It’s more accurately a contest over who governs machine intelligence and to what ends.

These aren’t separate stories. They are the same one. And that brings us full circle. Everyone’s pissing to mark territory and more splash is hitting internet policy.

‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Internet freedom, as a policy focus, died, quietly at home, surrounded by loved ones. It’s no mystery, we know what killed it. Attending RightsCon in 2025 was like being at its wake. People remenisced. The food was good. Now internet sovereignty is rising quickly in its place. Funding is even surfacing around it. They aren’t the same thing.

For a generation, the internet was mostly narrated as a sprawling borderless commons. In 1996, John Perry Barlow declared cyberspace independent of governments, a realm where sovereignty dissolved into protocol and participation. Good times. That mythology held long after it became obvious it wasn’t true.

The early governance model worked not because power was absent, but because it operated in the background. Root servers, backbone infrastructure, cloud platforms and semiconductor supply chains were overwhelmingly anchored in the U.S. The system functioned because that dominance was exercised with restraint. Sovereignty was invisible because it didn’t need to announce itself.

“Washington need not seize the DNS or nationalize infrastructure to shape global outcomes for instance. Influence is embedded in architecture: jurisdiction over key firms, extraterritorial enforcement of domestic law, sanctions regimes, export controls on advanced chips and AI models, and the policy alignment of globally dominant companies.” — Konstantinos Komaitis

That restraint became a competitive advantage. U.S. hyperscalers didn’t just sell compute and storage, they sold confidence in the rule of law underpinning them. Trust was the product. But trust isn’t structural. It’s contingent. And it’s ephermeral.

“As the footprint of these hyperscalers has increased, policymakers in Washington have found ways to serve U.S. foreign policy goals by weaponizing this digital infrastructure. In response, other nations have increasingly sought to reduce their dependence on the U.S. for their critical digital infrastructure. — Kat Duffy

When U.S. sanctions led to the suspension of ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s Microsoft email account, the abstraction collapsed. It wasn’t DNS. It was an angry America. The invisible sovereign became visible.

Europe has noticed. A Wall Street Journal headline captured the shift bluntly: Europe prepares for a “nightmare scenario” in which the U.S. blocks access to critical technology. A decade ago that would have sounded conspiratorial. Today it’s contingency planning.

The U.S. had been seen for decades as a stable steward of a vast terrain of the internet’s core infrastructure. That assumption is eroding. Access can be weaponised. When Washington demands compliance, companies within its jurisdiction comply. The U.S. once invested hundreds of millions into the internet freedom model — decentralisation, interoperability, tunnels, proxies, encryption, encryption, some more encryption. The U.S. is now more interested in something else.

As confidence falters, trust migrates inward. Money follows, moving away from circumvention tools and open protocols and toward national AI models, domestic clouds and state-controlled routing capacity. This is less a technical shift than a transfer of power from users to states and from global networks to firewalls that increasingly resemble national borders.

Sovereignty as insurance policy

Across Europe it’s all kicking off. Procurement teams are weighing jurisdictional risk against cost and convenience. France announced that 2.5 million civil servants will migrate away from Zoom, Teams and Webex toward a French-built platform hosted on national infrastructure. Austria’s armed forces is shifting thousands of workstations to LibreOffice and Nextcloud. Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein is moving 30,000 government PCs from Windows to Linux. Danish regulators are scrutinising Google deployments in schools under GDPR exposure. Switzerland’s ETH Zürich and EPFL released Apertus, a fully open large language model trained on domestic infrastructure. Spain’s ALIA initiative is building open multilingual models under national supervision.

Many of these substitutions do involve FOSS systems, but the primary driver isn’t an ideological commitment to open source. It’s reducing reliance on American hyperscalers. Now the calculus is leverage, sanctions risk and supply chains.

At an EU Open Source Policy Summit, Ruth Suehle argued that “digital sovereignty doesn’t mean a digital fortress. It means openness, and options, not being locked in.” That is the aspiration. Sovereignty as diversification. Sovereignty as insurance policy. That seems nice.

Sovereignty begins as hedging behaviour. It rarely stays there.

The walls go up faster

“None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me!” — Rorschach, Watchmen

In authoritarian contexts, digital sovereignty isn’t an insurance policy. It’s an instrument of control.

Iran’s National Information Network and its recently approved “electronic passive defense” doctrine formalise the ability to disconnect external networks during “crises.” Shutdowns are engineered in advance. Spectrum becomes sovereign terrain.

China’s doctrine of cyber sovereignty layers law, licensing, gateways and deep packet inspection into a coherent architecture. Through companies exporting firewall technology, it offers sovereignty as a service to other autocratic and closed regimes. When filtering infrastructure is built and maintained by foreign firms, sovereignty becomes outsourced control.

Flexing the sovereign muscle takes subtler forms in democracies. The United Kingdom’s rollout of age verification requirements led to predictable VPN surges. The response is to consider regulating VPNs. Control begets circumvention. Circumvention justifies deeper control. On it goes.

Among allies, sovereignty now collides. The U.S. is launching a government portal intended to help Europeans bypass domestic content restrictions. Circumvention reframed as foreign policy. The splinternet is not merely fragmentation between blocs. Shutdowns are getting cheaper and easier to impose. Fragmentation is increasingly deployed for political ends.

Where freedom and sovereignty collide

“Before I built a wall,” Robert Frost wrote, “I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.” The question rarely features in policy briefings.

Freedom House warned that the future of internet freedom would depend on how governments deploy incentives and controls over the next wave of technological innovation. Many are deploying it this way: “Sovereign AI development in authoritarian contexts is likely to advance ongoing efforts to wall off the domestic internet from global networks, often referred to as ‘cyber sovereignty.'”

Sovereignty language proliferates discourse. At SplinterCon in Paris, the theme was sovereignty: autonomy or isolation. At RightsCon in Taipei, a session centred on undersea cables and the island’s digital resilience. Indigenous communities articulated digital sovereignty as cultural survival. 7amleh launched #ReconnectGaza, which is very much based on Palestinian telecommunications sovereignty.

“Gaza is one of the last places on earth with 2G. Regular access to fiber options, essential for modern telecommunications, has been restricted too, and any international connectivity has been channeled through Israeli-controlled networks, leaving Gaza’s connections vulnerable to intentional disruptions. — #ReconnectGaza

Internet freedom assumes permeability. It’s outward-facing. It’s not just some circumvention tools, It’s connectivity as a universal right. Sovereignty framing is conditional on context. For Palestinians, it’s access to the outside world, free of an occupier’s surveillance. For the Turkmenistan government, sovereignty is a tightly controlled state internet blocking external traffic getting in and external traffic getting out.

Freedom protects users from states. Sovereignty aims to protect states from each other. There are good elements in some sovereignty initiatives. Data protection matters. Transparency matters. Supply chain resilience matters. But sovereignty is a poor substitute for internet freedom. In many ways, it’s a retreat. The world now wants to put its borders online.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Users route around filters. Signals seek paths. Even in blackout, packets move. I still want to believe. But We’re in “mending season.” Governments “walk the line and set the wall between us once again.” The question isn’t whether sovereignty will shape the network. It already does. The question is what we’re walling in as we build, and what we’re keeping out.