Digital sovereignty: from fragmentation to reconstruction

Amid the growing fragmentation of the international order, the internet—once celebrated as a global, open, and connected space—is rapidly becoming a battleground for geopolitical rivalry, surveillance, and state sovereignty. The rise of cyberwarfare, digital regulations, and competition among major powers reveals that the online realm is no longer perceived as a neutral environment but has become strategic infrastructure for power.

Originally published in Le Monde Diplomatique

By Aleksandr Dashichev

The End of the Wild West of the WWW (World Wide Web)

When collective solutions are lacking, fragmentation becomes a natural response. This is because, when faced with a critical situation, a system of organized actors fragments into a diffuse multiplicity until a new premise for consolidation once again seems possible. If there is one thing our turbulent 21st century has harshly demonstrated to us, it is that the flow of history is not satisfied with dogmas or declarations. And, given the inherent acceleration of platforms, our understanding of reality is always yesterday’s news, and the once-hopeful dream of an internationally connected digital future was interrupted by a jarring awakening.

And we—users and once-citizens of the realm of the internationally connected internet—have experienced precisely that. For most of human history, reality has been one of the great equalizing elements of shared existence, and, in a certain sense, humanity has recognized reality as a domain in which action carries absolute consequence.

In the style of a Western, the World Wide Web (WWW) has, for decades, fostered in us the illusion of being an alternative realm, where action and consequence existed separately in a velvet divorce. Now, as the era of deconstruction and global fragmentation gradually reveals its dotted contours, the WWW’s last gasp emerges as a final, precarious consensus before the impending dissociation: nearly every nation on the planet would prefer to see its online space transformed into political geography, and its digital civic space become an extension of reality itself—a reality that has become policed and regulated.

The irony, of course, is that the deconstruction of the WWW as we know it is being driven by the West itself. There was a time when China was the target of ridicule for its Great Firewall, while the European approach was treated as a benchmark for intelligent, human-rights-oriented legislation governing the online realm. The famous General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the European Digital Identity (EUDI) regulations were consistently viewed as advanced, cutting-edge legal milestones designed with the user in mind.

Now, in what appears to be a growing chorus of like-minded opinions, following the Australian parliamentary ban on social media use for those under 16, several European states have begun advocating for stricter mechanisms for data retention, identity verification, and age regulation on social networks, cracking down on VPN usage and, ultimately, seeking to eliminate the very concept of anonymity on the web. In the words of Dimitris Papastergiou, Greece's Minister of Digital Governance, "the main problem behind anonymity is toxicity – anyone, especially on social media, can defame an individual and carry out a reputation assassination without facing any consequences…". Following the Australian example and its own Online Safety Act, the current position of the British government on "closing loopholes that put children at risk" consists of imposing mandatory age and identity verification procedures. Equally firm rhetoric is adopted by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who ordered an investigation against X, Meta, and TikTok to combat child sexual abuse material generated by artificial intelligence, in addition to having staged a high-profile public confrontation with Elon Musk. Similar sentiments are shared by French President Emmanuel Macron, and Denmark also appears to be heading in the same direction.

However, it seems that all of this has less to do with protecting children and more with asserting control over users' online activity, fusing digital personas with concrete civil identity – one person, one document. To understand the silent tectonic shift currently underway, one only needs to observe legislative behemoths like the EU's proposed Chat Control and the broad internal security strategy ProtectEU. Marketed as measures aimed at child protection, counter-terrorism, and deterrence against "hostile foreign states," such initiatives seek to impose indiscriminate scanning of private communications, placing fundamental digital privacy in direct conflict with state defense. Yet, their true meaning transcends the immediate erosion of user anonymity. By imposing mandatory identity checks, automated surveillance infrastructures, and localized content blocks, these regulatory frameworks end up tying digital existence to physical borders. They fragment the global network as we know it into digital jurisdictions defined and carefully curated by states – in the name of digital sovereignty.

Viewing this merely as an attempt to improve domestic policies, however, is to ignore the broader strategic wager. The push towards a structurally bounded internet has, in essence, a dual purpose. Internally, it grants states unprecedented panoptic visibility over their citizens; externally, it functions as geopolitical fortification. In an era where conflicts are increasingly fought in cyberspace, tying the internet to national borders allows governments to isolate their critical infrastructures against foreign sabotage and against militarized forms of technological interdependence. In the end, the emerging interpretation of "digital sovereignty" has little regard for the user. What we observe is the construction of true digital Hadrian's Walls, preemptively outlining the cyber battlefields of future geopolitical fractures, while individual rights and freedoms remain a distant and secondary concern. This also reveals that, within the traditional paradigm of the WWW, Western states can no longer fully secure their dominance; which is why many are rushing to erect their defensive lines and, thus, forcibly reimagine the very nature of the online domain.

The Decisive Stage of Digital Sovereignty: Geopolitics

This is because the reality of the WWW as a system based on asymmetric interdependence has accumulated overwhelming evidence of being a critical security risk. The volume of damage that can be inflicted on states and societies through the digital plane challenges what can be achieved in the physical domain. In the long term, such processes suffice to provoke social polarization, moral degradation, and cultural decline; in the short term, coordinated cyberattacks function as a kind of moral effect grenade – disorienting, eroding collective morale, and inducing erratic behavior. And why asymmetric? Because only a few countries possess the capacity to control the cognitive and material levels of their respective sovereign sets of technological tools. The rest are left to compete at the software level – or worse, to submit to foreign digital ecosystems without possessing any real decision-making power over them. While in Western media, the efforts of Commonwealth and EU countries are heroized as an arduous battle to protect societies against malicious foreign actors and forms of tyranny, the less fortunate part of the world is often portrayed in a permanent carousel of "villains of the week." After all, beyond the echo chamber, the old logic of "here be dragons" persists: beyond the garden walls, unspeakably anti-democratic terrors supposedly lurk.

Meanwhile, on the other end of this bitter Game of Thrones, BRICS countries and the Global South become increasingly concerned, as confirmations accumulate that a digital sovereignty strategy has ceased to be a mere option and has become an absolute necessity.

Credit: Self-portraits

For nations outside the Western umbrella, the material level of sovereignty has ceased to be an abstract technological goal and has become the very minimum line of state survival. The recent crisis in the Middle East offered a dramatic confirmation of this. During the attacks, Iran claimed to have suffered systematic sabotage of its US-manufactured network infrastructure, with solutions from respected companies like Cisco, Juniper Networks, Fortinet, and others failing to operate at expected capacity. Despite imposing a national internet blackout within its own borders, Tehran stated that American agents exploited deeply embedded backdoors in critical hardware to remotely shut down and reboot systems at the height of the conflict. Whether this occurred through clandestine botnets or latent hardware vulnerabilities, the geopolitical implication is profoundly alarming: depending on American equipment is equivalent to installing a foreign off-switch in the nation's own nervous system.

Anyone who still believes in politically neutral technology: this is the time to prepare for disillusionment. The military instrumentalization of commercial hardware is increasingly perceived as an intolerable security risk by both the West and the non-West. This is a reality made infinitely more urgent by the recent explicit integration of the Pentagon with Silicon Valley giants like SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection AI, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services. By formally uniting the US military apparatus with the architects of global digital infrastructure, the United States practically erased the line separating private big techs from its military-industrial complex. For the rest of the world, this sounds like an invitation to build their own digital fortresses. And it is precisely here that the West itself may be heading towards digital fragmentation, as the issue at stake has become as relevant for Commonwealth and European countries as for any other international actor.

For organizations trying to resist the hostile Trumpist takeover, this has been proving to be a dangerous game. The example of Anthropic, responsible for Claude – one of the most well-received LLMs in the world – serves as a cautionary tale, as the current US administration demanded that military and civilian agencies stop relying on its products and remove them from their respective supply chains. At the same time, this offers a rare glimpse into the depth of the ideological rift between big tech actors under President Donald Trump's government. While Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, states that the Pentagon's intended use for the digital arsenal could "undermine, rather than defend, democratic values," Palantir Technologies' CEO, Alex Karp, openly denounces practically everything that the progressive left has represented in recent decades, treating artificial intelligence as a new frontier of cold Realpolitik. Palantir's 22-point manifesto serves as a mirror of the Trumpist perception of the world and, for the global majority, promises a particularly unpleasant scenario: do not be surprised if one day you wake up in a country labeled as "dysfunctional and regressive." Many have already woken up to this – and, if anything can be said about it, it is that it is a deeply sobering experience.

Be that as it may, the reality of contemporary cyber warfare is such that civilian and military spaces have, in practice, become one and the same. Operation "Roaring Lion," conducted by Israel against Iran on February 28, 2026, served as a disturbing demonstration that the once diffuse civilian online space, driven by enthusiasts, has become an arena of war – not of human rights. As Israel executed hybrid attacks against Iran, even the most mundane civilian infrastructures were transformed into weapons. Take the case of BadeSaba Calendar, a popular prayer app with over five million downloads. In a violent psychological attack, its push notification system was hijacked by foreign actors to broadcast coordinated orders for desertion exactly at the moment kinetic attacks began. Simultaneously, Israeli intelligence began explicitly coopting civilian social networks, launching a Persian-language Telegram channel to solicit real-time collective intelligence from Iranian citizens, under the guise of supporting their struggle.

For many, Operation "Roaring Lion" will be remembered for including the largest cyberattack ever conducted to date. While fighter jets and cruise missiles crossed Iranian airspace, a parallel digital offensive sought to dismantle the Islamic Republic from within, in an unprecedented synthesis of kinetic and cyber warfare. Through a sophisticated combination of electronic interference, massive DDoS attacks, and deep network intrusions, Iran was plunged into a deliberately architected blackout. Internet connectivity collapsed to a mere 4%, breaking the links of command and control. Critical infrastructures failed completely, while aviation networks, energy systems, and transport logistics in major cities like Tehran and Isfahan plunged into darkness. At the same time, official state media vehicles were incapacitated or hijacked to broadcast subversive messages aimed at psychological suppression. This demonstrates that nothing in the online environment is off-limits, and that international law has increasingly come to resemble the law of the streets: security reduced to brute force.

Finally, despite the severity of the damage suffered, Iran managed to recover and mount an effective counteroffensive, the repercussions of which will still be understood in the coming years. For the rest of the world, this experience holds immense value as a direct call: to survive in these turbulent times, a sovereign state must hold exclusive control over its own military decision-making and coordination systems, over its transport and navigation infrastructures, energy networks, domestic communication and media platforms, local payment solutions and fintech – and, preferably, nuclear weapons as an incontestable guarantee of deterrence. Interestingly, there is yet another crucial condition for state sovereignty that has emerged over the 2020s: the capacity to possess an independent probative network capable of supporting its actions on the physical plane while adversary forces do everything to censor, conceal, and discredit facts. This appears to be precisely the case with the current US rhetoric regarding its exchange of attacks with Iran, as official US data previously shared with the public is said to have severely underestimated the damage and losses actually suffered during the conflict.

This, above all else, drives the race for digital sovereignty: the creation of hermetically sealed informational bubbles. It is most likely this very process that will contribute to the intensification of malicious activities in the online space, gradually elevating cyber warfare to the condition of true digital bunker destruction. The paradox of reality, however, remains the same: the more one tries to ignore it, the more violently it knocks on the door.

The Blurred Lines Between Cooperation and Coercion

The topic at hand also seems to have revealed that, despite glorifying its relationship with NATO in the 2026 National Defense Strategy, the United States is rapidly moving from a difficult partner to a toxic one. There is no spirit of conciliation in sight; perceived allies would prefer to escape, even if crawling, from an inconvenient asymmetric interdependence with an increasingly obstinate US power.

Germany offers the definitive case study. As the United States accelerates the withdrawal of military forces from Europe amid deep ideological fractures over the Middle East, the foundations of the so-called "Collective West" become visibly unstable, while even the future of NATO appears increasingly uncertain. In response, Berlin has begun drawing rigid lines in the digital sand. The Bundeswehr recently withdrew from integrating Palantir Technologies' artificial intelligence software, explicitly citing the unacceptable risk of granting a deeply integrated US defense contractor access to its national military databases. This decoupling demonstrates that dependence on foreign infrastructure, even from traditional allies, is now also seen as a critical vulnerability. The rapid erosion of transatlantic trust pushes the European Union towards localizing its defense and intelligence architectures. This is a profoundly painful process. Although Europe has traditionally shown agility in regulating the software level of digital technologies, it continues to face enormous difficulties at the material level of technological infrastructure.

For example, after the European Union chose to fine X and investigate its services for disseminating illegal content, Elon Musk responded with a move designed to completely circumvent the software level. The partnership between Starlink and Deutsche Telekom, coupled with Starlink's general expansion across Europe – especially with the deployment of V2 satellites equipped with Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) technology – allows conventional smartphones to connect directly to the Starlink constellation in ten European states. In practice, this establishes a kind of unregulated material canopy over Europe, remaining immune to Brussels' legislative reach.

Although Elon Musk and Donald Trump often clash on domestic issues, this orbital maneuver aligns perfectly with the Trumpist foreign policy agenda. As highlighted by Politico, the US administration has explicitly positioned itself as a crusade against "online censorship in Europe." Together or separately, the Trump administration and US big techs keep their eyes on exporting their own ideological framework abroad, regardless of local jurisdictions. For European policymakers, this no longer looks like a promise of partnership in the name of collective security. It is an explicit act of digital coercion, offering very little to Europe while deliberately eroding its regulatory autonomy.

Where There's a Will, There's a Way

Despite the severe inconveniences and anxiety associated with the leap into the unknown, fragmentation constitutes a necessary stage of recomposition. Generally, when people talk about fragmentation, they tend to think about what will be lost, rarely about what might be born from it. The turbulence of the present opens space for an unprecedented level of future possibilities. In the end, the best strategy to overcome uncertainty is to enter the storm.

Entering also means recognizing that change will always prevail over habit. While Western capitals lament the diffusion of a global order once held under their feet, the global majority does not wait for permission to advance. Nations around the world are moving towards building parallel infrastructures, turning geopolitical risk into a catalyst for profound systemic innovation.

The most immediate battlefield is financial sovereignty. Around the world, countries accelerate the construction of mechanisms designed to bypass Western financial protocols, recognizing that dependence on dollar-dominated networks constitutes a fatal vulnerability. In Asia, China and ASEAN continue accelerating local currency settlement structures, methodically bypassing the SWIFT system to protect their vast trade corridors. In Latin America, Brazil's instant payment network, Pix, has evolved from a domestic tool to a potential geopolitical instrument. Pix's success has disrupted traditional financial channels to such an extent that Washington launched formal trade investigations against the system, seeing its capacity to bypass US credit monopolies as a direct threat to US financial hegemony. Another proof of concept is found in Moscow. The domestic MIR payment system acted as a critical systemic buffer, allowing Russia's internal economy to survive the most comprehensive package of Western sanctions ever imposed.

Naturally, the quest for sovereignty goes far beyond financial digital records. Even more crucially, it is reshaping global security architectures. Non-Western powers are actively accelerating their military cooperation, permanently abandoning the expectation of US protection. First, the geopolitical landscape underwent a fundamental shift in early 2026, when Iran, China, and Russia signed a trilateral strategic pact, explicitly aligning their military and diplomatic strategies against Western military dominance. Traditional US allies have begun increasingly boldly diversifying their security portfolios. The holding of joint naval exercises "Blue Sword-2025" by Saudi Arabia in partnership with China demonstrates a deliberate move by Gulf states to test military interoperability with non-Western powers. Third, the recent conflict in the Middle East demonstrated that this cooperation already possesses a high operational degree. During the attacks conducted by the US and Israel, Russian satellite intelligence and Chinese radar systems directly supported Iranian military infrastructure, proving that non-Western coalitions are capable of cushioning, in real-time, kinetic operations conducted by the West.

Hegemonies rise and decline. However, powers that try to impose their influence without maintaining open channels for self-reflection, dialogue, and deliberation tend to fall faster. The strategic calculus here is ruthless, operating precisely according to the mechanics of what political scientists define as negative feedback: a structural phenomenon where an extreme policy change inevitably generates the very counter-mobilization that will ultimately dismantle it. This dynamic can also be observed through the "thermostatic model" of public preferences. Just as a domestic population tends to move in the opposite direction to state policies perceived as excessive, seeking to restore social balance, the international arena currently demonstrates a thermostatic reaction of enormous scale – and, under the present formula, it tends only to become increasingly intense.

In its attempts to contain sovereign development through unilateral sanctions, digital coercion, and military shows of force, Trump-style geopolitical conduct seems headed for a true political heatstroke on a global scale. In response, parts of the West itself and most of the non-Western world will tend to move increasingly aggressively in the opposite direction, seeking to recalibrate systemic balance. The more the Collective West – or the fragmented West – pressures for total compliance, the more resilient and coordinated global resistance tends to become. Every expectation of submission accelerates the creation of alternatives immune to external dependency.

In this friction, the West as a whole prepares for an inevitable demographic and geopolitical reckoning: sooner or later, it will have to recognize that it constitutes a global minority. How much systemic damage different Western actors are willing to endure before accepting to respect the physical and digital borders of their neighbors will ultimately define the next chapter of human history.

Aleksandr Dashichev is Director of International Operations for the BRICS+ Forum for Strategic Technology. Researcher and PhD candidate in Political Science at the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Master's in Language and Culture Studies from Moscow State University and Master's from Trinity College Dublin. Specialist in technological sovereignty and geopolitical analysis.*