Cybersecurity & Digital Warfare
Who Owns Your Internet? The Quiet Battle for Digital Sovereignty
The moment a government can cut its citizens off from the global internet — or a foreign power can do it for them — is the moment the map of the world gets redrawn in ways no treaty ever anticipated.
The Idea
Digital sovereignty sounds like bureaucratic jargon, but it describes something viscerally real: the question of who actually controls the infrastructure through which a nation thinks, communicates, and governs itself. It's not just about data privacy. It's about whether the cables, the servers, the domain name system, and the platforms that carry daily life sit inside or outside your country's reach — legally, physically, and politically. Most countries depend on a patchwork of infrastructure they don't own. Submarine cables owned by US tech giants carry the majority of intercontinental internet traffic. Domain names are ultimately administered by ICANN, a California-based nonprofit operating under the lingering shadow of US oversight. Cloud computing, for vast swathes of the world, means renting space from a handful of American and Chinese corporations. This dependency is not neutral. It means that when geopolitical relationships sour, or when a sanctions regime is applied, entire populations can find themselves suddenly cut off from services they took to be as permanent as electricity. Some nations have responded by building 'sovereign internet' infrastructure — essentially, the technical capacity to operate a sealed national network if the global one becomes hostile or unreliable. Russia calls its version RuNet. China has operated something like this for years. But the same architecture that protects a state from foreign interference also hands that state enormous power over its own citizens. Digital sovereignty, it turns out, cuts in two directions at once.
In the World
On 23 March 2022, roughly a month after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian government made an urgent, unprecedented request: it asked ICANN to revoke Russian domain names — effectively erasing Russia from the readable internet. ICANN refused, citing its mandate to remain a neutral technical body rather than an instrument of geopolitical pressure. Ukraine's digital minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, publicly called this a failure of moral imagination. But the episode revealed something more unsettling than a bureaucratic standoff. It showed that Ukraine had been building its own answer to the problem in parallel. In the months before the invasion, Fedorov's ministry had quietly migrated critical government data to cloud infrastructure outside the country — specifically to servers in Poland and other EU states — so that if Russian missiles took out Ukrainian data centres, the government could continue to function. This was digital sovereignty practised defensively, not offensively: a small nation recognising that its digital existence was as vulnerable as its physical borders, and hedging accordingly. The broader lesson is that digital sovereignty is no longer an abstract policy debate in Brussels or Beijing. It is active infrastructure planning, practised under live fire, with real consequences for whether institutions survive conflict. Ukraine's rapid digitalisation — from government services to military coordination — has been both its greatest asset and its most exposed flank.
Why It Matters
Most of us interact with digital infrastructure the way we interact with plumbing: we assume it works, we don't think about where it comes from, and we notice it only when it fails. But the decisions being made right now about where servers sit, which companies lay cables, and whose legal jurisdiction governs a platform will quietly determine the character of the internet your children inherit. This matters even if you never think about geopolitics. The fragmentation of the global internet — what analysts call 'the splinternet' — means that the open, borderless web that emerged in the 1990s is becoming something more like a collection of walled regional networks, each shaped by the values and interests of whoever controls the infrastructure. If you live in a democracy, that might still feel abstract. But it shapes what you can access, who can surveil you, and whether the platforms you rely on can be switched off by a government — yours or someone else's. The question of digital sovereignty is ultimately a question about power: who holds it, who constrains it, and whether the architecture of the internet will serve people or control them.
A Question to Ponder
If your government had the technical ability to seal your country off from the global internet tomorrow, would you feel safer — or less free?
Get a new one of these every morning.
Start learning with Thinkable