The Splinternet & Digital Sovereignty: The End of the World Wide Web

Back on January 8, Iran flipped a pretty important switch.

Ninety-two million people woke up disconnected. And I’m not talking about an inconvenient slowdown or a few surprise restrictions. It stopped working, period.

Landlines turned into expensive paperweights and mobile networks returned nothing but error messages.

The government deployed military-grade jammers to block Starlink satellites, then sent security forces door to door in Tehran hunting for satellite dishes on rooftops ^[1].

A government spokesperson casually told journalists the internet wouldn’t be restored until March 20, maybe. Officials, though? They kept posting on X and Telegram just fine, broadcasting regime messaging to the outside world while 92 million citizens sat in digital darkness ^[1].

We’re not talking about a technical failure or a cyberattack. The Iranian government simply decided its citizens didn’t get internet access anymore (at least not the global kind), and that was that.

This is what happens when governments decide the internet belongs to them, not you.

And Iran’s not unique. In 2024 alone, governments hit the off switch 296 times across 54 countries ^[2].

Myanmar did it 85 times in a single year. India, the world’s largest democracy, did it 84 times. Pakistan hit 21 shutdowns, its highest number ever.

Russia’s been working hard to set up the right infrastructure for this. Brazil proved democracies can do it too.

The “World Wide Web” was supposed to be borderless, a place where information flowed freely and censorship got treated as network damage we could simply route around.

Turns out nation-states have other ideas about that whole arrangement, and they’re winning decisively. What most of us browse every day isn’t really a “global internet.” It’s our government’s version. And it is subject to whatever rules they decide to enforce, and vulnerable to shutdown whenever they find it convenient.

What we’re left with is the Splinternet: national and regional fragments of what used to be a unified global network, each controlled by whatever government happens to be in charge.

So today I’m walking you through how this came about. We’ll look at how different governments around the world are building more and more effective walls around the internet. And of course, once we get the picture, I’ll dive into the best strategies I know to help you maintain access when your government decides connectivity is conditional.

So how did the idealistic vision collapse, and which country was the first to prove these walls actually work? I’ll give you a hint: they’re pretty experienced with the whole “putting up walls” thing.

How China Proved (Yet Again) that Walls Work

The internet was designed on a beautiful, naive assumption: Information wants to be free. The network interprets restrictions as failures and finds another path. Packets flow like water around obstacles, and authoritarian control was supposed to be impossible at scale.

China looked at that philosophy and said: hold my beer.

The Great Firewall went live gradually through the 2000s, blocking foreign websites and filtering search results. Connections to services the government didn’t approve of were throttled ^[3].