 How Multipolar Power Is Dismantling the Open Internet and Replacing It with Competing Digital Sovereignties The 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly was not just another parade of world leaders. It was a eulogy — for the open, borderless Internet that once promised to knit humanity into a single digital commons. In New York, the world’s major powers — led by President Donald Trump, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Premier Li Qiang — did not merely disagree on who should govern the Internet. They converged, in different languages and logics, on a single premise: the open Internet is politically incompatible with the emerging multipolar world.
That convergence, subtle but unmistakable, marked a geopolitical rupture. The ideal of a seamless global network — interoperable, rights-respecting, and governed through multistakeholder consensus — is giving way to a patchwork of sovereign digital domains. What began as technical divergence has hardened into political design. The new Internet is being built not on open code but on competing commands. This is not simply the “splinternet” analysts warned about two decades ago. It is something more deliberate: a geopolitical veto on the very idea of a shared digital space. At UNGA80, the world’s leading powers effectively agreed that the Internet would henceforth serve nations, not citizens. And in doing so, they may have set the stage for the most profound reordering of the digital age since the network’s creation. From the Multistakeholder Dream to the Multipolar Reality The Internet’s founding governance vision — open, meritocratic, and transnational — was one of the last utopian projects of the late twentieth century. Built during the unipolar moment of U.S. hegemony, it reflected a faith that technical coordination could transcend politics. Engineers, civil society, and corporations all shared seats at the table. States, for a time, were guests in a system whose legitimacy derived from consensus rather than coercion. That fragile equilibrium depended on a single assumption: that the world itself would remain sufficiently unified to sustain a shared governance space. The rise of multipolarity has shattered that foundation. President Lula da Silva captured this new world plainly: the twenty-first century, he declared, “will be increasingly multipolar” and “must be multilateral.” His words were not diplomatic boilerplate. They were a declaration of independence from the Western liberal order that had dominated Internet governance since the 1990s. For Lula, the Internet must no longer be a “land of lawlessness.” It must be governed — by states, through treaties, and ultimately through the United Nations’ Global Digital Compact. That reference is crucial. By invoking the Global Digital Compact rather than the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)— the process that originally defined the Internet as a multistakeholder domain shared among governments, industry, and civil society — Lula effectively affirmed that the Internet has become a terrain of state sovereignty, not of citizens’ rights. WSIS symbolized the belief that governance could be distributed across sectors; the Global Digital Compact reasserts that it should be consolidated under governments. In other words, what began as a commons to be coordinated is now a territory to be administered. In principle, such calls for multilateral oversight sound like reforms toward fairness. In practice, they introduce incompatibility into the Internet’s very architecture. A network designed for universal standards and voluntary coordination cannot easily accommodate competing legal sovereignties. The technical commons becomes a regulatory battlefield, while the code that once embodied universality now encodes divergence. Challenging this vision of reformed multilateralism is President Trump’s resolute rejection of globalism. His championing of absolute sovereignty and scorn for the UN and its frameworks is an attempt by a fading hegemonic power to resist the shift to multipolarity by prioritizing domestic law above all shared governance. The principle that "every sovereign nation must have the right to control their own borders" translates into a digital isolationism that refuses to align its technical or legal frameworks with either UN bodies or competing poles. This resistance is further entrenched by the United States’ strategic abdication of its international human rights commitments, a withdrawal that removes one of the core normative anchors that once supported the vision of an open internet. Together, these choices ensure fragmentation, as the world’s largest economy refuses to conform, shattering the possibility of a shared internet legal space. Meanwhile, Premier Li Qiang’s focus on the Global Development Initiative (GDI) provides the blueprint for the third major digital pole. China’s strategy of strengthening the "UN-centered international system" through state-led cooperation and technology transfer is designed to export its own model of digital governance and infrastructure standards. This approach subordinates the internet’s bottom-up coordination—where engineers and innovators create open, meritocratic protocols—to top-down, state-driven mandates, ensuring its infrastructure supports national economic and geopolitical interests. Three leaders, three philosophies: populist sovereignty, reformist multilateralism, and technocratic state capitalism. But together they articulate a shared reality — that the open Internet cannot survive a world organized around geopolitical blocs. The New Concert of Networks To understand this moment, history offers an uncanny parallel. After the Napoleonic Wars, the great powers of Europe established the Concert of Europe — a balance-of-power arrangement designed to prevent any one state from dominating the continent. For four decades, it maintained a fragile peace through negotiation and restraint. But it also suppressed revolution, stifled liberalism, and prioritized order over freedom. The digital world is entering its own Concert of Powers. The U.S., China, and the emerging Global South — led by Brazil, India, and others — as well as the European Union, are all constructing spheres of digital influence that mirror the strategic geography of the nineteenth century. Instead of borders drawn on maps, they are traced through data cables, standards committees, and content regulations. The battlefield is the network itself. Each bloc seeks not only to protect its citizens or industries but to shape the underlying architecture of the Internet in its image. The result is a form of digital mercantilism — the weaponization of interconnection for national advantage. Where the nineteenth century had colonies, the twenty-first has digital dependencies. The “splinternet” is therefore not a technical failure but a strategic design. Russia’s “Runet,” China’s Great Firewall, the European Union’s data localization and Digital Services Act, the U.S. export controls on semiconductors — these are not isolated phenomena. They are the infrastructure of a multipolar Internet, one that mirrors the “New Cold War” without the ideological binaries. In this system, interoperability is no longer a given but a privilege. Nations decide which packets cross their borders, which algorithms are permissible, which data may be stored abroad. The universal protocols that once defined the network are being replaced by political protocols — authentication systems for sovereignty itself. Digital Iron Curtains The Cold War had its Iron Curtain, dividing East from West by ideology and arms. The twenty-first century’s Digital Iron Curtain is subtler but no less consequential. It is not a single wall but a lattice of legal, technical, and commercial enclosures. China’s model of “cyber sovereignty” demonstrates how digital borders can be both porous and absolute. Within its Great Firewall, domestic platforms like WeChat and Baidu flourish, protected from competition and surveillance-free only in name. Outside it, Chinese technology companies expand globally, embedding Beijing’s technical standards into the infrastructure of developing nations. The Belt and Road Initiative has become, in part, a Digital Silk Road — exporting fiber, satellites, and governance norms together. Russia’s approach is more defensive, but no less strategic. The Kremlin views the Internet simultaneously as weapon and vulnerability. It conducts asymmetric operations abroad while hardening its domestic network through deep packet inspection and mandatory data localization. Its goal is not isolation but selective interdependence — the ability to disconnect at will while retaining the benefits of global connectivity. Whether Russia can achieve this goal is questionable; its intentions though are unmistakable. Even democratic powers have embraced their own versions of digital sovereignty. The European Union’s regulatory assertiveness — from the GDPR to AI governance frameworks — reflects an effort to reclaim normative leadership. Yet it also contributes to fragmentation. When every bloc defines “trust” in its own legal terms, the shared space for innovation and cross-border rights erodes. And the United States? Once the Internet’s chief architect and evangelist, it now finds itself both defender and divider. The United States, historically, has been the Internet’s greatest champion. It has long promoted a global, open, and interoperable network, governed by multistakeholder institutions like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Fragmentation, for Washington, has been seen not just as a technical failure but a geopolitical threat—undermining US values, economic interests, and strategic primacy. Yet America’s recent behavior has complicated that stance. During President Trump’s first term, American policy veered toward techno-nationalism. The “Clean Network” initiative, executive orders targeting TikTok and Huawei, efforts to onshore tech supply chains and the broader effort to exclude Chinese platforms from US infrastructure all signaled a shift toward selective decoupling.And, today, efforts to force TikTok into American hands suggest a shift in strategy—but the underlying instinct remains: security first, even at the cost of global interoperability. Additionally, the “America First” doctrine continues to cast doubt on whether the US will prioritize global cooperation over domestic advantage. In other words, the U.S. isn’t pushing for fragmentation, but it’s increasingly accommodating it. The Multipolar Veto At UNGA80, these competing doctrines did not collide; they converged. For the first time, the great powers agreed — tacitly but unmistakably — that global interdependence must be subordinated to national control. In practice, this is the geopolitical veto: a collective but fragmented assertion of sovereignty that overrides the Internet’s founding principle of universal interoperability. Each power, by insisting on its own digital norms, renders universal ones impossible. The veto operates not through UN resolutions but through standards bodies, trade restrictions, and infrastructure investment. Lula’s push for a UN-centered Global Digital Compact represents one form of the veto — governance by intergovernmental consensus that excludes non-state actors. Trump’s rejection of multilateral frameworks represents another — governance by unilateral withdrawal. Li Qiang’s advocacy of state-led development is a third — governance through infrastructural capture. Together, they amount to a systemic denial of the multistakeholder ideal that sustained the Internet’s legitimacy for three decades. The genius of the multistakeholder model was its insistence on consensus and its formal empowerment of civil society to advocate for universal rights—privacy, free expression, and access—against the combined power of states and corporations. In a multipolar world, that model dies because its necessary condition, a shared global consensus on digital governance, has vanished. The assertive sovereignty preached by President Trump eliminates the necessary foundation for global rights advocacy. By rejecting "globalism," he effectively rejects the international human rights instruments used by civil society to hold domestic power accountable. In the new environment, human rights become entirely fungible, subordinate to whichever national law is supreme in that pole. Similarly, the emergence of competing governance poles, as championed by Lula and Li Qiang, effectively silences the independent civil society voice. When Lula advocates for multilateral governance and Li Qiang promotes state-led development, they are pushing governance toward intergovernmental committees. In these bodies, the independent, often critical, voice of civil society is systematically marginalized, replaced by state-appointed delegates or relegated to advisory roles. The focus shifts from protecting the rights of individuals to serving the strategic priorities of the nation-state or geopolitical bloc. For civil society, the turn toward multipolarity presents an existential crisis: they must now navigate multiple, often contradictory, pole-specific standards for human rights, data privacy, and censorship. The collective, global power of digital rights advocates to organize across borders—a power fundamental to the original open internet—is being destroyed by the lack of a common legal and technical ground. The tragedy is not only that the open internet is dying, but that it is being killed by design. Multipolar sovereignty has imposed a veto on the very conditions that once made the network global, interoperable, and free. What remains will still be called “the internet,” but it will be a diminished thing—an archipelago of state-controlled stacks, stitched together by commerce and diplomacy rather than by shared protocols and common rights. The Economic Fallout: Commerce in the Age of Code Wars For businesses and innovators, this geopolitical veto translates into structural uncertainty. The borderless marketplace that defined the first three decades of the Internet is disintegrating into incompatible regimes. A global platform now confronts multiple Internets — each with its own laws on data, content, encryption, and AI. To operate in China, a firm must accept censorship; in the EU, strict privacy compliance; in the U.S., security vetting; in India or Brazil, data localization. The result is duplication of infrastructure, rising compliance costs, and the erosion of network effects that once made global scale possible. This is the “Code War” — competition not for territory, but for the standards, architectures, and supply chains that define digital sovereignty. Semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, and even content moderation have become tools of statecraft. Data itself has become a strategic resource — regulated, taxed, and weaponized. Firms are forced to act like micro-states: negotiating access, forming alliances, hedging against regulatory and geopolitical shocks. The agile survive by adapting to local conditions; the rigid collapse under compliance burdens. Innovation slows, but does not stop — it mutates, localizes, fragments. The dream of a single digital marketplace gives way to a constellation of semi-autonomous economies, bound together by commerce but divided by code. The Death — and Possible Rebirth — of the Commons The tragedy of UNGA80 is that the world did not debate whether to preserve the open Internet; in many ways, it declared its obsolescence. The open network, once the most ambitious experiment in transnational governance, has been judged incompatible with the age of sovereign resurgence. And yet, history suggests that systems built on veto and balance eventually yield to new forms of integration. The Concert of Europe maintained peace for decades but could not suppress the forces of nationalism and industrial transformation. Its collapse gave rise to a more volatile but also more democratic international order. The digital world may follow a similar trajectory. The current phase of multipolar fragmentation may, paradoxically, sow the seeds of renewal. Civil society, though marginalized, continues to exist in the interstices — in transnational advocacy networks, open-source communities, and decentralized technologies. The infrastructure of interconnection still resists total enclosure. Data, like water, seeks to flow. The question is whether the next generation can imagine a new kind of digital commons — one resilient enough to coexist with sovereignty yet open enough to preserve universality. That will require not nostalgia for the unipolar past, but innovation in governance itself: federated rights frameworks, interoperable privacy regimes, technical standards designed for pluralism rather than uniformity. Conclusion: A Concert Without Harmony The Internet was once a symbol of humanity’s shared destiny. Today it mirrors its divisions. What UNGA80 made explicit is that the age of global digital unity is over, not through accident but through choice. The United States, China, and the Global South each claim to defend the public good, yet all have subordinated the network’s universality to their own strategic visions. The open Internet has not been defeated by its enemies; it has been vetoed by its creators. We are living through the birth of a Concert of Networks — a digital order held together by balance, not by belief. It promises stability, but at the cost of openness; security, but at the expense of freedom. Whether that equilibrium can endure, or whether it too will collapse under the weight of its contradictions, will define the next era of the digital century. The Internet has survived pandemics, cyberwars, and revolutions. Its greatest test now is political. The question is no longer whether the open Internet can survive multipolarity — but whether a multipolar world can survive the Internet it is creating. To this end, thechallenge for the next generation is whether they accept this fate as irreversible, or whether they can imagine, and fight for, a new kind of digital commons that transcends the veto. The answer will determine not only the future of the network, but the fate of global rights and freedoms in the 21st century. Comments are closed.
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